The Virgin of Zesh & the Tower of Zanid by L. Sprague de Camp Read Free Book Online Page A

questions.”
    “All right,” said Althea.
    “First, he wishes to know if your reviving him meant that you had changed your mind and wished to go to the races with him after all. The last expression is, I believe, a euphemism.”
    “Of course not. I revived him because I considered death too severe a punishment for what he had done.”
    Bahr and the sailor conversed. The former said: “Do you mean, he says, that you went to all that trouble over a mere question of justice?”
    “That’s right.”
    The sailor shook his head. Bahr said, “He wants to know if you wish to be friends with him?”
    “No.”
    Bahr told the sailor, and Kirwan added a few words in his own broken Gazashtandu, explaining: “I told the beggar if he so much as came within reach of you, I’d take his hide off personally and use it to bind me next book.”
    Time slipped by as the Labághti plodded her way eastward among the islands of the Sadabao Sea. Althea turned brown from the sun and even put on a little weight, while Bahr lectured her on the theory and technique of intelligence testing. The hopeless trapped feeling which had come upon her when she stepped off the spaceship at Novorecife and learned that Bishop Raman was away, subsided. She did not, however, get over her tendency to scan the western horizon for the sail of a pursuing ship.
    The three Terrans were standing in a cluster at the poop deck rail and watching the island of Jerud slide below the horizon when Althea asked, “Gottfried, how are you going to test the Záva?”
    Bahr lit his pipe. “That depends on the mental level that I find. On the ordinary Mangioni scale, which takes the consolidated averages for the whole human race as one hundred percent, the tailless Krishnans average one hundred and two and the Koloftuma seventy-eight, so one would normally test the latter by the tests used for preadolescent human beings. But if the rumors be true, I may have to use the Takamoto genius test.”
    “Ha!” said Kirwan. “And what does an intelligence test measure? Why, the ability to pass an intelligence test, nothing more!”
    Althea asked, “What’s happened on Zá to get the Interplanetary Council and the Terran World Federation so excited?”
    “Well,” explained Bahr, “thirty years ago, Terran time, the Záva were living the same sort of savage lives that the tailed Krishnans of Koloft and Fossanderan still do. The other Sadabao Islanders raided them to catch the young for slaves, the adults being too intractable. But they had never been able to conquer Zá, not so much because of the resistance of the Záva, whose sticks and stones could not have done much against armored men with swords and crossbows, as because of the shape of the island, which like Zesh is surrounded by steep cliffs with only two landing places.
    “Then word began coming out that the Záva were rapidly changing their way of life. In a few years, they acquired a form of writing, a well-organized government, a system of law, and are said to have constructed a lot of well-planned and spacious buildings instead of the wretched huts of stones and mud. The latest report has it that they are building a small but serviceable navy of rowing galleys of advanced design. Now, these things do not happen so quickly of their own accord.”
    “Do you suppose there’s some Earthman on Zá teaching them?” asked Althea.
    “I do not think so,” replied Bahr. “I made inquiries of Mr. Gorchakov, who showed me what careful track his office has kept of all the Earthmen on Krishna. Moreover, when the Saint-Rémy treatment was introduced, the authorities at Novorecife had great success in getting these Earthmen to come in and submit to treatment.”
    “I should think some would have refused,” said Althea.
    “Ah, but Novorecife can always cut off their longevity doses. That is how the technological blockade was as successful as it was before the Saint-Rémy treatment. Few Earthmen cared to jeopardize their