Read Downward to the Earth for Free Online Page B

indeed whether evil in fact existed as an objective phenomenon. His answers surprised and delighted him, and he turned to Kurtz to communicate his insights, but just then the effect of the venom began to fade with quite startling suddenness, and in a short while Gundersen felt altogether normal again. He was weeping, though, and he felt an anguish of shame, as though he had been flagrantly detected molesting a child. The three nildoror were nowhere in sight. Salamone picked up the bowl and went into the station. “Come,” Kurtz said. “Let's go in too."
    They would not discuss any of it with him. They had let him share in it, but they would not explain a thing, cutting him off sternly when he asked. The rite was hermetically private. Gundersen was wholly unable to evaluate the experience. Had his body actually turned into that of a nildor for an hour? Hardly. Well, then, had his mind, his soul, somehow migrated into the nildor's body? And had the nildor's soul, if nildoror had souls, gone into his? What kind of sharing, what sort of union of innernesses, had occurred in that clearing?
    Three days afterward, Gundersen applied for a transfer out of the serpent station. In those days he was easily upset by the unknown. Kurtz's only reaction, when Gundersen announced he was leaving, was a short brutal chuckle. The normal tour of duty at the station was eight weeks, of which Gundersen had done less than half. He never again served a stint there.
    Later, he gathered what gossip he could about the doings at the serpent station. He was told vague tales of sexual abominations in the grove, of couplings between Earthman and nildor, between Earthman and Earthman; he heard murmurs that those who habitually drank the venom underwent strange and terrible permanent changes of the body; he heard stories of how the nildoror elders in their private councils bitterly condemned the morbid practice of going to the serpent station to drink the stuff the Earthmen offered. But Gundersen did not know if any of these whispers were true. He found it difficult, in later years, to look Kurtz in the eye on the rare occasions when they met. Sometimes he found it difficult even to live with himself. In some peripheral way he had been tainted by his single hour of metamorphosis. He felt like a virgin who had stumbled into an orgy, and who had come away deflowered but yet ignorant of what had befallen her.
    The phantoms faded. The sound of Kurtz's guitar diminished and was gone.
    Srin'gahar said, “Shall we leave now?"
    Gundersen slowly emerged from the ruined station. “Does anyone gather the juices of the serpents today?"
    “Not here,” said the nildor. He knelt. The Earthman mounted him, and in silence Srin'gahar carried him away, back to the path they had followed earlier.

FOUR
    IN EARLY AFTERNOON they neared the nildoror encampment that was Gundersen's immediate goal. For most of the day they had been traveling across the broad coastal plain, but now the back of the land dipped sharply, for this far inland there was a long, narrow depression running from north to south, a deep rift between the central plateau and the coast. At the approach to this rift Gundersen saw the immense devastation of foliage that signaled the presence of a large nildoror herd within a few kilometers. A jagged scar ran through the forest from ground level to a point about twice a man's height.
    Even the lunatic tropical fertility of this region could not keep up with the nildoror appetite; it took a year or more for such zones of defoliation to restore themselves after the herd had moved on. Yet despite the impact of the herd, the forest on all sides of the scar was even more close-knit here than on the coastal plain to the east. This was a jungle raised to the next higher power, damp, steamy, dark. The temperature was considerably higher in the valley than at the coast, and though the atmosphere could not possibly have been any more humid here, there was an almost