"Look, Mommie!" he'd said. "Cappy's trees have moved. They're around the cabin, now." He'd been interested, not surprised. In the past year, Mazda had become Richard's home; only Earth could surprise him. But, Ted, come to think of it, had seemed withdrawn, his face a careful blank. And she? "Very pretty," she'd said, and stuffed the tag-end of fear back into the jammed, untidy mental pigeon-hole she used for all unpleasant thoughts. "Don't run too far ahead, dear." But now she had to know what Ted knew. "Tell me!" she said. "These tree-things--" "There've been _other_ deaths! How many?" "Sixteen. But I didn't want to tell you. Orders were to leave women and children home when we had that last Meeting, remember." "What did they say at the Meeting? Out with it, Ted!" "That--that the tree-things think!" "But that's ridiculous!" "Well, unfortunately, no. Look, I'm not trying to tell you that terrestrial trees think, too, nor even that they have a nervous system. They don't. But--well, on Earth, if you've ever touched a lighted match to the leaf of a sensitive plant like the mimosa, say--and I have--you've been struck by the speed with which _other_ leaves close up and droop. I mean, sure, we know that the leaves droop because certain cells exude water and nearby leaves feel the heat of the match. But the others don't, yet they droop, too. Nobody knows how it works ..." "But _that's_ just defensive!" "Sure. But _that's_ just on Earth!" "All right, dear. I won't argue any more. But I still don't understand. Go on about the Meeting." "Well, they said these tree-things both create and respond to the patterned electrical impulses of the mind. It's something like the way a doctor creates fantasies by applying a mild electric current to the right places on a patient's brain. In the year we've been here, the trees--or some of them--have learned to read from and transmit to our minds. The range, they say, is around fifty feet. But you have to be receptive--" "Receptive?" "Fearful. That's the condition. So I didn't want to tell you because you _must not_ let yourself become afraid, Naomi. We're clearing trees from the land, in certain areas. And it's their planet, after all. Fear is their weapon and fear can kill!" "You still--all you men--should have let us women know! What do you think we are? Besides, I don't really believe you. How can fear kill?" "Haven't you ever heard of a savage who gets in bad with his witch-doctor and is killed by magic? The savage is convinced, having seen or heard of other cases, that he _can_ be killed. The witch-doctor sees to it he's told he _will_ be killed. And sometimes the savage actually dies--" "From poison, I've always thought." "The poison of fear. The physical changes that accompany fear, magnified beyond belief by belief itself." "But how in the world could all this have affected Cappy? He wasn't a savage. And he was elderly, Ted. A bad heart, maybe. A stroke. Anything."