Blind and insensible, Alston stood upon the island pedestal in the ruined temple, arms yearning upward in hopeless supplication to the monstrous, decaying horror on the veil. He still stood there when a mopping-up squad of convicts searched the temple and found him. Raving, he was borne away to the returning ships.
It is another matter that he awakened later in the radiation hospital at Quanta City. Beautiful Kial Nasron, also suffering from painful radiation burns, sat beside him on the bed when he tore off the bandages and opened his eyes upon darkness. She pressed him gently back to the pillow, told him that he had been freely pardoned, and promised that he would see again, months later, when the paralysis had left his optic nerves.
It is also another matter that when Kial and her father returned to Mars Craig Alston went along, and that a court there reversed its findings in his case, restoring full civil rights which a man needs to be married.
In time even a man like Torkeg Nasron can be civilized into a potential father-in-law. Craig Alston volunteered for the Second Trans-Plutonian Expedition, and while Kial waits for him, she can work upon her father. But in the years ahead, she and Alston will rarely speak of Venus with its age-old mystery, its forgotten cities and strange plants. And they will try not to think of the temple and the Circean monster in its sacred well, nor of the thing that hung upon a veil of woven moonbeams....