Burk Winters was a panting, shambling ape,
fleeting through dark and echoing pits of
horror. Behind him hissed the lashes of
the jeering mob, savagely exultant at
having debauched still another proud
Terran into something that crawled.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories Winter 1948.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Burk Winters remained in the passenger section while the _Starflight_
made her landing at Kahora Port. He did not think that he could bear
to see another man, not even one he liked as much as he did Johnny
Niles, handle the controls of the ship that had been his for so long.
He did not wish even to say good bye to Johnny, but there was no
avoiding it. The young officer was waiting for him as he came down the
ramp, and the deep concern he felt was not hidden in the least by his
casually hearty grin.
Johnny held out his hand. "So long, Burk. You've earned this leave.
Have fun with it."
Burk Winters looked out over the vast tarmac that spread for miles
across the ochre desert. An orderly, roaring confusion of trucks and
flat-cars and men and ships--ore ships, freighters, tramps, sleek
liners like the _Starflight_, bearing the colours of three planets and
a dozen colonies, but still arrogantly and predominantly Terran.
Johnny followed his gaze and said softly, "It always gives you a
thrill, doesn't it?"
Winters did not answer. Miles away, safe from the thundering rocket
blasts, the glassite dome of Kahora, Trade City for Mars, rose
jewel-like out of the red sand. The little sun stared wearily down
and the ancient hills considered it, and the old, old wandering wind
passed over it, and it seemed as though the planet bore Kahora and its
space-port with patience, as though it were a small local infection
that would soon be gone.
He had forgotten Johnny Niles. He had forgotten everything but his own
dark thoughts. The young officer studied him with covert pity, and he
did not know it.
Burk Winters was a big man, and a tough man, tempered by years of
deep-space flying. The same glare of naked light that had burned his
skin so dark had bleached his hair until it was almost white, and just
in the last few months his grey eyes seemed to have caught and held
a spark of that pitiless radiance. The easy good nature was gone out
of them, and the lines that laughter had shaped around his mouth had
deepened now into bitter scars.
A big man, a hard man, but a man who was no longer in control of
himself. All during the voyage out from Earth he had chain-smoked the
little Venusian cigarets that have a sedative effect. He was smoking
one now, and even so he could not keep his hands steady nor stop the
everlasting _tic_ in his right cheek.
"Burk." Johnny's voice came to him from a great distance. "Burk, it's
none of my business, but...." He hesitated, then blurted out, "Do you
think Mars is good for you, now?"
Quite abruptly, Winters said, "Take good care of the _Starflight_,
Johnny. Good bye."
He went away, down the ramp. The pilot stared after him.
The Second Officer came up to Johnny. "That guy has sure gone to
pieces," he said.
Johnny nodded. He was angry, because he had come up under Winters and
he loved him.
"The damn fool," he said. "He shouldn't have come here." He looked out
over the mocking immensity of Mars and added, "His girl was lost out
there, somewhere. They never found her body."
* * * * *
A space-port taxi took Burk Winters into Kahora, and Mars vanished. He
was back in the world of the Trade Cities, which belong to all planets,
and none.
Vhia on Venus, N'York on Earth, Sun City in Mercury's Twilight Belt,
the glassite refuges of the Outer Worlds, they were all alike. They
were dedicated to the coddling of wealth and greed, little paradises
where millions were made and lost in comfort, where men and women from
all over the Solar System could expend their feverish energies without
regard for such annoyances as weather and gravitation.
Other things than the making of money were done in the Trade Cities.
The lovely plastic buildings, the terraces and gardens and the glowing
web of moving walks that spun them together, offered every pleasure and
civilized vice of the known worlds.
Winters hated the Trade Cities. He was used to the elemental honesty
of space. Here the speech, the dress, even the air one breathed, were
artificial.
And he had a deeper reason than that for his hatred.
Yet he had left N'York in feverish haste to reach Kahora, and now that
he was here he felt that he could not endure even the delay caused by
the necessity of crossing the city. He sat tensely on the edge of the
seat, and his nervous twitching grew worse by the minute.
When finally he reached his destination, he could not hold the money
for his fare. He dropped the plastic tokens on the floor and left the
driver to scramble for them.
He stood for a moment, looking up at the ivory facade before him. It
was perfectly plain, the epitome of expensive unpretentiousness. Above
the door, in small letters of greenish silver, was the one Martian
word: SHANGA.
"The return," he translated. "The going-back." A strange and rather
terrible smile crossed his face, very briefly. Then he opened the door
and went inside.
Subdued lighting, comfortable lounges, soft music, the perfect waiting
room. There were half a dozen men and women there, all Terrans. They
wore the fashionably simple white tunic of the Trade Cities, which set
off the magnificent blaze of their jewelry and the exotic styles in
which they dressed their hair.
Their faces were pallid and effeminate, scored with the haggard marks
of life lived under the driving tension of a super-modern age.
A Martian woman sat in an alcove, behind a glassite desk. She was dark,
sophisticatedly lovely. Her costume was the artfully adapted short robe
of ancient Mars, and she wore no ornament. Her slanting topaz eyes
regarded Burk Winters with professional pleasantness, but deep in them
he could see the scorn and the pride of a race so old that the Terran
exquisites of the Trade Cities were only crude children beside it.
"Captain Winters," she said. "How nice to see you again."
He was in no mood for conventional pleasantries. "I want to see Kor
Hal," he said. "Now."
"I'm afraid ..." she began. Then she took another look at Winters' face
and turned to the intercom. Presently she said, "You may go in."
He pushed open the door that led into the interior of the building,
which consisted almost entirely of a huge solarium. Glassite walls
enclosed it. Around the sides were many small cells, containing only a
padded table. The roofs of the cells were quartz, and acted as mammoth
lenses.
Skirting the solarium on the way to Kor Hal's office, Winters' mouth
twisted with contempt as he looked through the transparent wall.
An exotic forest blossomed there. Trees, ferns, brilliant flowers,
soft green sward, a myriad of birds. And through this mock-primitive
playground wandered the men and women who were devotees of Shanga.
They lay first on the padded tables and let the radiation play with
them. Winters knew. Neuro-psychic therapy, the doctors called it.
Heritage of the lost wisdom of old Mars. Specific for the jangled
nerves and overwrought emotions of modern man, who lived too fast in
too complex an environment.
_You lie there and the radiation tingles through you. Your glandular
balance tips a little. Your brain slows down. All sorts of strange and
pleasant things happen inside of you, while the radiation tinkers with
nerves and reflexes and metabolism. And pretty soon you're a child
again, in an evolutionary sort of way._
* * * * *
Shanga, the going-back. Mentally, and just a tiny bit physically, back
to the primitive, until the effect wore off and the normal balance
restored itself. And even then, for a while, you felt better and
happier, because you'd had one hell of a rest, from everything.
Their pampered white bodies incongruously clad in skins and bits of
coloured cloth, the Earthlings of Kahora played and fought among the
trees, and their worries were simple ones concerning food and love and
strings of gaudy beads.
Hidden away out of sight were watchful men with shock guns. Sometimes
someone went a little bit too far down the road. Winters knew. He had
been knocked cold himself, on his last visit here. He remembered that
he had tried to kill a man.
Or rather, he had been told that he had tried to kill a man. One did
not remember much of the interludes of Shanga. That was one reason
people liked it. One was free of inhibitions.
Fashionable vice, made respectable by the cloak of science. It was
a new kind of excitement, a new kind of escape from the glittering
complexities of life. The Terrans were mad for it.
But only the Terrans. The barbaric Venusians were still too close to
the savage to have any need for it, and the Martians were too old and
wise in sin to use it. _Besides_, thought Winters, _they made Shanga.
They know._
A deep shudder ran through him as he thrust his way into the office of
Kor Hal, the director.
Kor Hal was lean and dark and of no particular age. His national origin
was lost in the anonymity of the conventional white tunic. He was
Martian, and his courtesy was only a velvet sheath over chilled steel,
but beyond that he was quantity X.
"Captain Winters," he said. "Please sit down."
Winters sat.
Kor Hal studied him. "You're nervous, Captain Winters. But I am afraid
to treat you anymore. Atavism lies too close to the surface in you." He
shrugged. "You remember the last time."
Winters nodded. "The same thing happened in N'York." He leaned forward.
"I don't want you to treat me anymore. What you have here isn't enough
now. Sar Kree told me that, in N'York. He told me to come to Mars."