"A hundred times during this voyage I've wished you would die. Why? Because then I wouldn't have to think about the time to come when you would leave this world forever, leave _me_ forever! But when you were in danger, then I almost died, too, and I knew I didn't really wish your death. It was just wounded pride on my part. And I couldn't face the moment of your departure! Or the fact that you must come from a superior race, a people more like gods than demons! "Oh, I didn't know what to think! Whether you were a devil, or a god, or just a man who was somehow more of a man than any I knew. I could ignore such things as your wounds healing up faster than they should and scar tissues disappearing. But I couldn't ignore your knowledge that Aga would be killed if she touched that wall in the room on the cannibals' island. Nor the fact that your teeth grew back in after they were knocked out during the escape from the island. Nor your too obvious interest in those two demons held prisoner in Estorya. Or...." "Not so loud, Amra," he interrupted. "You'll wake everybody up." "All right, all right. Better to keep quiet and pretend to be stupid. But I can't, I'm not built that way. So ... what are you going to do, Alan?" "Do? Do?" he repeated miserably. "Why, somehow or other I'm going to free those two poor devils and escape in their spaceship." "Devils? Then they _are_ demons!" "Oh, no, that was just a manner of speaking. I said poor devils because of what they must have gone through in that barbarous prison. They might as well have been in the hands of the cannibals as at the mercy of the priests of this wretched planet." "Yes, that's what you really think of us, isn't it? That we're all murderous, dirty and stinking savages." "Oh, not all of you," he replied. "You're not, Amra. By any standards, you're a wonderful woman." "Then why can't...?" She bit her lip and turned away from him. She would not humble herself by asking him to take her with him. It was up to him to make the offer. Green did not know what to say, though he knew that it was necessary to say something at once. He just could not make up his mind as to how she would fit into Earth civilization. How could he teach her that if somebody whom you didn't like differed with you, you just didn't try to tear them apart? Or that if the person you hated was too powerful for you to settle matters with personally you didn't resort to professional assassins? How could he teach her to love the same things he did, the music and literature of his own culture? Her roots were in an entirely different culture. She couldn't possibly understand what he understood, thrill to that which thrilled him, catch the subtleties that he caught, see what lay behind the nuances of his civilization. She'd be a stranger in a world not made for her.