The big ham swelled up. He flexed his arms and stuck out his chest. "OOH!" said the girl, and went bounding back up the side of the pit.
I stopped the exercise and the wrestlers sat and mused blankly at each other.
In a few minutes, our little visitor was back again. With her were about a dozen pals, differing in details, but resembling her in the important points.
The leader was a tall, brown-haired, gray-eyed girl, with a face where intellect fought a losing battle with a dimple. The others helped her down the pit side as if she were something fragile and precious, like maybe a new bottle of perfume.
Then our pal went back to Gorgeous Gordon. "More ooh!" said the girl guide.
You know how wrestlers are. They'll slap each other silly to get the cheers of four kids on a street corner, or commit mayhem for a purse big enough to buy a ham hock. In five seconds, we had going one of the finest wrestling matches in the history of good, clean sportsmanship. And over the cracking of wrestler's bones rose the shrieks of the girls, showing that their throats were in the right place, even if their brains weren't.
The gray-eyed girl sat with me on a flange of unmined ore. She was Aliana, a direct descendant of the leader of the Eros pioneers. As such, she was princess of the planetoid, although she left most of the governing to a council of elders, apparently as outstanding an array of mossbacks as ever smelled a gardenia or just plain smelled.
"I sometimes think, Mr. Michaels," Aliana told me, "that we of Eros have laid too much stress upon the cerebral. I wonder if our lives would not be fuller if we also included some of the more vigorous activities, such as the one in which those men are now engaged."
"If it's a vacation for your mind that you want, Princess," I agreed, "those boys are your meat."
Just then the Gorilla Man got a leg split on Barefoot Charley and began to braid his toes.