Fox B. Holden

“ To run a mile's distance had never been difficult for either the man or woman before, but on this lush planet with its heavy, sweet atmosphere and slightly greater gravity than that of their own home sphere, it seemed to both that the distance between them and the ship would never be covered. Ronal glanced over his shoulder twice as they ran, but there were no signs of activity at the jungle's edge. But the heavy foliage would make perfect camouflage for an entire army....
Krist dogged the airlock shut. "The best bet," he said, "is to barge right in and let them all see us. ”

“ The girl, Marla, trembled, yet she was not afraid. Ronal had told her at the outset of the cruise that although Krist's friend Logan was young for a space pilot, he was a good one, and had trained in the old fuel-propelled ships that men had first flown Space in before the new warp-drive had been perfected. ”

“ Certainly Ronal was no scientist, no explorer. Yet, as though he were an appointed ambassador of his own kind, he was attempting the always risky job of finding a common level of understanding with an alien mind. ”

“ A highly-cultured man from a well-ordered, civilized galaxy, making a crude attempt to teach a beast to walk, on the face of a planet which, but a few days before, he had never known existed.
Why? Marla wondered. What fascination had there always been between alien cultures, that had always made one attempt to instruct the other in its ways? ”

“ Ronal understood too clearly what Krist was talking about. Travel in "free" Space, the ordinary three-dimensional kind, was measured in miles; warp-travel was measured in parsecs. "Free" speed, with old-fashioned fuel-eating jets which were supposed to be carried as emergency power units only, was forty thousand miles a second at best—warp-speed, depending on the dimension you used, had a top of better than a thousand light-years a minute. ”