Flesh Read Online Free

every activity out of which we’ve been able to make sense is directed at rebuilding the soil.
    “And the ceremonies we’ve seen through the plate were obviously fertility rites. The absence of an advanced technology might indicate several things. One, science as we knew it has been lost. Two, a revulsion against science and its practitioners exists—because science is blamed, fairly or not, for the holocaust that has scourged Earth.”
    “So?”
    “So these people probably have forgotten that Earth once sent out a starship to explore interstellar space and locate virgin planets. They may look upon us as devils or monsters—especially if we represent the science they may have been taught to loathe as the spirit of evil. I’m not just conjecturing on the basis of pure imagination, you know. The images on their temple walls and the statues, and some of the pageants we’ve witnessed, clearly show a hatred of the past. If we come to them out of the past, we might be rejected. Rather fatally for us.”
    Stagg began pacing back and forth.
    “Eight hundred years since we left the Earth,” he muttered. “Was it worth it? Our generation, our friends, enemies, our wives, sweethearts, children, their children and their children’s children... shoveled under and become grass. And that grass turned to dust. The dust that blows around the planet is the dust of the ten billion who lived when we lived. And the dust of God knows how many more tens of billions. There was a girl I didn’t marry because I wanted this great adventure more...”
    “You’re alive,” said Calthorp. “And eight hundred and thirty-two years old, Earth-time.”
    “But only thirty-two years old in physiological time,” Stagg said. “How can we explain to those simple people that as our ship crept toward the stars, we slept, frozen like fish in ice? Do they know anything about the techniques of suspended animation? I doubt it. So how will they comprehend that we only stayed out of suspended animation long enough to search for Terrestrial-type planets? That we discovered ten such, one of which is wide open for colonization?”
    “We could go around Earth twice while you make a speech,” said Calthorp. “Why don’t you get down off your soapbox and take us to Earth so we can find out what’s facing us? And so you might find a woman to replace the one you left behind?”
    “Women!” shouted Stagg, no longer looking dreamy.
    “What?” said Calthorp, startled by his captain’s sudden violence.
    “Women! Eight hundred years without seeing a single, solitary, lone, forlorn woman! I’ve taken one thousand ninety-five S.P. pills—enough to make a capon out of a bull elephant! But they’re losing their effect! I’ve built up a resistance! Pills or not, I want a woman. I could make love to my own toothless and blind great-grandmother. I feel like Walt Whitman when he boasted he jetted the stuff of future republics. I’ve a dozen republics in me!” “Glad to see you’ve quit acting the nostalgic poet and are now yourself,” said Calthorp. “But quit pawing the ground. You’ll get your fill of women soon enough. From what I’ve seen in the plate, women seem to have the upper hand, and you know you can’t stand a domineering female.”
    Gorilla-fashion, Stagg pounded his big hard chest.
    “Any woman comes up against me will run into a hard time!”
    Then he laughed and said, “Actually, I’m scared. It’s been so long since I’ve talked to a woman, I won’t know how to act.”
    “Just remember that women don’t change. Old Stone Age or Atomic Age, the colonel’s lady and Judy O’Grady are still the same.”
    Stagg laughed again and affectionately slapped Calthorp’s thin back. Then he gave orders to make planetfall. But during the descent, he said, “Do you think there’s a chance we might get a decent reception?”
    Calthorp shrugged.
    “They might hang us. Or they might make us kings.”
    As it happened, two weeks after he