“Niaga, I wish—I wish—” He shrugged his shoulders helplessly.
“Why is it so important for you to build your trade cities?”
As he sought for words to answer her question, the spell of her presence was broken. He saw her for what she was: an extremely beautiful woman, sensuously very lovely, yet nonetheless a primitive—a forlorn child without any conception of the meaning of civilization. “We keep our union of planets economically sound,” he explained patiently, “and at peace by constantly expanding—”
“I have visited the schoolroom your teacher has put up beside the ship. I have seen her models of the many machines your people know how to build. But why do you do it, Martin Lord?”
“The machines make our lives easier and more comfortable; they—”
“More comfortable than this?” She gestured toward the stream and the cultivated forest.
“Your world moves at the pace of a walk, Niaga; with our machines, you could rise above your trees, reach your destination in minutes—when now it takes you days.”
“And miss all the beauty on the way. What point is there in saving time, and losing so much that really matters? Do your machines give you anything—you as a person, Martin Lord—that you couldn’t have here without them?”
The question was unanswerable. It symbolized the enormous gulf that lay between Niaga and himself. More than that, Lord saw clearly that the trade cities would destroy her world utterly. Neither Niaga nor her way of life could survive the impact of civilization. And the exotic charm, the friendly innocence was worth saving. Somehow Lord had to find a way to do it.