Even to a drug-soaked outcast ethnographer Fyhon
was a paradise planet. It was worth anybody's
life to find Dridihad, the secret city of dread!
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories Summer 1949.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Ericson returned to an awareness of his personal identity quitesuddenly. He had an impression that it was a long time, months atleast, since he had been in a state of normal consciousness. At theback of his mind a memory of pain had imprinted itself as a signetmakes an impression in hot wax; he shied away from it. "Where am I?"he asked.
The green-skinned girl squatting beside him in the coppice looked athim sideways out of her dark jade eyes. "Hungry?" she asked.
"But where am—yes, I am hungry. Yes."
Mnathl—he knew, somehow, that that was her name. Didn't he rememberher from the other side of the gulf in his memory, from the days whenhe had begged food in the streets of Penhairn? Mnathl handed him anicely-roasted bosula rib. He ate it avidly. He had always thoughtthe bosula was the best of the food animals of Fyhon.
When the bone was gnawed clean she passed him, in a folded fresh greenleaf, a mixed grill consisting of bits of bosula liver, kidney,tripe, salivary glands, and eyes. He ate that, too. When his stomachwas full Ericson lay back with his arms under his head and looked atthe big puffy clouds drifting overhead. He had no desire to think abouthimself or the things that had been happening to him in the last threeor four months, but the thoughts came anyhow.
The chief thing was pain—remorseless, long-continued, pain. Mnathl hadcome to him one day when he was sitting on the dock in Penhairn andtold him they were going to Lake Tanais. He had got up and gone withher obediently; a byhror addict has little will of his own. The painhad begun after that.
There had been a barren island in the middle of the brackish, poisonouswaters of the lake, and most of the time, until just latterly, he hadbeen kept bound for fear he would drown himself in them. Mnathl ...Mnathl had swum over from the mainland to tend him; she had bathed himand kept his body free of sores and vermin, set food before him andtried to coax him to eat. And twice a day she had given him injectionsof mercapulan with a hypodermic syringe. His arm was pocked with theneedle marks. Where had she got the syringe and the drug? She must havestolen them from the big Colony Hospital in Penhairn.
The injections had brought on the pain. Ericson, at the thought, feltsweat break out on his upper lip. What he had endured had been just atthe edge of what a man could stand and still live. (His ordeal, hadhe known it, had been very much less than it would have been had hetaken the drug cure in the hospital in Penhairn. Mnathl, though she hadnot disdained the help of terrestrial science, knew things about theFyhonese flora and its properties that no terrestrial even suspected.Still, the ordeal had been bad enough.) Ericson shifted his positionand sighed.
Mnathl had cured him of byhror addiction. In return, he had hatedher. There had been weeks, he remembered, when his brain had heldnothing but horrible pain and the wish to kill Mnathl. Once, when shehad untied him for exercise, he had shammed sleep until she came closeto him; then he had caught her by the throat. He had come close tokilling her then. And no doubt in those long, maniacal days there hadbeen other times.
Ericson raised himself on one elbow and looked at her. She was pouringwater into a clay pot above the small, workman-like fire she had built,a