Winters knew that he would. He could not go through this again. If he were still alive in the garden of Shanga the next time the gong sounded, he would go with his brothers. The fire of Shanga died at last from the prisms, and the creatures of its making lay still on the ground. The Martians sighed. The first stir of departure ran through them. Burk Winters cried out, "Wait!" * * * * * His voice rang back from the empty upper tiers, and it brought every eye upon him. There was desperation in it, and triumph, and the anger of a man driven beyond the bounds of reason. "Wait, you men of Mars! You came to see a show. Very well, I'll give you one. You, Kor Hal! You told me something, down there in Valkis. You told me of the men of Caer Dhu who first made Shanga, and how in one generation they were destroyed by it. _One_ generation!" He stepped forward, finding release for his tortured nerves in this denunciation. "We of Earth are a young race. We're still close to our beginnings, and for that you hate and mock us, calling us apes. Very well. But that youth gives us strength. We go very slowly down the road of Shanga. "But you of Mars are old. You have followed the circle of time a long way round, and the end is always close to the beginning. In one generation the men of Caer Dhu were gone. Our fibres are iron, but theirs were only straw. "That's why no Martian will practice Shanga--why it was forbidden by the City-States. You don't dare to practice it, because it hurls you headlong down that road--toward your end or your beginning, who knows? But you haven't the strength to take it, and you're afraid." A jeering, angry howl rose from the crowd. Kor Hal shouted, "Listen to the ape! Listen to the beast we drove through the streets of Valkis!" "Yes, listen to him!" Winters cried. "Because the Lady Fand is gone, and only the ape knows where she is!" That silenced them, and in the quiet Winters laughed. "Perhaps you don't believe me. Shall I tell you how I did it?" He told them, and when he was through telling he listened, while they called him liar, and he jeered in Kor Hal's face. "Wait," he shouted. "Wait, and I'll bring her to you." He turned and went toward the clearing. He went fast, because the beasts were already beginning to stir and rouse from their temporary stupor. He remembered from his own experience with Shanga that before consciousness returned there was a period of delirium, so that even in the Trade City solariums the people were not turned loose until it had passed. Threading his way between the brutish bodies, leaping over them, avoiding the touch of the scaly things, he came to the clump of flowering shrubs by the lake and crawled in among them. He had not known. He had guessed from Kor Hal's statement that the metamorphosis was swift, but he had not known. There were some things that a man could not even guess at.