Surely on Dracona there was enough nerve-tingling beauty everywhere to enchant a lad with my capacity for enjoyment. Why couldn't I have accepted that beauty as a near approach to paradise, content in the knowledge that I was my own master under the stars? Why did I have to step into a forest clearing and let a slender pale girl strip away all of my defenses, leaving me as naked as a new-born babe to the great, roaring winds of unreason?
If I had shouted the question then and there the forest might have murmured in reply: "It's because you haven't seen a woman for so long. It's because loneliness is a destructive blight, and you're a young romantic fool."
It might have shouted that to my mind, to the tumultuously pounding blood at my temples. But it wouldn't have been a complete answer.
I knew she wasn't from Earth the instant she raised her eyes, and looked at me. Mocking eyes she had, of a deep, lustrous violet, and her pale hair clustered in little, golden ringlets about her brow, giving her the tantalizingly defiant aspect of a woman with enough of the eternal tease in her to be secretly amused by her own beauty.
She was collecting zoological specimens in the pollen-scented Draconian dusk. Not me, especially. Just iridescent spider bats, darter birds with vermilion beaks, and flying lizards which measured forty-eight inches straight across their wing-tips.
To be strictly accurate—there was only one lizard. It was thrashing wildly about in the metallic net at her back, the glow from the stationary lure-light giving it the aspect of some fiery monster which she had enticed from its cave by her beauty, and trapped at the risk of her life.
As I returned her stare she blinked in amazement, then laughed outright, the gulfs between us dissolving in a sudden, warming intimacy that was like nothing I'd ever known before.
To keep the scales from dipping too cruelly to her side I threw in everything I had that could be weighed and measured. Mother Earth still gives her sons a good start physically. Surely I was big and strong enough to please her, with a grip no man could break.
Furthermore, I knew how to look after myself. I'd been born and bred to the thunder of primitive rocket jets, and I could walk any jungle like a native, bargain and hold my own. I was a man who would fight tooth-and-nail to justify what I was and always would be at heart—an Earthborn trader.