"You'll see." She turned on him suddenly. "You challenged Shanga,
Earthman, just as your people have challenged Mars. We'll find out
which is the stronger!"
She motioned to the officer of the guard, who went away. Then she said
to Winters,
"You wanted your girl back. You were willing to go through the fire
of Shanga for her, though you abhorred it. You were willing to risk
your identity through the changes of the ray--_which after a while,
Earthman, never go away_. And all for Jill Leland. Do you still want
her back?"
"Yes."
"You're sure of that."
"Yes."
"Very well." Fand glanced over his shoulder and nodded. "There she is."
For a long moment, Burk Winters did not turn around.
Fand moved away a little, watching, with a cruel, amused interest.
Winters' back stiffened. He turned.
She was there, standing in the sunlight, bewildered, frightened, a wild
and shining creature out of the dawn of the world, with a rope around
her neck. The guards were laughing.
Winters thought desperately, _She has not changed too much. Back to the
primitive, but not yet to the ape. There is a soul still in her eyes,
and the light of reason._
_Jill, Jill! How could you have done this thing?_
But he understood now how she could have done it. He remembered how
bitterly he had quarreled with her over Shanga. He had thought it
a stupid and childish thing, far beneath her intelligence and as
degrading as any other drug. But he had not understood.
He did now. And he was filled with a deadly fear, because he understood
so well.
Because he himself was now numbered among the beasts of Shanga. And
beneath his horror as he looked at the creature that was Jill and
yet not Jill, he was aware that in some unholy way he found her
more beautiful and more alluring than he ever had before. Stripped
of all the shams and the studied unconventions of society, freed of
all complexity, her body strong and fleet as a doe's quivering with
sensitive life....
_It would take two of a kind. Dawn-woman, dawn-man. Strong sinew,
strong passion, the guts that cities stole away...._
Fand said, "She can still be saved, if you can find a way to do it."
Then she added shrewdly, "Unless you now need someone to save _you_,
Captain Winters!"
A strong shock of revulsion rocked him, but his eyes still held a
strange light.
* * * * *
The silver she was coming toward him. Her gaze was fixed upon him. He
saw that she was drawn to him, and struggling to understand why. She
did not speak, and somehow Winters' throat closed on an aching lump,
so that he too was dumb.
The guard who held her rope let her move as she would. She came close
to Winters, hesitantly, as an animal does. Then she stopped and looked
up into his face. Tears gathered in her wide dark eyes. Presently she
whimpered, very softly, and went down on her knees at his feet.
The old woman let out a shrill cackling. Fand's eyes were like cups of
molten gold.
Winters bent over and caught Jill in his arms. He lifted her to her
feet and stood holding her to him, in a fury of protective possessive
love. He said very softly to Fand,
"You've seen it all now. Can we go?"
She nodded. "Take them to the garden of Shanga," she said, and added,
"It is almost time."
The guards took them, Burk Winters and the woman he had lost and found
again, out through the great echoing halls of the palace and down the
long slope of lawn to the amphitheatre.
A barred gate of heavy metal covered the mouth of a tunnel. The guards
unlocked it and took off Winters' chains and thrust him inside with
Jill. The gate was locked again behind them.
Holding Jill tightly by the hand, Winters went down the tunnel and came
presently into the arena--into the garden of Shanga.
He stopped, blinking in the sudden light. Jill's hand tightened on his.
She quivered with a tense expectancy, and her head was tilted in an
attitude of listening.
He had only a moment before the gong sounded, the mellow sonorous notes
that might have been calling some evil priesthood to its dark prayers.
Only a moment to glimpse the trees and the shambling anthropoid forms
that moved among them, to catch the rank beast taint in the air, to
hear the splashing and the hissing screams from the hidden pool.
Only a moment to be filled with horror and a sick fear, to deny to
himself the reality of this nightmare garden, to wish that he were
blind and deaf, or better than that, dead.
In the seats above the protecting wall, rows of Martian faces looked
down. They were the faces of men and women who watch the antics
of creatures in a zoo--destructive creatures for which they have a
personal hatred.
Then the gong called out, and Jill leaped away, pulling him by the
hand. All over the garden there was a moment of intense silence, and
then there rose a devil's chorus of roaring and screaming in voices
that were horribly human and even more horribly not, and close to him
Jill's voice chimed in, saying over and over,
"Shanga! Shanga!"
It came to Winters in a flash, then, what Fand had meant about Mars. As
Jill pulled him headlong between the trees and across the open grassy
spaces, he realized that this garden of Shanga was in fact a zoo, an
exhibit, where the people of Mars might come to see what manner of
beast their economic conquerors were. A hot and dire shame rose in
him. _Apeling, running naked through the trees, a slave to the fire of
Shanga!_
He yelled at Jill to stop!
She only plunged on the harder, so that he had to fight her, setting
his heels in the earth. And she turned on him snarling, saying,
"Shanga!"
A great anthropoid male came rushing toward them. He had slipped back
beyond speech, but ecstatic noises came out of his throat. Behind him
were others, males, females, and young on the same evolutionary level.
Winters and the silver she that was Jill were caught up and carried on
in their tribal rush. Winters fought to get away, but it was hopeless.
The wild hairy bodies walled him in.
As they approached the center of the garden they were joined by more
and more, all apparently summoned by the sound of the gong. Looking
at them, Winters' stomach turned over. This was Walpurgis Night, a
festival of blasphemies. And he was trapped in it, inextricably joined
to destruction.
The ones like Jill, who had only gone a little way as yet, were not so
bad. They were human. Winters knew that he himself had been like that,
and he felt no particular horror of them. But there were others. Back
through all the stages of the primitive, beyond the Neanderthaler,
beyond the Piltdown Man, beyond Pithecanthropus Erectus, beyond the
missing Link, back to the common ancestor.
Shapeless, shambling, hairy brutes, deformed skulls and little red
cunning eyes, bared teeth grinning yellow. Things that even the
anthropologists had never seen or dreamed of. Things that were not
human, or ape, nor any form of life that had ever been classified.
[Illustration: _All the dark secrets of Terran evolution were laid bare
in this garden of evil, under that prism of hell!_]
All the dark secrets of Terran evolution were laid bare in this garden,
for the Martians to see. It made even Winters, the Earthman, flinch
to think that bodies like that had given ultimate birth to him. What
respect could the Martians have for such a race, that was still so
close to its beginnings?
But he was to see more, much more, of those beginnings....
* * * * *
The gong struck a last booming summons. The tide of bowed hairy
shoulders and flat brows and ugly things that went on all fours swept
Winters and Jill out into the clearing at the center, where from the
palace window he had seen the lake. A strong musky reek hung in the
air. It had the same sickly taint that a snake-house does. And Winters
saw that the lake was agitated by the creatures who lived there, and
who were swarming out to answer the gong.
_Back to the common ancestor, and beyond. Beyond the mammal, back
to the gill and the scale, to the egg laid in the warm mud, to the
hissing, squirming, utterly loathly ultimate!_
Jill panted, "Shanga! Shanga!", looking up, and Winters felt a darkness
swimming in his brain. A cold wet thing slithered between his legs, and
he swayed, retching. The surface of the lake rippled, but he would not
look. He could not.
Grasping Jill, he tried to batter his way through the crowd, but it was
hopeless. He was caught, trapped.
Looking up, he saw the prisms that were set high overhead on long
booms. He saw them start to glow, with the remembered flame.
He had reached the end, now. The end of his search for Jill Leland, the
end of everything. The first sweet deadly thrill of the ray touched his
flesh. He felt the waking hunger in him, the deep lust, the stirring
of the beast that lay so close under his own skin. He thought of the
lake, and wondered how it would be to lie in its wetness, breathing
through the gill slits that had once opened in his own flesh when he
was an embryo in his mother's womb.
_Because that is where I shall be, he thought. In the lake. Jill and I.
And beyond the lake, what? The amoeba, and then...?_
He saw the royal box, whence the Kings of Valkis had watched the
gladiators and the flowing blood. Fand sat there now. She leaned her
slender elbows on the stone and watched, and it seemed to Winters that
even at this distance he could see the smile and the scorn in her
golden eyes. Kor Hal sat beside her, and the old woman, a muffled shape
of black.
The fires of Shanga burned and brightened. There was a silence on
the clearing now. The sounds that came, the moanings and the little
whimpers, did not touch the silence. They only made it deeper. The warm
glints danced on the upturned faces, glowed in the staring eyes. Each
scaled or shaggy body bore a nimbus of beauty. He saw Jill standing
there, reaching up toward the twin suns, a slim shaft of silver flame.
The madness already in his blood. Muscle and sinew taut with
it, arching, curving. Brain clouding with a bright soft veil,
forgetfulness, release. Jill and Burk, dawn-man, dawn-woman, happy
while they lived, done with everything but their own love, their own
satisfaction. Why not? They were both in it now, both marked with the
same stamp.
Then he heard the laughter and the jeering of the Martians who were
gathered to watch the shame of his world. He tore his gaze away from
the wicked light and looked again into the face of Fand of Valkis, and
then at Kor Hal and the thousand other faces, and a bleak and terrible
expression came into his eyes.
The ranks of the crowd had broken. The beast-shapes lay upon the turf,
writhing in the ecstasy of Shanga. Jill was on her hands and knees.
Winters felt the strength going out of him. The lovely pain, the
beautiful, wild, exultant pain....
He grasped Jill and began to drag her, back toward the trees, out of
the circle of light.
She did not want to go. She screamed and tore his face with her nails
and kicked him, and he struck her. After that she lay limp in his arms.
He kept on, stumbling over the twitching bodies, falling, crawling at
last on his hands and knees. Only one thing kept him going on. Only one
thing made him undergo the tortures of the damned, fighting Shanga.
That thing was the scornful, smiling face of Fand.
The touch of the ray weakened and was gone. He was safe, beyond the
circle. He dragged the girl farther into the shrubbery and turned his
back on the clearing because he wanted more than any drug addict could
conceive of wanting to go back into the light, and he dared not look at
it.
Instead, he pulled himself erect and faced the royal box. It was only
pride that kept him standing. He looked straight into the distant eyes
of Fand, and her clear silvery voice carried to him.
"You will go back into the fire of Shanga, Earthman. Tomorrow, or the
day after--you will go."
Complete assurance there, as one is sure of the rising of the sun.
Burk Winters did not answer. He stood a moment longer, his gaze level
on Fand's. Then even pride failed. He fell and lay still.
The last conscious thought of his mind was that Fand and Mars together
had challenged Earth, and that it was no longer merely a matter of
saving a girl from destruction.