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it approached the onyx-white of the Princess Afuan and the others, had a brownish tinge, like a pale
shadow of the brownishness of an American Indian. The brownishness extended to her eyes, which were
rather a dark gold, flecked with little sparkles of red highlights not like the lemon yellow Jim had seen in
Afuan. Her face was less long than Afuan's, and more rounded of jaw. She smiled in a way that was very
unlike the inscrutability of the High-born princess; and when she smiled, the ghosts of a small cloud of
something like freckles appeared across her nose and up her cheeks. Finally, her hair, though she let it
hang straight down her back, as had the other High-born females Jim had seen in the arena, was plainly
yellow-blond rather than white, and it did not hang as straight as Afuan's, but had a perceptible wave and
thickness to it.
Her smile vanished and her face darkened suddenly with an abrupt flood of blood below the skin. It was
a literal flush the last thing Jim had expected to discover upon the face of one of the High-born.
"That's right, stare at me!" she said spiritedly. "I'm not ashamed of it!"
"Ashamed of what?" asked Jim.
"Why " She broke off suddenly. Her blush fled, and she looked at him contritely. "I'm sorry. Of
course you're a Wolfling. You wouldn't even know the difference, would you?"
"Evidently not," said Jim. "Because I don't seem to understand what you're talking about."
She laughed but a little sadly, it seemed to him; and patted his arm unexpectedly, with a light, consoling
touch.
"You'll learn soon enough," she said, "even if you are a Wolfling. I'm a throwback, you see. Something in
my gene pattern was atavistic. Oh, my father and mother were as High-born as anyone outside the Main
Royal Line; and Afuan will never dismiss me from her household. But, on the other hand, she can hardly
show me off. So I'm left with doing things like taking care of the pets for her. That was why I was the one
who brought you on board just now."
She glanced down at his two cases.
"Is that your equipment there?" she asked. "I'll put it away for you."
Instantly the two pieces of luggage vanished.
"Just a minute," said Jim.
She looked up at him, a little puzzled.
"Didn't you want them put away just yet?" she asked. Instantly the bags were back at their feet.
"No," answered Jim. "It's just that there are other things to bring aboard. I told your Princess Afuan that
I'd need the bulls the creatures I work with when I put on my show. I've got six more of them in
cryogenic storage back in the city. She said I could bring them along, and to tell whoever brought me
aboard the ship that she said it was all right."
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"Oh!" said the girl thoughtfully. "No don't try to tell me. Just think about where they are in the city."
Jim obliged by summoning up a mental picture of the refrigerated warehouse behind the compound
housing the Earth Trade Delegation, where his bulls were stored. He felt a curious light touch in his
mind a sort of passing sensation, as if his naked brain had been lightly brushed by a feather. Abruptly
he and the girl were standing in the refrigerated warehouse, before the stack of six huge cases, each with
the frozen body of a fighting bull in suspended animation within it.
"Yes," said the girl thoughtfully. Abruptly they were someplace else.
This new place was a large, metal-walled chamber with a small assortment of cases and other objects
arranged in neat piles at intervals about its floor. The stack of cases containing the frozen bulls was now
here also. Jim frowned. The temperature of the room was clearly in the comfortable seventy-degree
range.
"These animals are frozen," he told the girl. "And they have to stay frozen "
"Oh, don't worry about that," she interrupted; and then smiled at him, half in cheerfulness, half, it seemed,
in apology for interrupting him. "Nothing about their condition will change. I've left orders with the ship's
controls to see to that."
Her smile widened.
"Go ahead," she said. "Put your hand out and feel for yourself."
Jim reached out his hand toward the side of the nearest case. There was no change in temperature until
his fingertips came within an inch or two of the surface of the case then they suddenly encountered
bone-chilling atmosphere. The cold, he knew, could not come from the cases, since these were superbly
insulated. He withdrew his hand.
"I see," he said. "All right. I won't worry about my bulls."
"Good," she answered.
Instantly they were elsewhere. Not back in the egg-shaped room but in another, a long room, one side
of which appeared to be glass looking out on a strip of beach and the surf of an ocean shore the shore
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