* * * *
It was mid-summer before Ted had time enough to consider marriage and a honeymoon. He and Kay spent the latter on the Caribbean, cruising that treacherous sea in a sturdy fifty-foot sloop lent for the occasion by Asa Gaunt and the Geological Survey. They spent a good share of the time watching the great dredges and construction vessels working desperately at the task of adding millions of cubic yards to the peaks of the submarine range that was once the Sierra Madre. And one day as they lay on the deck in swimming suits, bent on acquiring a tropical tan, Ted asked her a question.
“By the way,” he began, “you’ve never told me how you managed to keep Sir Joshua in the States. That stalled off war just long enough for this thing to be worked out and presented. How’d you do it?”
Kay dimpled. “Oh, first I tried to tell him I was sick. I got desperately sick.”
“I knew he’d fall for that.”
“But he didn’t. He said a sea voyage would help me.”
“Then—what did you do?”
“Well, you see he has a sort of idiosyncrasy toward quinine. Ever since his service in India, where he had to take it day after day, he develops what doctors call a quinine rash, and he hasn’t taken any for years.”
“Well?”
“Don’t you see? His before-dinner cocktail had a little quinine in it, and so did his wine, and so did his tea, and the sugar and the salt. He kept complaining that everything he ate tasted bitter to him, and I convinced him that it was due to his indigestion.”
“And then?”
“Why, then I brought him one of his indigestion capsules, only it didn’t have his medicine in it. It had a nice dose of quinine, and in two hours he was pink as a salmon, and so itchy he couldn’t sit still!”
Ted began to laugh. “Don’t tell me that kept him there!”
“Not that alone,” said Kay demurely. “I made him call in a doctor, a friend of mine who—well, who kept asking me to marry him—and I sort of bribed him to tell father he had—I think it was erysipelas he called it. Something violently contagious, anyway.
“And so—?”
“And so we were quarantined for two weeks! And I kept feeding father quinine to keep up the bluff, and—well, we were very strictly quarantined. He just couldn’t present his recall!”
The 27th Golden Age of Science Fiction Page 37