ho live it is worse."

"Well, now you have told me and I will not be drawn," he said with
that grin. "Who said women are not barbarous? It is up to you," he
went on, "to free your world from its deadly isolation."

He kissed her by the vein in her neck, the heavy one, where the blood
beats through. And there flashed through her head the instructions for
Seduction, Step II, and she wondered that other women had been able to
remember printed pages when this happened.

"You must go," Juba said, holding him so that he would not. "What do
you want me to do?"

* * * * *

He lost his fingers in her hair, "I like blondes," he said. "And I
like a slender waist." There was a tension in the muscles of his lower
lip and his eyes seemed to lengthen, and by this Juba knew what he
felt at that moment.

But he said, "I want you to switch off your planetary directional
diverter. Even if you had let me radio in the coordinates I had they
would have been wrong, wouldn't they?"

"Yes," Juba said. "But the directional diverter diverts only in
certain patterns, so that it might be possible to figure out...."

"I know. Maybe and maybe not. I want you to turn it off long enough
for me to get up beyond your whole system and have my instruments take
a fix on your orbit. Then we can planet in blind, if necessary, to set
up our station."

"But as soon as you take off," Juba said, wondering if she would
really do such a thing or if she would suddenly wake as from a dream
and find her wits again, "they'll be on me with their questions. And
what could I say to them?"

"You won't have to say anything to them," the Man said. "You'll be on
the ship with me."

"With _you_!" The thought went all through Juba, as ice water does
sometimes, and bubbled up into her ears. "With you." When she looked
at him she really couldn't see what he looked like any more. Only a
sort of shine. "You mean you'll take me away with you?"

"Do you think I could leave you?" he asked, all shiny. "Smash the
thing," he said. "They'll repair it, but by that time it'll be too
late."

She sat down on the moss, and he was over her, his face urgent, as for
Step III. But he said, "Go ahead. Go now. And hurry."

She got up hastily, planning in her mind how she would arrange her
face, so as to appear calm if anyone should see her and what excuses
she would make if there were anyone about the Machine House. They had
no guards and kept no wat