'No, Tara of Helium," he replied."They were scarce worth the effort of my blade, and never were they a menace to me because of their swords.""They should have slain you easily," said Ghek."So great and highly developed is the power of reason among us that they should have known before you struck just where, logically, you must seek to strike, and so they should have been able to parry your every thrust and easily find an opening to your heart.""But they did not, Ghek," Gahan reminded him."Their theory of development is wrong, for it does not tend toward a perfectly balanced whole.You have developed the brain and neglected the body and you can never do with the hands of another what you can do with your own hands.Mine are trained to the sword--every muscle responds instantly and accurately, and almost mechanically, to the need of the instant.I am scarcely objectively aware that I think when I fight, so quickly does my point take advantage of every opening, or spring to my defense if I am threatened that it is almost as though the cold steel had eyes and brains.You, with your kaldane brain and your rykor body, never could hope to achieve in the same degree of perfection those things that I can achieve.Development of the brain should not be the sum total of human endeavor.The richest and happiest peoples will be those who attain closest to well-balanced perfection of both mind and body, and even these must always be short of perfection.In absolute and general perfection lies stifling monotony and death.Nature must have contrasts; she must have shadows as well as high lights; sorrow with happiness; both wrong and right; and sin as well as virtue.""Always have I been taught differently," replied Ghek; "but since I have known this woman and you, of another race, I have come to believe that there may be other standards fully as high and desirable as those of the kaldanes.At least I have had a glimpse of the thing you call happiness and I realize that it may be good even though I have no means of expressing it.I cannot laugh nor smile, and yet within me is a sense of contentment when this woman sings--a sense that seems to open before me wondrous vistas of beauty and unguessed pleasure that far transcend the cold joys of a perfectly functioning brain.I would that I had been born of thy race."Caught by a gentle current of air the flier was drifting slowly toward the northeast across the valley of Bantoom.Below them lay the cultivated fields, and one after another they passed over the strange towers of Moak and Nolach and the other kings of the swarms that inhabited this weird and terrible land.Within each enclosure surrounding the towers grovelled the rykors, repellent, headless things, beautiful yet hideous.
"A lesson, those," remarked Gahan, indicating the rykors in an enclosure above which they were drifting at the time, "to that fortunately small minority of our race which worships the flesh and makes a god of appetite.You know them, Tara of Helium; they can tell you exactly what they had at the midday meal two weeks ago, and how the loin of the thoat should be prepared, and what drink should be served with the rump of the zitidar."Tara of Helium laughed."But not one of them could tell you the name of the man whose painting took the Jeddak's Award in The Temple of Beauty this year," she said."Like the rykors, their development has not been balanced.""Fortunate indeed are those in which there is combined a little good and a little bad, a little knowledge of many things outside their own callings, a capacity for love and a capacity for hate, for such as these can look with tolerance upon all, unbiased by the egotism of him whose head is so heavy on one side that all his brains run to that point."As Gahan ceased speaking Ghek made a little noise in his throat as one does who would attract attention."You speak as one who has thought much upon many subjects.Is it, then, possible that you of the red race have pleasure in thought? Do you know aught of the joys of introspection? Do reason and logic form any part of your lives?""Most assuredly," replied Gahan, "but not to the extent of occupying all our time--at least not objectively.You, Ghek, are an example of the egotism of which I spoke.Because you and your kind devote your lives to the worship of mind, you believe that no other created beings think.And possibly we do not in the sense that you do, who think only of yourselves and your great brains.We think of many things that concern the welfare of a world.Had it not been for the red men of Barsoom even the kaldanes had perished from the planet, for while you may live without air the things upon which you depend for existence cannot, and there had been no air in sufficient quantities upon Barsoom these many ages had not a red man planned and built the great atmosphere plant which gave new life to a dying world.
"What have all the brains of all the kaldanes that have everlived done to compare with that single idea of a single red man?"Ghek was stumped.Being a kaldane he knew that brains spelled the sum total of universal achievement, but it had never occurred to him that they should be put to use in practical and profitable ways.He turned away and looked down upon the valley of his ancestors across which he was slowly drifting, into what unknown world? He should be a veritable god among the underlings, he knew; but somehow a doubt assailed him.It was evident that these two from that other world were ready to question his preeminence.
Even through his great egotism was filtering a suspicion that they patronized him; perhaps even pitied him.Then he began to wonder what was to become of him.No longer would he have many rykors to do his bidding.Only this single one and when it died there could not be another.When it tired, Ghek must lie almost helpless while it rested.He wished that he had never seen this red woman.She had brought him only discontent and dishonor and now exile.Presently Tara of Helium commenced to hum a tune and Ghek, the kaldane, was content.
