The Galaxy Primes | Page 9

Grand Lady Neldine, I'd like to have your company."
She seized his elbow and hugged it quickly against her breast. Then,
taking his hand, she walked--almost skipped--along beside him. "And I
want to see Pilot James close up, too, sir--he's not nearly as wonderful
as you are, sir--and I wonder why Planetographer Bellamy's hair is
green? Very striking, of course, sir, but I don't think I'd care for it much
on me--unless you'd think I should, sir?"
Belle knew, of course, that they were coming; and Garlock knew that

Belle's hackles were very much on the rise. She could not read him,
except very superficially, but she was reading the strange girl like a
book and was not liking anything she read. Wherefore, when Garlock
and his joyous companion reached the great spaceship--
"How come you picked up that little man-eating shark?" she sent,
venomously, on a tight band.
"It wasn't a case of picking her up." Garlock grinned. "I haven't been
able to find any urbane way of scraping her off. First Contact, you
know."
"She wants altogether too much Contact for a First--I'll scrape her off,
even if she is one of the nobler class on this world...." Belle changed
her tactics even before Garlock began his reprimand. "I shouldn't have
said that, Clee, of course." She laughed lightly. "It was just the shock;
there wasn't anything in any of my First Contact tapes covering what to
do about beautiful and enticing girls who try to seduce our men. She
doesn't know, though, of course, that she's supposed to be a bug-eyed
monster and not human at all. Won't Xenology be in for a rough ride
when we check in? Wow!"
"You can play that in spades, sister." And for the rest of the day Belle
played flawlessly the role of perfect hostess.
It was full dark before the Hodellians could be persuaded to leave the
Pleiades and the locks were closed.
"I have refused one hundred seventy-eight invitations," Lola reported
then. "All of us, individually and collectively, have been invited to eat
everything, everywhere in town. To see shows in a dozen different
theaters and eighteen night spots. To dance all night in twenty-one
different places, ranging from dives to strictly soup-and-fish. I was nice
about it, of course--just begged off because we were dead from our
belts both ways from our long, hard trip. My thought, of course, is that
we'd better eat our own food and take it slowly at first. Check, Clee?"
"On the beam, dead center. And you weren't lying much, either. I feel

as though I'd done a day's work. After supper there's a thing I've got to
discuss with all three of you."
Supper was soon over. Then:
"We've got to make a mighty important decision," Garlock began,
abruptly. "Grand Lady Neldine--that title isn't exact, but
close--wondered why I didn't respond at all, either way. However, she
didn't make a point of it, and I let her wonder; but we'll have to decide
by tomorrow morning what to do, and it'll have to be airtight. These
Hodellians expect Jim and me to impregnate as many as possible of
their highest-rated women before we leave. By their Code it's
mandatory, since we can't hide the fact that we rate much higher than
they do--their highest rating is only Grade Two by our standards--and
all the planets hereabouts up-grade themselves with the highest-grade
new blood they can find. Ordinarily, they'd expect you two girls to
become pregnant by your choices of the top men of the planet; but they
know you wouldn't breed down and don't expect you to. But how in all
hell can Jim and I refuse to breed them up without dealing out the
deadliest insult they know?"
There was a minute of silence. "We can't," James said then. A grin
began to spread over his face. "It might not be too bad an idea, at that,
come to think of it. That ball of fire they picked out for you would be a
blue-ribbon dish in anybody's cook-book. And Grand Lady Lemphi--"
He kissed the tips of two fingers and waved them in the air. "Strictly
Big League Material; in capital letters."
"Is that nice, you back-alley tomcat?" Belle asked, plaintively; then
paused in thought and went on slowly, "I won't pretend to like it, but I
won't do any public screaming about it."
"Any anthropologist would say you'll have to," Lola declared without
hesitation. "I don't like it, either. I think it's horrible; but it's excellent
genetics and we cannot and must not violate systems-wide mores."
"You're all missing the point!" Garlock snapped. He got up, jammed his
hands into his pockets, and began to pace the floor. "I didn't think any

one of you was that stupid! If that was