The Blue Behemoth
Copyright© 2024 by Leigh Brackett
Chapter 3
We scattered, all of us, hunting for a way out. There was only one door leading to the back, and it was stoppered tight with men cursing and fighting to get through. Gow was crouched in a corner by the splintered wall.
I pulled Bucky along, thinking we might get in back of the cansins and sneak out. I wondered what they wanted. And I wondered where in heck you could hide a thing as big as Gertrude and keep anybody from finding out.
Somebody screamed briefly. I saw one of the strange cansins toss the bartender aside like a dry twig. Gow rose up in front of me with a queer staring look in his eyes.
“Somethin’s wrong,” he said. “All wrong. I...” His mouth twitched. He turned sharply and started to scramble through the wrecked hall. Bucky and I were right on his heels. I think Melak and some of his lobbygows were crowding us, but nobody was thinking about things like that any more.
I knew what was eating Gow. The fear that had looked out of Kapper’s eyes. The fear that was riding me. Fear that had nothing to do with anything physical.
Bucky cursed and stumbled beside me. And suddenly the four cansins let go a tremendous thundering scream. The hair rose on my neck, and I turned to look. I just had to.
Gertrude had turned away from the booth. They stood, the four of them, their huge black shoulders touching, their crests like rows of petrified flame, staring at what Gertrude held in her arms.
It was Kapper’s body.
Slowly, with infinite gentleness, she began to strip him. He hung loose in the cradle of one great arm, his flesh showing blue-white against her blueness. Her free hand ripped his clothes away like things made of paper.
I don’t know why nobody tried to shoot the beasts after the first second. Sheer panic, I guess. We could have killed them all, then. But we just stood looking, fascinated by the slow, intent baring of Kapper’s body.
And the strange fear. It was on us all.
Kapper lay naked in her black arms. She raised him slowly over her head, her eyes blind green fires deep under bony brows. The others drew closer, shivering, and I could hear them whimper.
Strangers from the deep swamps with no stink of man on them. I thought of the Nahali woman laughing in the hot rain. Death from the deep swamps, because something had been taken, and they were angry.
There was a little black box strapped to Kapper’s thin white belly.
Gertrude shifted her hands a little. The blood hammered in my ears. I was sick. I didn’t want to look any more. I couldn’t help it. Bucky Shannon caught a hard, sobbing breath.
Gertrude broke Sam Kapper’s body in two.
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... ”
God knew what was loose in that town.
Bucky Shannon spoke beside me. We were still running, slipping and floundering in the mud, making toward the ship from sheer instinct. He gasped,
“We got to get those babies rounded up. Gow! Gow, you 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?” he asked slowly. “Gertrude let ‘em out. She wanted ‘em—to help her. They know it. They ain’t going back.”
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