She was as colorless as a Lunar plant—even the hair netted down to her skull had a sort of grayish cast and I never saw her but once draped in anything but a shapeless and baggy gray space-all. Steena was strictly background stuff and that is where she mostly spent her free hours—in the smelly smoky background corners of any stellar-port dive frequented by free spacers.
If you really looked for her you could spot her—just sitting there listening to the talk—listening and remembering. But when she did spacers had learned to listen. And the lucky few who heard her rare spoken words—these will never forget Steena. She drifted from port to port. Being an expert operator on the big calculators she found jobs wherever she cared to stay for a time.
And she came to be something like the master-minded machines she tended—smooth, gray, without much personality of her own. It was Steena who identified the piece of stone Keene Clark was passing around a table one night, rightly calling it unworked Slitite.
That started a rush which made ten fortunes overnight for men who were down to their last jets. And, last of all, she cracked the case of the Empress of Mars. All the boys who had profited by her queer store of knowledge and her photographic memory tried at one time or another to balance the scales. Bub Nelson was the only one who got around her refusal.
It was he who brought her Bat. About a year after the Jovan affair he walked into the Free Fall one night and dumped Bat down on her table.
Bat looked at Steena and growled. She looked calmly back at him and nodded once. From then on they traveled together—the thin gray woman and the big gray tom-cat. Bat learned to know the inside of more stellar bars than even most spacers visit in their lifetimes.
He developed a liking for Vernal juice, drank it neat and quick, right out of a glass. And he was always at home on any table where Steena elected to drop him. Wells Source: Gasl. The Island of Doctor Moreau author H. Wells Source: One More Library The Strange Case of Dr.
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