"Then you will ..." Winters broke off, because there were no words with
which to finish his question.
Kor Hal did not answer. He reclined at ease against the cushions of his
lounge chair, handsome, unconcerned. Only his eyes, which were green
and feral, held a buried spark of amusement. The cruel amusement of a
cat which has a crippled mouse under its paw.
"Are you sure," he asked finally, "that you know what you're doing?"
"Yes."
"People differ, Captain Winters. Those manikins out there--" he
indicated the solarium--"have neither blood nor heart. They are
artificial products of an artificial environment. But men like you,
Winters, are playing with fire when they play with Shanga."
"Listen," said Winters. "The girl I was going to marry took her flier
out over the desert one day and never came back. God only knows what
happened to her. You know better than I do the things that can happen
to people in the dead sea bottoms. I hunted for her. I found her flier,
where it had crashed. I never found her. After that nothing mattered
much to me. Nothing but forgetting."
Kor Hal inclined his dark, narrow head. "I remember. A tragedy, Captain
Winters. I knew Miss Leland, a lovely young woman. She used to come
here."
"I know," said Winters. "She wasn't Trade City, really, but she had too
much money and too much time. Anyway, I'm not worried about playing
with your fire, Kor Hal. I've been burned too deep with it already.
Like you say, people differ. Those lily-whites in their toy jungle,
they have no desire to go back any farther. They haven't the guts or
the passions to want to. I have."
Winters' eyes blazed with a peculiarly animal light. "I want to go
back, Kor Hal. Back as far as Shanga will take me."
"Sometimes," said the Martian, "that's a long way."
"I don't care."