Spoken For

By WILLIAM MORRISON
Illustrated by EMSH
He was lost—anyone could see that—but she had no idea how entirely lost he was nor why!
Half of Jupiter's great disk and most of the other moons were below the horizon when the man stepped out of the plane and changed her life. As far as Carol Marsh was concerned, he was ordinary enough in appearance. And she wasn't ordinarily attracted to ordinary men.
He was slightly over medium height, his features were not quite regular, and he had a deep tan over what had started out as a sunburn, so that she decided he had misjudged the strength of the sun on some planet with a thin atmosphere.
She frowned as she watched him look around. She was annoyed by the fact that it took him almost a minute to get his bearings and realize that she was first, a human being and second, a girl well worth a man's attention.
Even the troubled expression in his eyes was something she held against him. A man shouldn't look troubled. A man should be confident, self-assured in a manner that also assured the girl he spoke to. She remembered that back on Earth John Burr had been completely self-assured.
It was startling to realize that it was with this newcomer, whose appearance she had every reason to dislike, that she had fallen suddenly and completely in love, as suddenly and completely as if she had fallen off a cliff.
I'm looking for some people, he said. But I suppose— His very voice was ill at ease, and that was something else she should have held against him. And against herself. She had always resented men whose voices betrayed their lack of confidence. I suppose it's no use, he went on. I'd recognize the house.
Who are the people you're looking for?
He took out a wallet, and from it drew a stereo picture. Two children, a boy and a girl, were standing with a smiling young woman in front of a sturdy, old-fashioned plastic house. Their clothes were out of fashion by a year or so, but that depended on where you were. Mars, for instance, was always three years behind Earth. Here on Ganymede, on the other hand, you might even be ahead of Earth in some respects.