The Blue Behemoth Regrown Page 4

scared and sick, but I thought I saw their outlines blur a little.

  Gow spoke suddenly. Her voice was loud, and calm.

  'That was it,' she said, as though it was the only thing in the world I hat mattered. 'They ain't complete by themselves. Like the zurats back home on Mercury. They got a community brain. No wonder Gerty was lonesome.'

  Her voice broke the spell. Somebody screamed, and everybody started to move at once, clawing in blind panic for the openings.And we all knew, then, what we were afraid of.

  We were afraid of the little thing in the black box, the thing in a cloak of fire that had risen from the ruins of Kapper's body, and the power that lived in it.

  I suppose we thought we were going to fight it, a II right. But outside, where we could breathe. Not in here, with the hugeness of the females smothering us, penned in with the last female cansin in creation.

  I knew then why Kapper had broken, and why she hadn't told, in spite of the selak. The thing hadn't let her. And it had called to its kind, from the deep swamps and Beccalyn Shannon's Imperial Circus.

  THE deep indigo night of Venus had settled down, in the smell of mud and jungle and the hot rain. Lights flared crazily here and there out of open doorways. People were yelling, the tight, animal mob-yell of fear.

  There was no place to run in Nahru. The jungle held it. The thick green jungle built on quicksand and crawling with death. Behind us the four cansins raised a wild whistling screech.

  It was answered, out of the hot night between the little shacks of Nahru. Brute voices, singing their hate. Suddenly I remembered what Gow had said. 'He busted a lot of cages....'

  God knew what was loose in that town.

  Beccie Shannon spoke beside me. We were still running, slipping and floudering in the mud, making toward the ship from sheer instinct. She gasped,

  'We got to get those babies rounded up. Gow! Gow, you hear hear me? We got to get 'em back!'

  Gow's voice came sullenly. 'I hear you, boss.' We slowed down. It was suddenly important to hear what more Gow had to say.

  'Don't you get it?' she asked slowly. 'Gerty let 'em out. He wanted 'em – to help him. They know it. They ain't going back.'

  Somewhere behind us a plastic shack cracked open like an egg-shell. Human cries were drowned in a whistling screech. Off to the right the Mercurian cavecat began to laugh like a crazy man.

  Slow, patient, animal hate, walled around them, waiting. The feel

  and smell of hate in the brute tank. I could feel and smell it now, in

  only it wasn't patient and waiting any more.

  time it has waited for was here. Gerty had set it free.

  Shannou said, very softly, 'Mother o' God, what are we going to

  do?'

  'Get back to the ship. Get back and get out of here!'

  I jumped. It was Mela's voice, sounding hard and ugly. Light spilling out of a sagging door made a faint silhouette of her in the rain. She held a blaster in her hand.

  Shannon snarled, 'Take off with half my gang stranded here? You go to hell!'

  Rockets blasted suddenly out on the landing field. Somebody had made it to Beamish's yacht and gone. The runabout followed it. The circus ship was still there, and the only one in Nahru.

  I said, 'We can't go. Not with a couple hundred credits' worth of animals running loose in the town.'

  'Get on to the ship,' said Malek. 'Gripes, if I knew how to fly I'd leave you here! Now move!'

  Shannon was almost crying. She started to rush Mela. I caught her and said, 'Sure. Sure we'll move. All of us. Look behind you!' 'I was weaned on that one. Move!'

  Well, it was her funeral.

  IT was almost ours, too. Ganymedian puffballs move fast. They had come out from between two shacks, skimming over the mud on their long white cilia. There were three of them, rolled up in balls about the size of my head. They didn't make any noise.

  They came up behind Mela. Two of them unrolled suddenly, whipping out into lean, fuzzy ropes about five feet long. They went around the Martian 'breed. The third one came straight at me.

  Mela made a noise that wasn't human and went down, the puffballs tightened around her, pulsing a little with the pleasure of digestion. Gow was on the other side of Mela, too far away, and unarmed.

  I jumped, and the mud tripped me. Shannon fell the other way. The puffball, strung out now like a fuzzy snake, paused a moment, not three inches from my face. I lay still on my belly, choking on my heart.

  Shannon moved, and it whipped down across her legs.

  She screamed. I could feel the poison from the thing eating into her. I got to my knees and she cursed me and raised something out of the mud. It was Mela's blaster. She fired, between her Feet.

  The puffball shrivelled to a little stinking wire and dropped away. Beccie said evenly,

  'That pays me off. Now it's all your party, Jix.'

  She fainted. Her legs were already swelling. Gow bent over her. 'She's gotta have the croaker, quick.'

  'You take her to the ship, Gow. If you can get there.'

  'Me? I'm the zoo-man. I oughta....'

  'Do I look like Superman, to carry that big lug?' I didn't know why it was so hard to talk. 'Get her there. Then round up everybody left at the ship. Get guns and ropes and torches and come back, quick!'

  She nodded and got Beccie across her shoulders. I gave her the blaster. Then I turned back. I knew where most of the circus gang would be – spread out among the bars.

  It was a lot darker, because now all the doors were closed, except two or three where the people hadn't lived to close them. It was quieter, too, because there's a limit to the noise a human throat can make. There was just the hot rain, and the soft jungle undertone of things padding and slithering in the mud, hunting.

  Up the street somewhere the cansins screamed, and another shack split open. Instantly the brute clamor went up from the dark alleys, answering. Animal legions from five different planets, led by a tiny creature in a cloak of green fire. And woman was the common enemy.

  A pair of Martian sand-tigers shot out into the street ahead of me. They were frolicking like kittens, playing with something dark and tattered. Then they saw me and dropped it, and came sliding on their bellies, their six powerful legs sucking in the mud.

  There was no place to go. I don't remember being particularly scared, but that wasn't because I was brave. It was sheer exhaustion. A guy can only take so much. Now I was just walking around, seeing and hearing, but not feeling anything inside. Like a guy that's coked to the ears, or punchy from a beating.

  I picked up a double handful of mud and slung it in their snarling pusses, and threw my head back and yelled.

  'Ha-a-y Rube!'

  A door at my left opened three inches, daggering the rain with yellow light.A voice said,

  'For gossakes get in here!'

  I picked up another handful of mud. The Martian cats were pawing the last load out of their eyes. I gave them more to play with. I guess they weren't very hungry, just then. I said, 'I'm going to get the cansins.'

  Just like that. I told you I was out on my feet. Clean nuts. The guy in the doorway thought so too.

  'Will you come in before you're too dead?'

  'And wait around for those big apes to crack the house open over my head? The hell with that.' More mud sploshed in the cat's faces. They were beginning to get sore. 'The rest of the critters are just following the cansins. Sort of a mopping-up brigade. Stop the cansins, and we can round up the others easy.'

  'Oh, sure,' said the woman. 'Any time before breakfast. Are you coming, pal, or do I shut this door again?'

  I don't know how it would have turned out. Probably I'd have wound up inside the cats. But one of 'em let out a shrill, nasty wail, the kind they give the trainer when they're challenging her to a finish fight, and somebody came shouldering out past the woman in the doorway.

  The door swung wide, so that there was plenty of light. The six-inch fangs on the Martian kitties were
a beautiful, shining white. The newcomer said something to the cats in a level undertone and came to me.

  It was Jaris, the Titan who works the cats. She's about half my height, metallic green in color, and faster on her feet than a rummy to the first drink. She looks like a walking barrel when she's folded up, and like nothing on earth when she isn't.

  She was unfolded then. She went up to the cats, light and dainty in the mud. They were crouching uneasily, coughing and snarling, wanting to rush her and not quite daring to.

  The female sprang.

  IV

  ALL I could see was a green blur in the rain. I heard the crisp, wicked smacks of Jaris's tentacles on the tiger. It flopped over in mid-air, buried its face in the mud and came up yowling, like your Uncle Minnie's cat when you stepped on its tail.

  It went away from there, fast, with its mate right behind it.

  Jaris chuckled softly. 'About the cansins,' she hissed. 'You had an idea?'

  Somewhere, quite close to us, there was the familiar sound of a plastic shack going to pieces. I remembered hearing blasters rip occasionally. But only Mela's hoods were armed with anything heavy enough to do any good, and I guessed most of them had beat it to Beamish's yacht. A cansin has a hell of a tough hide, and their vitality is something you wouldn't believe if you hadn't seen it.

  The familiar whistling screech went up, and the babel of human screams and the brute chorus from the rainy alleys. I think, right then, I began to get scared.The fear began to seep through my dopey calm, like pain in a new wound.

  I shuddered and said, 'No. No ideas.'

  There was a soft step in the mud behind me. I spun around,