He watched the woman closely. There was too much brightness inside of her, too much nervousness, as though she were burning inside and she had to keep moving, laughing, insulting, enticing, because she was alive with that burning, and she couldn't stop. It wasn't the liquor, Caine knew, because they had just started that, a few minutes after he had brought the ship down. They were approximately four-hundred miles from the Colony, and in the wild stretches of this Venusian jungle, four-hundred miles was like the distance from day to night. Here was the dark, the strange, the weird and the wild. Kiitz birds screamed in the distance, and their sound was like the sound a man makes when he is touched by fire. A thick, muddy river went over a cliff above and behind them, hitting transparent rocks with a steady crashing noise that thrummed against Caine's ears like thunder in a distant sky. Teewh birds with black wings and curling yellow beaks came out of the sultry sky and skimmed the tips of the trees surrounding the clearing. They screeched when they dove, and they kept harmony with the unseen stationary kiitz birds. A chilling, nerve-racking harmony. * * * * * "Won't you have a drink with us?" said the woman, her teeth white between her smiling lips. "Thank you, no," Caine said. The woman tipped her head and watched him. Her eyes were very blue and they mocked Caine and taunted him, while her husband just sat there, drinking and watching his bare knees. This could go to pieces in a hurry, Caine decided, and he rubbed his palms against the arms of the chair. Because, on the other hand, the husband was too quiet, too brooding, too deliberately unseeing of the way his wife played with Caine, with her eyes and her movements. Her legs, Caine noticed, were the kind that would look well bare, as they were, or in nylon beneath a skirt, and she had rather full hips, although not too full. Her breasts, Caine could see, were well enough developed. She bent to rub a finger against her left knee. "Are there insects in this part of the jungle?" she asked Caine. "Some." "But no grith cats?" she said, straightening. "Not here," Caine said. "Just where we're going tomorrow?" "Yes." Caine looked back to the man. He was about fifty, Caine judged, at least twenty years older than the woman. His face was lean and sad, and there were thin lines traveling out from the corners of his eyes and mouth that contrasted with the youthful cut of his wiry hair. These two had come to Caine because his reputation in the Colony was established. He had been flying tourists into the jungle for more than three years, and while he could not predict all of this country, he at least knew the general traits of those sections within a reasonable radius of the Colony. "Did you ever shoot a grith cat?" the woman asked, looking at Caine over her glass. "No," said Caine. "But you've heard that they're pretty horrible and dangerous?"