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

Kirwan, o’ course, that was a professional wrestler before he got bit by the poetical bug.”
    “Come on, come on!” roared Diomedes-Halevi. “Everybody down to the beach. Don’t lounge around; you’ll catch cold!”
    “God, don’t a man ever get five minutes to himself?” muttered Kirwan. He followed the others down the trail to the beach.
    The entire village, two hundred-odd people, over a third of them children, swarmed down to the beach on which Althea had landed three days earlier. They made one of their number to climb out on a projecting rock to watch the water for any of the man-eating monsters of the Sadabao Sea, while the rest shed their wrappings and plunged in.
    Althea and Bahr sat down on the sand to watch the performance. Althea said, “Do you know what impresses me most? It’s the high proportion of children and pregnant women.”
    “That is the natural ratio, when people have short life-expectancies and no methods of limitation.”
    “But I thought Kuroki provided his members with longevity doses like other Terrans?”
    “He does; that is one product of decadent civilization that they would not forgo. But his medical service is rather crude. He has a lot of mixed-up ideas about nature’s being the best physician. At this rate, in any case, he will soon have an overpopulation problem.”
    Althea looked up to see the barrel-bodied Kirwan dripping in front of her. He said, “Well, Althea darling, aren’t you having a bath this day, and you so dirty and all?”
    “I suppose I could use one,” said Althea. Up on the plateau, water was not so easily come by that it was used for bathing. She had thought of going down to the beach for a bath the night before, but she had been too tired. “But I haven’t any bathing suit.”
    “You’ve got your skin, the same as the rest of us. In a suit, you’d be the conspicuous one.”
    “Why not?” said Bahr, rising and beginning to peel off his khaki shirt. “If Brian will his great paunch expose, and I my poor thin skeleton of a physique, why should you to your Terran taboos adhere? You, who could be a sculptor’s model for a statue of Diana?”
    Althea compromised by walking down to one extreme end of the beach, out of earshot if not out of sight of the Roussellians, and bathed there. Lacking soap or washrag, she scrubbed herself with sand. Then she waded out to breast depth and swam powerfully out until the lifeguard blew a whistle to warn her back in.
    She returned to her companions to find that the bony Bahr had just emerged from the water and was talking with Kirwan. The latter said, “Sit down, Althea, and listen. The mind of the great Brian Kirwan is so superior it’s even willing to admit when it’s made a mistake. I thought getting out and living the natural life would be easier; but I’m finding the simpler it is, the harder it is. This sort of thing may be all right for a vacation, but the idea of spending years grubbing in the muck fair gives me the horrors. No meat, no whiskey, and no tobacco after me present supply’s gone. Nothing but these damned vegetables, all tasting like turnips, morning, noon, and night. And what’s an Irishman without his whiskey and beefsteak?”
    “You would at least train off some of that fat,” murmured Bahr.
    Kirwan snorted. “I’m not fat, except in comparison with a tottering structure of strings and wires like you. Now, we want to get out of here before the Dasht of Darya comes down on us horse, foot, and artillery. But we can’t just write a letter to Novorecife to come fetch us. In the first place, it’d bring Gorchakov down on our necks; in the second, Kuroki censors all the mail to keep contacts with the decadent Terran civilization down to a minimum.”
    “What then?” queried Althea.
    “I thought maybe we could do something with Halevi—you know, the one they call Diomedes.” Kirwan pointed to where the patriarchal Israeli was disporting himself like a porpoise.
    Bahr shook his head.