--if you are, I'm an
Australian bushman."

"Perhaps I'm an atypical case. I'm not raving about your perfect
body--you know what that is like already. Nor about your mind, which is
the only one I know of as good as my own. Maybe I'm in love with what I
think you ought to be ... or what I hope you will be. Anyway, I'm in
love with _something_ connected with you--and with no other woman alive.
Shall we go eat?"

"Uh-huh--let's."

They joined Lola and James at the table; and if Lola noticed anything
out of the ordinary, she made no sign.

And after breakfast, in the Main--

"About three weeks, Jim, you think?" Garlock asked.

"Give or take a couple of days, yes."

"And Belle and I would just be in the way--at least until time to show
Deggi about the activation ... and all those Primes to organize ... we'd
better leave you here, don't you think, and get going?"

"I'll buy that. We'll finish as soon as possible."

Lola and James moved a few personal belongings planetside; Garlock and
Belle shot the _Pleiades_ across a vast gulf of space to one of the
planets they had scanned so fleetingly on their preliminary survey. Its
name was, both remembered, Lizoria; its two Primes were named Rezdo
Semolo and Mirea Mitala--male and female, respectively.

After sending down a very brief and perfunctory request for
audience--which was in effect a declaration of intent and nothing
else--Garlock and Belle teleported themselves down into Semolo's office,
where both Lizorian Primes were.

Both got up out of peculiar-looking chairs to face their visitors. Both
were tall; both were peculiarly thin. Not the thinness of emaciation,
but that of bodily structure.

"On them it looks good," Belle tight-beamed a thought to Garlock.

Both moved fast and with exquisite control; both were extraordinarily
graceful. "Snaky" was Belle's thought of the woman; "sinuous" was
Garlock's of the man. Both were completely hairless, of body and of
head--not by nature, but via electric-shaver clipping. Both wore
sandals. The man wore shorts and a shirt-like garment of nylon or its
like; the woman wore just enough ribbons and bands to hold a hundred
thousand credits' worth of jewels in place. She appeared to be about
twenty years--Tellurian equivalent--old; he was probably twenty-three or
twenty-four.

"We did not invite you in and we do not want you here," Semolo said,
coldly. "So get out, both of you. If you don't, when I count three I'll
throw yo