Furthermore, I knew how to look after myself. I’d been born and bred to the thunder of primitive rocket jets, and I could walk any jungle like a native, bargain and hold my own. I was a man who would fight tooth-and-nail to justify what I was and always would be at heart—an Earthborn trader.
We of Earth are traders still! We haven’t forgotten how to rejoice when waterfalls crash on rocks white with foam, and the mists of morning rise clear and cold to the wheeling stars. I was prepared to tell her what that meant in terms of human dignity, human worth.
I was prepared to remind her that the real target of a trader is the unknown. Everything else he does, or fails to do, is a prelude to the kind of wayfaring that brought the restless human breed to Tragor.
Tragor! The scales started dipping her way, and I couldn’t stop them. She was a woman of Tragor, with the star-bright insignia of her heritage gleaming on the folded-back flaps of her weather jacket.
I thought of how human civilization had shifted from Earth to the stars, and what it meant to stand at the hub of the Galaxy in Tragor City. I thought of Tragor City as a man will who is eager not to remain a child in the eyes of one who has never known the meaning of childhood.
I thought of the thousand square miles of research laboratories, the museums and the libraries, the sports arenas swimming in a golden radiance and the sky-mirroring splendors of the biogenetic fulfillment centers. I thought of the schools where teaching had become an exact science completely integrated with human needs.
I remembered that no woman of Tragor could ever become tender and yielding without first dissecting a man. I told myself she’d see through me the instant I spoke to her. With her understanding of the conflict between the sexes the primitiveness in me would stand out like a gall blister on a sturdy oak.
Right at that moment I didn’t feel so sturdy. But I knew I’d have to speak first. I couldn’t just stand there staring her out of countenance.
“I’m sorry if I startled you,” I said. “I didn’t mean to stare, but I couldn’t very well help myself. I don’t quite know how to say it. You’re not just an attractive woman. I wouldn’t have stared if you were just one woman in ten—or one woman in twenty. I stared because I think you’re the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.”
She flushed scarlet. “I thought you’d never stop staring,” she said.
“You’re angry,” I said. “Don’t be. Many men must have told you how beautiful you are. I just happen to mean it.”
“Please,” she whispered. “Are Terrans always that abrupt?”
“We have a reputation for candor,” I said. “If I hadn’t told you why you left me speechless you’d have been angry for the wrong reason. You may take that as a compliment.”
“I’m not sure I want to.”
“You must know how lovely you are,” I protested. “Why should you resent being told the simple truth?”
“Perhaps this is one of my bad-tempered days,” she said, her eyes searching my face. “You don’t look like the kind of man who would deliberately try to embarrass anyone. No man is wise enough to be gallant by design, and make the pretense seem casual and completely honest. You’re right, of course. I had no reason to be angry.”
She came toward me, straightening her hair, her eyes crinkling with undisguised amusement.
“I still don’t know who you are.”
“The name’s Hargon,” I said. “Taro Hargon. I came here to trade with the natives. I get on fairly well with them.”
Her eyebrows went up. “Natives? I haven’t seen any.”
“You will,” I promised her.
You can accept almost any reality when it’s thrust upon you, even the wonder of a woman of Tragor facing you in a wilderness Eden with a warmth so unmistakable it makes your senses reel.
Her name was Kallatah, and she had come to Dracona alone in a faster-than-light cruiser to collect zoological specimens for the natural history museum at Tagga. Just for the record, Dracona’s the fourth planet of a second-magnitude sun in the Constellation Cygnus, and it’s as far from Tragor City as it is from Earth. Tagga is a suburb of Tragor City—a white and beautiful metropolis in its own right.
“It’s my first important assignment,” she told me. “Naturally I’ve got to make good at it. You see, there’s a new director of biological research on the Guiding Council, and from all reports he’s the kind of man who is only impressed by results. When I have my first interview with him he’ll forget I’m a woman. I’ll have to shine as a scientist who doesn’t make mistakes.”
“You’ve made one already,” I told her.
I walked past her, stared into the net. The captive lizard was twisted into a repulsive-looking knot, its verdigris-colored tail thrashing furiously back and forth. Draconian flying lizards are monstrous brutes. They’re four feet in length and have a metallic green sheen to them, and when they have reason to hate their jaws can close with a ferocity unparalleled in nature.
Visualize a Tyrant King dinosaur with ribbed, skeletal wings, reduced to the dimensions of a kangaroo, and you’ll have a fairly accurate mental picture of one.
All they do is eat. Birds and small mammals, fruits, berries and nuts. In twenty-four hours a Draconian flying lizard can eat three times its weight in food. But a man is safe if he keeps his distance, for they are lazy by nature and don’t attack without provocation.
“They’re taboo animals,” I told her. “The natives call them ‘Servants of the Mountain.’ If your purpose was to infuriate the natives you couldn’t have made a better start.”
She returned my stare with a strange mixture of alarm and defiance. “I had no way of knowing that!” she protested. “This planet is down on
