"That woman Garga," Allen was saying with his ready grin, "I get along fine with her. Pumped a lot of facts out of her." Physically, Allen and I are of quite different types, which is perhaps why we are such friends. He says I have a romantic, sort of poetic look--from my mother, who was Spanish. And that, he says, goes with a bad temper. However that may be, certainly he was always the opposite. A giant, blond fellow; six feet four; rugged, sun-bronzed, like a young Viking. And he had an almost unfailing good nature. A slow, quiet smile. Slow of movement; usually somewhat lazy. But there were times, rare intervals, when he was angered. His movements were panther-like then, and I wouldn't like to be the one to meet him in a fight. "That Garga woman likes me," he grinned. He lowered his voice as he leaned toward me. "She looks like a machine, but still she's a woman. Get the idea? If we ever get out of this, that might be the way." And then he told me what he knew of Nereid's strange Venus world. The realm of the Arones was in a lush forest, the tropic region. Compared to our Earth population, there were not many of the Arones. Half a million perhaps, in little Forest and Water villages, with twenty thousand in the chief city, known as Arron.... How shall I attempt even an outline of the ethnological history of Venus? I can give only the barest suggestion of it. In former ages doubtless there had been millions of humans on this, Earth's sister planet. A civilization rising to great heights of science, with all the planet's surface mastered by man. And then decadence had come. Mankind resting; then drifting backward. Dwindling in number; with science forgotten, put aside as a memory, a tradition. And slowly but inexorably the monstrous animals, insects, the weird vegetation again took primitive possession of most of the globe. "So that's your Nereid's people," Allen was saying. "Decadent--soft now--trying to accomplish nothing." Except human happiness. I recalled Nereid's words of her world, living for love and music and beauty. Strange how in all human affairs there are two sides of looking at everything! I said something like that to Allen, and he nodded. "The trouble with science," he agreed, "is that it can be so easily perverted. Things to benefit mankind, turned into engines of death. That's the recent history of our own world." And the Arones had gone to the other extreme. Science was banned. Men and women should live for human happiness, with no thought of conquest, or of personal power. And out of this, a few generations ago, had risen the Gorts. They had been for centuries a nomadic race of giants, mere savages roaming the barren parts of the planet. Few in number, and like the savages of our own Earth, apparently doomed to extinction. Banished criminals from the world of the Arones, generations back, had joined them, brought them science--stolen things of science.