Woman from another planet

by Frank Belknap Long

He could see the girl clearly now, her slender supple form bent seductively above the pale, sky-mirroring water. There were other girls in the group but even at a distance they seemed far less attractive. Two were very stout and one was a gaunt, big-boned woman with almost mannish features and no roundness where Tragor looked for roundness with anticipatory delight.

He saw now that the group consisted of eight people, and that four of them were men. The men could be destroyed without difficulty and presented no problem. But he studied them carefully nevertheless. He studied their physiques for muscular sturdiness and their faces, as the ship drew rapidly nearer, for qualities which might prove troublesome in a struggle, however heavily the odds were weighted against them: resolution, defiance, firmness of mind and will.

He knew that a few men would fight to the death, counting their own lives of no importance, if a monster threatened a woman dear to them. Tragor recoiled a little at the thought, cursing himself for allowing such an image to torment him at a moment when his triumph seemed assured. He was not a monster, and he intended to make sure that the woman by the brook did not think of him as one for long. She would very soon find out he was the most perfect lover she had ever known.

How many human lovers had she known? he wondered. A woman that beautiful could hardly have escaped lovers, but it did not matter to him at all. It disturbed human males, sometimes even drove them to acts of violence, but he was not that kind of a fool. He could make any woman forget any lover in her past. He was sure of it. He could blot the memory from her mind, make it seem less than the shadow of a dream. She would exist for him alone and believe that she had come into his arms completely virginal.

A little violence at first perhaps might be needed. He must be firm and unbending, but it would not be for long. She would quickly enough dissolve in his arms when the monster image was destroyed by an embrace more passionate and unyielding than she could have dared to hope for, even during those moments of wild surrender when a woman is asleep and dreaming and restrained by nothing sternly forbidding and unfair to her nature in the waking world.

The four men and four women had seen the ship now and were on their feet, pointing, shouting, their faces contorted with terror. The girl by the brook had dropped her pail and was running toward the others, her red-gold hair whipped by the wind, her white limbs gleaming in the sunlight.

Tragor swayed a little, so aroused and stimulated by her great beauty that he was unable to take command. He stood very still, his heart beating wildly, knowing that it was not really necessary for him to act. Others would act for him, as they had often done in the past. In the absence of direct orders the ship would veer slightly, and then remain stationary, hovering above the women who were to be taken captive and the men who were to be destroyed. A wide section of the hull would swing open, and five heavily armed Martians would descend to the ground over a collapsible metal stairway. The stairway would be instantly withdrawn and not lowered again until the men had been killed, the women taken captive.

It was happening now. Tragor could hear the thrumming of the opening hull section, the metallic clatter of weapons and equipment as the marauding party waited with no attempt to conceal their impatience for the stairway to be lowered.

Then, through the view-glass, he saw the stairway go down and the first of the five Martians start to descend, his massive shoulders and hairless skull giving him the formidable aspect of a trained warrior who would give and expect no quarter. The brutishness of the warrior caste never failed to repel Tragor a little, but he realized that warriors were necessary.

A human woman might almost be justified in looking upon a Martian warrior as a monster. A straggle-legged brute, hairy and uncouth and utterly lacking in refinement. To be seized by a warrior, roughly slapped, and carried screaming and kicking to a space ship could hardly fail to be abhorrent to a sensitive and delicate woman. But a desirable woman could not be allowed to escape and the women of Earth were often incredibly fleet of foot.