"Correct. You have the potential, but you don't have the control necessary to permit it."
A small, satisfied smile curved about her lips.
Tensor found it oddly disconcerting. Despite the ugly sheathing, there was something about her that was quite pleasant.
He began to feel that she was even beautiful, and as he disintegrated the sheath in order to appreciate her better, he realized that it was undoubtedly the strange endocrine balance he had created in himself that was responsible for the attitude. Because there was nothing particularly well-designed about her. She looked unprepossessingly like a civilized woman, except a good deal fatter in places, which hardly helped matters from an abstract point of view.
Tensor could only assume that his point of view was becoming less abstract.
He observed that, upon his disintegrating the sheath, the noise was there again, issuing rapidly from her mouth, and lacking in detailed semantic significance. It was very curious, he thought, watching the rapid rise and fall of her pink-tipped breasts. He could not determine whether the signal indicated terror or fury.
She solved the problem for him by grasping a small metal object from the rack beside her and throwing it at him. He deflected it to the floor as it left her hand.
"What," he asked politely, "is disturbing you so?" He liked the angry sparkle of her eyes.
"You," she snapped. "Keep away from me."
"I don't understand," he replied, moving closer and reaching out his hand to obtain a tactile sensation of her lovely hair texture. The woman compressed her red lips firmly and stood there, uneasily watching him out of the corner of her eyes as he gently stroked her head.