I can still hear the noise it made. The blood ran dark and sluggish down her arms. It worried me that Kapper's face didn't change expression. The little black box on his belly split with the rest of him. Something rose out of it. Something no bigger than my forefinger that carried a cold green blaze around it like a ball of St. Elmo's fire. Gertrude threw Kapper away. I heard the two flopping thuds of him hitting the floor. Some guy was down on his knees close to me. His lips moved. I don't know if he could remember his prayers. Somebody else was vomiting, hard. I wanted to, but my stomach felt frozen. The cold green fire had a shape inside it. I couldn't make it out clearly, except that it looked horribly human. It put out four thin green filaments. Don't ask me if they were physical things like tentacles, or just beams of light, or maybe thought. I don't know. Whatever they were, they worked. They connected with the four black, snaky heads of the female _cansins_. I felt the shock of them connecting with my own nerves. And it was like something had welded those four brutes together into one. They had been four. Separate, with hard outlines. Now they were one. One single interlocking entity. I guess it was just my being so scared and sick, but I thought I saw their outlines blur a little. Gow spoke suddenly. His voice was pretty loud, and calm. "That was it," he said, as though it was the only thing in the world that mattered. "They ain't complete by themselves. Like the _zurats_ back home on Mercury. They got a community brain. No wonder Gertrude was lonesome." His 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, all right. But outside, where we could breathe. Not in here, with the hugeness of the females smothering us, penned in with the last male _cansin_ in creation. I knew then why Kapper had broken, and why he hadn't told, in spite of the _selak_. The thing hadn't let him. And it had called to its kind, from the deep swamps and Buckhalter 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. "_She busted a lot of cages...._"