The injections had brought on the pain. Ericson, at the thought, felt sweat break out on his upper lip. What he had endured had been just at the edge of what a man could stand and still live. (His ordeal, had he known it, had been very much less than it would have been had he taken the drug cure in the hospital in Penhairn. Mnathl, though she had not disdained the help of terrestrial science, knew things about the Fyhonese flora and its properties that no terrestrial even suspected. Still, the ordeal had been bad enough.) Ericson shifted his position and sighed. Mnathl had cured him of _byhror_ addiction. In return, he had hated her. There had been weeks, he remembered, when his brain had held nothing but horrible pain and the wish to kill Mnathl. Once, when she had untied him for exercise, he had shammed sleep until she came close to him; then he had caught her by the throat. He had come close to killing her then. And no doubt in those long, maniacal days there had been other times. Ericson raised himself on one elbow and looked at her. She was pouring water into a clay pot above the small, workman-like fire she had built, and was putting in bits of chopped _bosula_ meat. Her greenish skin, the skin of a native of the South Polar continent, glittered slightly as she moved. "Mnathl ..." he said. She turned toward him quickly, but did not speak. "Mnathl, I'm sorry I tried to ... hurt you on the island. I must have been pretty bad." Mnathl almost smiled. "No matter," she said. "Pretty soon, soup." * * * * * The incident seemed to be closed. Ericson lay back in the shade again and watched the movements of the cloudscape across the deep turquoise of the sky. His eyes felt as fresh as Adam's. The trees were green with the greenness of living emeralds, and the sun had an ardor and a richness like no sun he had ever known before. Winds blew with caressive, sweet-smelling tendrils over his face, and from the warm soil beneath him he could almost feel strength soaking up again into his body cells. He had visited several planets since he had first left earth; he had loved none of them as he did Fyhon. Fyhon.... Arnaldo, the chunky little head of the paleo-biology department of Penhairn University, had told him once that terrestrials loved Fyhon so because conditions on that planet were like those on Terra during the part of the Cenozoic when man was beginning to become man. Fyhon, he said, appealed to some deep-seated memory in humanity of what a planet ought to be.