“I’ll do what I can,” he promised.
As he left the schoolroom she collapsed in a straight-backed chair—thin and unattractive, like Ann herself—and her shoulders shook with silent, bitter grief.
Martin Lord took the familiar path to Niaga’s village. The setting sun still spread its dying fire across the evening sky, but he walked slowly through the deep, quiet shadows of the forest. He came to the stream where he had met Niaga; he paused to dip his sweat-smeared face into the cool water cascading over a five foot fall.
A pleasant flood of memory crowded his mind. When he had first met Niaga, almost a week before, she had been lying on the sandy bank of the stream, idly plaiting a garland of red and blue flowers. Niaga! A copper-skinned goddess, stark naked and unashamed in the bright spot light of sun filtered through the trees. Languorous, laughing lips; long, black hair loosely caught in a net of filmy material that hung across her shoulder.
The feeling of guilt and shame had stabbed at Lord’s mind. He had come, unasked, into an Eden. He didn’t belong here. His presence meant pillage, a rifling of a sacred dream. The landing had been a mistake.
Oddly enough, the Ceres had landed here entirely by chance, the result of a boyish fling at adventure.
Martin Lord was making a routine tour of representative trade cities before assuming his vice-presidency in the central office of Hamilton Lord, Inc. It had been a family custom for centuries, ever since the first domed ports had been built on Mars and Venus.
Lord was twenty-six and, like all the family, tall, slim, yellow-haired. As the Lords had for generations, Martin had attended the Chicago University of Commerce for four years, and the Princeton Graduate School in Interstellar Engineering four more—essential preparations for the successful Federation trader. In Chicago Martin had absorbed the basic philosophy of the Federation: the union of planets and diverse peoples, created by trade, was an economy eternally prosperous and eternally growing, because the number of undiscovered and unexploited planets was infinite. The steady expansion of the trade cities kept demand always one jump ahead of supply; every merchant was assured that this year’s profits would always be larger than last. It was the financial millennium, from which depression and recession had been forever eliminated. At Princeton Lord had learned the practical physics necessary for building, servicing and piloting the standard interstellar merchant ships.
Martin Lord’s tour of the trade cities completed his education. It was his first actual contact with reality. The economy of progress, which had seemed so clear-cut in the Chicago lecture halls, was translated into a brawling, vice-ridden, frontier city. In the older trade cities, the culture of man had come to dominate the occupied worlds. No trace of what alien peoples had been or had believed survived, except as museum oddities.