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Then our pal went back to Gorgeous Gordon. “More ooh!” said the girl guide.

You know how wrestlers are. They’ll slap each other silly to get the cheers of four kids on a street corner, or commit mayhem for a purse big enough to buy a ham hock. In five seconds, we had going one of the finest wrestling matches in the history of good, clean sportsmanship. And over the cracking of wrestler’s bones rose the shrieks of the girls, showing that their throats were in the right place, even if their brains weren’t.

The gray-eyed girl sat with me on a flange of unmined ore. She was Aliana, a direct descendant of the leader of the Eros pioneers. As such, she was princess of the planetoid, although she left most of the governing to a council of elders, apparently as outstanding an array of mossbacks as ever smelled a gardenia or just plain smelled.

“I sometimes think, Mr. Michaels,” Aliana told me, “that we of Eros have laid too much stress upon the cerebral. I wonder if our lives would not be fuller if we also included some of the more vigorous activities, such as the one in which those men are now engaged.”