lly, but she was reading the strange girl like a
book and was not liking anything she read. Wherefore, when Garlock and
his joyous companion reached the great spaceship--

"How come you picked up _that_ little man-eating shark?" she sent,
venomously, on a tight band.

"It wasn't a case of picking her up." Garlock grinned. "I haven't been
able to find any urbane way of scraping her off. First Contact, you
know."

"She wants altogether too much Contact for a First--I'll scrape her off,
even if she is one of the nobler class on this world...." Belle changed
her tactics even before Garlock began his reprimand. "I shouldn't have
said that, Clee, of course." She laughed lightly. "It was just the
shock; there wasn't anything in any of my First Contact tapes covering
what to do about beautiful and enticing girls who try to seduce our men.
She doesn't know, though, of course, that she's supposed to be a
bug-eyed monster and not human at all. Won't Xenology be in for a rough
ride when we check in? Wow!"

"You can play _that_ in spades, sister." And for the rest of the day
Belle played flawlessly the role of perfect hostess.

It was full dark before the Hodellians could be persuaded to leave the
_Pleiades_ and the locks were closed.

* * *

"I have refused one hundred seventy-eight invitations," Lola reported
then. "All of us, individually and collectively, have been invited to
eat everything, everywhere in town. To see shows in a dozen different
theaters and eighteen night spots. To dance all night in twenty-one
different places, ranging from dives to strictly soup-and-fish. I was
nice about it, of course--just begged off because we were dead from our
belts both ways from our long, hard trip. My thought, of course, is that
we'd better eat our own food and take it slowly at first. Check, Clee?"

"On the beam, dead center. And you weren't lying much, either. I feel as
though I'd done a day's work. After supper there's a thing I've got to
discuss with all three of you."

Supper was soon over. Then:

"We've got to make a mighty important decision," Garlock began,
abruptly. "Grand Lady Neldine--that title isn't exact, but
close--wondered why I didn't respond at all, either way. However, she
didn't make a point of it, and I let her wonder; but we'll have to
decide by tomorrow morning what to do, and it'll have to be airtight.
These Hodellians expect Jim and me to impregnate as many as possible of