The Project Gutenberg EBook of George Loves Gistla, by James McKimmey

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Title: George Loves Gistla

Author: James McKimmey

Release Date: August 2, 2009 [EBook #29578]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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[Illustration]

GEORGE
LOVES
GISTLA

By JAMES McKIMMEY, Jr.

_"Why don't you find yourself some nice little American girl," his
father had often repeated. But George was on Venus ... and he loved
pale green skin ... and globular heads and most of all, George loved
Gistla._

George Kenington was sixteen, and, as he told himself, someone who was
sixteen knew more about love than someone who was, say, forty-two. Like
his father, for instance. A whole lot more probably. When you were
forty-two, you got narrow-minded and nervous and angry. You said this is
this, and that is that, and there is nothing else. When someone thought
and felt and talked that way, George thought bitterly, there was not
enough room inside that person to know what it was like, loving a
Venusian.

But George knew. He knew very well.

Her name was Gistla. She was not pretty in standards of American
colonists. She had the pale greenish Venusian skin, and she was too
short and rather thick. Her face, of course, was not an American face.
It was the face of native Venus. Round and smooth, with the large
lidless eyes. There were no visible ears and a lack of hair strengthened
the globular look of her head.

But she was a person. The beauty was inside of her. Did you have to
point to a girl's face and say, "Here is where the nose should be, here
is where the ears should be?" Did you have to measure the width between
eyes and test the color of the skin? Did you have to check the size of
the teeth and the existence of hair? Was all of this necessary to
understand what was _inside_ someone?

George snapped a leaf from an overhanging vine and threw it angrily to
the ground. He was walking along a thin path that led from the colony to
the tangled hills beyond