GARDEN OF EVIL
By MARGARET ST. CLAIR
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 quite suddenly. He had an impression that it was a long time, months at least, since he had been in a state of normal consciousness. At the back of his mind a memory of pain had imprinted itself as a signet makes 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 at him 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 remember her from the other side of the gulf in his memory, from the days when he had begged food in the streets of Penhairn? Mnathl handed him a nicely-roasted bosula rib. He ate it avidly. He had always thought the bosula was the best of the food animals of Fyhon.
When the bone was gnawed clean she passed him, in a folded fresh green leaf, a mixed grill consisting of bits of bosula liver, kidney, tripe, salivary glands, and eyes. He ate that, too. When his stomach was full Ericson lay back with his arms under his head and looked at the big puffy clouds drifting overhead. He had no desire to think about himself or the things that had been happening to him in the last three or four months, but the thoughts came anyhow.