“Wait a minute, Helen!” Cloud protested, blushing. “That’s not it, and you know it. These fellows don’t have to mix socially with people who run around naked, and I do.”
“And how you hate it.” The other man offered mock sympathy, with a wide and cheerful grin. “How you suffer—I don’t think. But that holster-harness. It looks regulation enough, but isn’t there somehing a little different about it?”
“Yes. Two things.” Cloud grinned back. “Left-handed, and the holster’s anchored so it can’t flop around. Don’t know as I ever told you, but ever since that alleged pirate burned my arm off I’ve been practising the gun-slick’s draw.”
“Did you get it?” Joan asked impishly. “How good are you?”
“Not bad—in fact, I’m getting plenty good,” Cloud admitted. “Come on up to the range sometime with a stop-watch and I’ll show you.”
“I’ll do that. Right now—shall we?”
“Uh-uh. Can’t. I’m due at the High Mayor’s Reception in twenty minutes, and besides, I want to breathe some air that hasn’t been rehabilitated, rejuvenated, recirculated, reprocessed, repurified, and rebreathed until it’s all worn out. Happy landings, gang—I’ll be thinking of you while I’m absorbing all that nice new oxygen and stuff.”
“Particularly the stuff—and especially the liquid stuff!” Joe called after him just before he shut the door on his way out to join Thlaskin and Maluleme.
Going through customs was of course the merest formality, and an aircab whisked them into the city proper. Cloud really did enjoy himself as he strode along the walkway from the cabpark toward the Mayor’s . . . well, if not exactly a palace, it was close enough so as to make no difference. And he did attract plenty of attention. Not because of his dress or his build—most of the men on the street wore less than he did and many of them were just as trim and as fit—but because of the nature and variety of his bodily colors, which were literally astounding to these people, not one in twenty of whom had ever before seen a Tellurian in person.
For Chickladorians are pink; pink all over. Teeth, hair, skin, and nails; all pink. Not the pink of red blood showing through translucency, but that of opaque pigment. Most of their eyes, even—queerly triangular eyes with three lids instead of two—are of that same brick-reddish pink; although a few of the women have eyes of a dark and dusky green.