A third girl skidded around the bend in the canyon. Jonathan backed off warily.
Ann Clotilde cried in anguish: "Don't let him get away!"
Jonathan chose the centaurs. He wheeled around, dashed back the way he had come. Someone tackled him. He rolled on the rocky floor of the canyon. He struggled to his feet. He saw six more girls race around the bend in the canyon. With shouts of joy they flung themselves on him.
Jonathan was game, but the nine husky amazons pinned him down by sheer weight. They bound him hand and foot. Then four of them picked him up bodily, started up the canyon chanting: "He was a rocket riding daddy from Mars." He recognized it as a popular song of three years ago.
Jonathan had never been so humiliated in his life. He was known in the spaceways from Mercury to Jupiter as a man to leave alone. His nose had been broken three times. A thin white scar crawled down the bronze of his left cheek, relic of a barroom brawl on Venus. He was big, rangy, tough. And these girls had trounced him. Girls! He almost wept from mortification.
He said, "Put me down. I'll walk."
"You won't try to get away?" said Ann.
"No," he replied with as much dignity as he could summon while being held aloft by four barbarous young women.
"Let him down," said Ann. "We can catch him, anyway, if he makes a break."
Jonathan Fawkes' humiliation was complete. He meekly trudged between two husky females, who ogled him shamelessly. He was amazed at the ease with which they had carried him. He was six feet three and no light weight. He thought enviously of the centaurs, free to gallop across the plains. He wished he was a centaur.