You can accept almost any reality when it's thrust upon you, even the wonder of a woman of Tragor facing you in a wilderness Eden with a warmth so unmistakable it makes your senses reel.
Her name was Kallatah, and she had come to Dracona alone in a faster-than-light cruiser to collect zoological specimens for the natural history museum at Tagga. Just for the record, Dracona's the fourth planet of a second-magnitude sun in the Constellation Cygnus, and it's as far from Tragor City as it is from Earth. Tagga is a suburb of Tragor City—a white and beautiful metropolis in its own right.
"It's my first important assignment," she told me. "Naturally I've got to make good at it. You see, there's a new director of biological research on the Guiding Council, and from all reports he's the kind of man who is only impressed by results. When I have my first interview with him he'll forget I'm a woman. I'll have to shine as a scientist who doesn't make mistakes."
"You've made one already," I told her.
I walked past her, stared into the net. The captive lizard was twisted into a repulsive-looking knot, its verdigris-colored tail thrashing furiously back and forth. Draconian flying lizards are monstrous brutes. They're four feet in length and have a metallic green sheen to them, and when they have reason to hate their jaws can close with a ferocity unparalleled in nature.
Visualize a Tyrant King dinosaur with ribbed, skeletal wings, reduced to the dimensions of a kangaroo, and you'll have a fairly accurate mental picture of one.
All they do is eat. Birds and small mammals, fruits, berries and nuts. In twenty-four hours a Draconian flying lizard can eat three times its weight in food. But a man is safe if he keeps his distance, for they are lazy by nature and don't attack without provocation.
"They're taboo animals," I told her. "The natives call them 'Servants of the Mountain.' If your purpose was to infuriate the natives you couldn't have made a better start."
She returned my stare with a strange mixture of alarm and defiance. "I had no way of knowing that!" she protested. "This planet is down on the charts as uninhabited. A virgin wilderness. If there are intelligent primitives here—"
Her face grew suddenly strained. She stared about her as if seeking an answer for something intangible that was pressing in upon her thoughts and undermining her confidence in herself.