Those were the days when the waves of hatred from the conquered peoples beat upon his country as the waves of a stormy sea beat upon crumbling cliffs. Leagues back of the battered lines, you could _feel_ that hate and vengeance as a tangible thing, a thing that thickened the air, that made breathing difficult and talking futile. And the spacecraft, the jets, the rockets, the damnable rockets, more every day and every night, and ten coming for every one shot down. Rocket ships raining hell from the sky, havoc and chaos and the end of hope. And then he knew that he had been hearing another sound, hearing it often and long at a time. It was a voice that shouted invective and ranted hatred and glorified the steel might of his planet and the destiny of a man and a people. It was his own voice, and it beat back the waves from the white shore, it stopped their wet encroachment upon this, his domain. It screamed back at the _baroons_ and they were silent. And at times he laughed, and the _marigees_ laughed. Sometimes, the queerly shaped Venusian trees talked too, but their voices were quieter. The trees were submissive, they were good subjects. Sometimes, fantastic thoughts went through his head. The race of trees, the pure race of trees that never interbred, that stood firm always. Someday the trees-- But that was just a dream, a fancy. More real were the _marigees_ and the _kifs_. They were the ones who persecuted him. There was the _marigee_ who would shriek "_All is lost!_" He had shot at it a hundred times with his needle gun, but always it flew away unharmed. Sometimes it did not even fly away. "_All is lost!_" At last he wasted no more needle darts. He stalked it to strangle it with his bare hands. That was better. On what might have been the thousandth try, he caught it and killed it, and there was warm blood on his hands and feathers were flying. That should have ended it, but it didn't. Now there were a dozen _marigees_ that screamed that all was lost. Perhaps there had been a dozen all along. Now he merely shook his fist at them or threw stones. The _kifs_, the Venusian equivalent of the Terran ant, stole his food. But that did not matter; there was plenty of food. There had been a cache of it in the shack, meant to restock a space-cruiser, and never used. The _kifs_ would not get at it until he opened a can, but then, unless he ate it all at once, they ate whatever he left. That did not matter. There were plenty of cans. And always fresh fruit from the jungle. Always in season, for there were no seasons here, except the rains. But the _kifs_ served a purpose for him. They kept him sane, by giving him something tangible, something inferior, to hate.