The Blue Behemoth
Copyright© 2024 by Leigh Brackett
Chapter 4
All I could see was a green blur in the rain. I heard the crisp, wicked smacks of Jarin’s tentacles on the tiger. It flopped over in mid-air, buried its face in the mud and came up yowling, like your Aunt Minnie’s cat when you stepped on its tail.
It went away from there, fast, with its mate right behind it.
Jarin chuckled softly. “About the cansins,” he hissed. “You had an idea?”
Somewhere, quite close to us, there was the familiar sound of a plastic shack going to pieces. I remembered hearing blasters rip occasionally. But only Melak’s hoods were armed with anything heavy enough to do any good, and I guessed most of them had beat it to Beamish’s yacht. A cansin has a hell of a tough hide, and their vitality is something you wouldn’t believe if you hadn’t seen it.
The familiar whistling screech went up, and the babel of human screams and the brute chorus from the rainy alleys. I think, right then, I began to get scared. The fear began to seep through my dopey calm, like pain in a new wound.
I shuddered and said, “No. No ideas.”
There was a soft step in the mud behind me. I spun around, sweating. Ahra the Nahali woman stood there, red-eyed and laughing.
“You are frightened,” she whispered.
I didn’t deny it.
“I can help you stop the cansins.” Her eyes glittered like wet rubies, and her teeth were white and sharp. “It may not work, and you may die. Will you try it?”
She was daring me. She was hardly more human than the brutes themselves, and she belonged with the rain and the hot indigo night.
I said, “You don’t want to help, Ahra. You want us to die.”
I could see the pale skin throbbing under her bony jaw. She laughed, soft alien laughter that made my back hair stir and prickle.
“You humans,” she whispered. “Trampling and spoiling. The middle swamps have suffered you, greedy after oil and plumes and ti. But you we can fight.”
She jerked her round, glistening head toward the sound of destruction. “The death from the deep swamps, no. You deserve to die, you humans. You went meddling with something too big even for your pride. But because the cansins killed my mate and our first young...”
She hunched up. I thought she was going to flop on her belly like a cayman in the mud. Her teeth gleamed, sharp and savage.
“Legend says the cansins were once the wisest race on Venus. They were worshipped as gods by the little pre-human creatures of the swamp edges. They were going to be the reasoning lords of a planet.
“But nature made a mistake. Perhaps some mutation that couldn’t be stopped. I don’t know. Anyway, the females grew until their one thought was to find enough food. The males tried to balance this. Most of their strength was in their minds, anyway. But they couldn’t.
“The cansins took to eating their worshippers. At the same time the number of eggs they laid grew smaller and smaller. Finally the swamp-edgers drove them out, back into the deep swamps.
“They’ve been there ever since, going farther and farther on the path of evolution, dwindling in numbers, always hungry, and hating the humans who robbed them of their future. Even us they hate, because we go erect and have speech. The females are not independent. The male controls the community mind—they must have unity to exist at all.
“If you could control the male...”
I thought of the little creature in the ball of green fire. I shivered, and the pit of my stomach pinched up. I said, “Yeah? How?”
She chuckled at me. “It may mean death. Will you risk it?”
I didn’t have to. I could beat it back to the ship, maybe even rescue some of the gang, with Jarin’s help. Then I thought about Bucky and the way he cried down my neck that night in the tank and what would happen to us if we didn’t get the animals rounded up. I thought—oh, hell, why does a guy ever do anything? I don’t know. Maybe I thought I’d never get across the field to the ship anyhow.
I said, “Spill it, you she-snake. What do I do?”
“Get Quern,” she said, and went off through the hot rain, back into the plastic shack. The door slammed shut. Jarin and I were alone in the dark.
I said, “Will you help me?”
“Of course.”
I looked down the street toward the landing field. I felt tired, suddenly. Gone in the knees and weak, and sick to vomiting with fear.
“Here comes Gow,” I said. “He’s got seven or eight guys with guns. Just keep the critters off us until we get through with the cansins, and try not to kill any more than you can help.”
Good old Jig, thinking about money even then. Gow came up. We talked a minute, just the things that had to be said, and then I asked,
“Anybody have an idea where Quern might be?”
“Yeah,” said Gow slowly. “He was in the ginmill next to the one we was in. Drunk. I heard him singin’ when I went by. I think the big apes wrecked it.”
We started off up the muddy street, more as though we’d been wound up to go somewhere and couldn’t stop than like men with a purpose. The cansins were close. Awful close. You could hear them sucking and slopping in the muck. The rain fell straight down, almost solid, and the air was thick and hot.
We did a lot of shouting. Some men came out of the shacks to join us, but nobody had seen Quern since the trouble started. We had trouble with the animals in the streets. The vapor snakes got one man, and an Ionian hru poisoned one guy so bad he died the next day. We had to kill a couple of big babies that wouldn’t scare off.
And we found the ginmill. Gow was right. It was wrecked, and there were things scattered around amongst the splinters. I was glad it was dark.
“Well,” I said, “that’s that. We’ll just have to do what we can with the blasters.” It wouldn’t be much. We didn’t carry any heavy artillery, and a cansin is awfully hard to stop.
“Any you guys wanta scram, do it now. The rest of you come on.”
I took a step. Something squirmed under my foot, squeaked, and began to curse in a voice like a katydid’s.
“My God,” I said. “It’s Quern.”
I picked him up. His rubbery little body was slick with mud. He spat and hiccoughed, and snarled,