"The leader of the Wise Ones was a Rsi called Brasputi. He is a strange figure in the old legends-almost never represented in carvings or painting, and then in an odd, misshapen way – long arms and three-fingered hands. It was he who led the gods to the high mountains-they came in the fantastic vimana; that is, their aerial car-and who founded the philosophy of their civilization. That is to say he handed down the laws of government among the gods. He is the only one to be identified by a sign in the sky-one of the planets. Probably Jupiter or Mars. And Brasputi it is who rules the demons of the hills, although this was added perhaps much later."

Spence sat spellbound as Adjani's father talked. The names fell to his ear with an exotic, otherworldy ring. He visualized a time back in the dim and misty past of a newborn world where these beings walked and held commerce with men who worshiped them as gods. But there was also a strong suggestion of something else in his mind, which Chetti's words called up from his own, more recent past.

"What's the matter?" asked Adjani, studying his friend closely. "You look like you've seen a ghost."

"Not a ghost-a god." Spence shook himself out of his thought. The next instant he was standing before them, eyes burning with excitement. "It fits! It all fits! How could I have missed it?"

"Missed what?"

"Adjani, I have something to tell you. If I had told you sooner, maybe we wouldn't be in this mess right now. I haven't told you all that happened to me on Mars."

"Oh? There's more?"

"Adjani, you haven't heard the half of it."

… … ..KALITRI.. … …

…

SPENCE FELT AS IF he had entered The Land That Time Forgot. India, apart from the glassy modern cities of the western coast and southern interior, was largely a country where poverty and population had united to halt the wheels of progress and even rock them backward a few paces.

It was a land retreating back into the past-almost as fast as the rest of the world advanced.

Spence found the contrast between the crumbling cities and ragged people and his own ultra-advanced space station too hard to reconcile. The foreignness astounded him, numbed him. He resented it, resented the screaming populace that reeked of stale sweat, urine, and other basic human smells. He resented their poverty and blamed them for their lack, although intellectually he admitted that one could not blame the patient for the effects of his disease. Still, his first reaction was a smoldering malice against a people who could allow themselves to sink so far.

In this reaction he was no different from the millions who had gone before him, and millions more who still held the blight of India against India herself.

The rocketplane ride into Calcutta had not prepared him for the scene that would greet him upon landing. He had felt the thrust of the rocket engines and endured the g-forces of takeoff. The plane rose to its peak altitude within ten minutes and began its gliding descent. Out of the small round window he saw the blue-black sky devoid of clouds above him and the crisp crescent curve of the Earth's turquoise horizon. He had placed his palm against the window and felt the heat from the friction of the air moving over the skin of the plane. Then they dropped out of the sky in the steep landing glide to roll to a stop outside a skyport like any other skyport the world over.

Upon emerging from the boarding tube the shock of India hit him hard. One moment Spence had been comfortable amid familIar surroundings, the next plunged into a churning mass of backward humanity. The effect could not have been more startling if he stepped out of a time machine into the Stone Age.

"What now?" he asked Adjani in a bewildered tone.

"Are you all right, my friend?"

"No, but I'll get used to it." Spence stared dully at the chaos around him-diminutive travelers scurried like cockroaches all over the dilapidated terminal. The din was a muffled roar.

"Follow me," instructed Adjani. He began plowing through the crush as a man wading through floodwaters. "I'll get us out here."

"In one piece, I hope," said Spence. His remark was lost in the havoc.

Adjani hailed a rickshaw outside the terminal and bundled Spence into it. He yelled something unintelligible to the driver and, with a creak and a sway and a clang of a bell, they were off, worming through the snarled traffic around the skyport.

If Spence's first glimpse of India shocked him, the view from the rickshaw crawling along the rutted streets sickened him.

Everywhere he looked he saw people, an ocean of people: dirty, poor, ragged, fly-bitten, naked, staring, grasping. He turned his eyes from one dismal scene only to witness another, still more miserable. And there were animals: white and brown cattle, little more than ambulating bags of bones covered with hide, roamed among the streets; horses, their large heads bobbing on bony necks, pulled rude carts; dogs, yapping endlessly, dashed between the wheels of careening vehicles; crows and other birds-even vultures-watched the stinking pavements for any morsel to fall, swooping down in an instant to seize the scrap in their beaks and make off with it before some dog or beggar could grab it.

At the corners of large intersections were piled great heaps of refuse and garbage containing every kind of filth imaginable, and at least forty kinds of pestilence, thought Spence. On these dung heaps it was commonplace to see a dozen or so of the populace defecating or relieving their bladders while keeping the rats at bay with flailing sticks. Once they saw a huge wagon piled high with carcasses of cattle and horses-the dead scooped off the streets and destined for the rendering plant.

They passed by a railroad depot where nuns had set up a relief station for mothers with babies. Spence could see the sisters' white scarves moving among a sea of black heads that threatened to overwhelm their feeble effort. The cries of starving babies filled the air.

Everywhere, along the road, on traffic islands-every square centimeter of space-trash huts were erected; bamboo sticks for a framework, covered with rags. Bricks pulled up from the street or from a nearby wall established a fireplace. Other dwellings consisted of nothing more than a grimy scrap of cloth or blanket with stones to hold down the corners. On such a scrap a whole family might be encamped beside gutters running with raw sewage.

Billboards depicting smart, well-dressed Indians enjoying soft drinks or cigarettes, or wearing the latest fashion creations, sheltered masses of naked homeless who lay wrapped in rags beneath their cheerful slogans. Roving throngs of orphaned children ran after the buses and wagons and rickshaws, chanting for coins or food or castoff objects.

The stench of all this-the cooking, rotting, festering, putrefying-hung over the city like a malodorous cloud, reeking in the hot sun. To Spence it smelled like death.

"The City of Dreadful Night," said Adjani. "Look around you, my friend. You will never forget it. No one who comes here ever does."

Spence did look around him. He could not help but look. It seemed to him that he had left the world behind and descended into hell. "It's a nightmare," said Spence.

They passed on through the murky air of Calcutta's human quagmire; past slums and open-air mortuaries with corpses stacked like cordwood, awaiting cremation; past children bathing in the gutters; past beggars collapsed on their haunches in the middle of busy streets; past crumbling facades of once-stately buildings blackened by the cooking fires of the refugees of the streets; past rusting hulks of old automobiles turned into brothels; past squalid, unwashed, infested, decaying habitations of meanest description.