CHAPTER VIII
Honor for Sale
There was one thing about Chuck Lafferty which could be depended upon. He was a creature of habit. Nor time nor place nor condition of servitude could vary his set response to given circumstances. When he saw a pretty woman, he gave vent to his admiration in a typically Chuck Laffertyian way. He did so now. He opened his eyes wide. And he whistled.
"Phwee-eew! What a pigeon!"
Steve muttered, "Quiet, you dope! Do you want to get us all in a jam?"
But he had to concede that the Overlord Loala was—as Chuck's whistle had intimated—something to make a man sit up and take notice.
The amphibious heritage of the Venusian race did not display itself so blatantly in the females as in the men. Aside from the fact that her skin was abnormally pale, almost alabaster, the Lady Loala could have passed anywhere as one of Earth's fairest daughters. Her fingers were not joined with vestigial webs, as in the case of the Venusian men, nor was there any prognathous cast to her jaw. Her hair was a silver mantle, billowing down over soft and rounded shoulders ... her eyes were not colorless, but irised with lambent, gray-green pools, slumbrously inviting as a cool grotto on a torrid day. Her body was slim and lithe and perfectly molded. If Steve had suspected the Daans might be ovariparous, a glance at her contours convinced him otherwise. This Venusian was definitely, decidedly, most invitingly, mammalian.
There were others seated on the dais beside her ... a sort of Council, Stephen Duane guessed. These were obviously Venusians of a higher rank and culture than the fighting-men who had been their captors. They were less coarse of feature, less tagged with the stigmata of their squamous ancestry, more Earthly in appearance. One curious phenomenon which impressed itself upon Steve's notice was that the higher types of Daans seemed more highly pigmented than the lower classes. He could only guess at an explanation, but his off-hand hunch was that this differentiation of types paralleled the difference between humankind and the less fortunate anthropoids of Earth.[5]
But there was no time for further conjecture, because the Lady Loala had now lifted one hand in a delicate gesture, and he and his associates were being summoned forward.
The beautiful Overlord looked down upon them with an unusual curiosity. Upon Steve she bent her most interested glances; to him she spoke.