lked too, but their voices were quieter. The trees were submissive,
they were good subjects.

Sometimes, fantastic thoughts went through his head. The race of trees,
the pure race of trees that never interbred, that stood firm always.
Someday the trees--

But that was just a dream, a fancy. More real were the _marigees_ and
the _kifs_. They were the ones who persecuted him. There was the
_marigee_ who would shriek "_All is lost!_" He had shot at it a hundred
times with his needle gun, but always it flew away unharmed. Sometimes
it did not even fly away.

"_All is lost!_"

At last he wasted no more needle darts. He stalked it to strangle it
with his bare hands. That was better. On what might have been the
thousandth try, he caught it and killed it, and there was warm blood on
his hands and feathers were flying.

That should have ended it, but it didn't. Now there were a dozen
_marigees_ that screamed that all was lost. Perhaps there had been a
dozen all along. Now he merely shook his fist at them or threw stones.

The _kifs_, the Venusian equivalent of the Terran ant, stole his food.
But that did not matter; there was plenty of food. There had been a
cache of it in the shack, meant to restock a space-cruiser, and never
used. The _kifs_ would not get at it until he opened a can, but then,
unless he ate it all at once, they ate whatever he left. That did not
matter. There were plenty of cans. And always fresh fruit from the
jungle. Always in season, for there were no seasons here, except the
rains.

But the _kifs_ served a purpose for him. They kept him sane, by giving
him something tangible, something inferior, to hate.

Oh, it wasn't hatred, at first. Mere annoyance. He killed them in a
routine sort of way at first. But they kept coming back. Always there
were _kifs_. In his larder, wherever he did it. In his bed. He sat the
legs of the cot in dishes of gasoline, but the _kifs_ still got in.
Perhaps they dropped from the ceiling, although he never caught them
doing it.

They bothered his sleep. He'd feel them running over him, even when he'd
spent an hour picking the bed clean of them by the light of the carbide
lantern. They scurried with tickling little feet and he could not
sleep.

He grew to hate them, and the very misery of his nights made his days
more tolerable by giving them an increasing purpose. A pogrom against
the _kifs_. He sought out their holes by patiently following one bearing
a bit of food