Grabbing a branch, Johnny swung himself back to a spot where he could see the hunters. As he watched, more were arriving. About a mile away a battered hunting tank came lumbering through the sliding doors of the fifty-foot high concrete wall surrounding the colony. Outside those walls, Johnny knew, lay the murderous animal life of the jungle planet.
Every living thing on Venus attacked men. Not just the huge rhinosaurs and the horned river snakes, but even tiny scarlet apes and pigmy antelope. Johnny knew the colonists and hunters would never have come to such a savage place at all without the lure of tremendous wealth to be made from bouncing bears' claws.
Harder than diamonds and just as clear, these magical jewels shone soft blue in the night and were blindingly bright in the sun. But that wasn't the only reason claws were valuable. A tiny piece of claw, or even of the duller teeth, melted in thousands of tons of plastic, made that plastic tough enough to be used for the hulls of rocket ships. Men called it marvaplast.
With such a treasure beckoning, man could not stay away from Venus. Rockets came hurtling across space filled with hunters. Traders followed. After the traders came the colonists, led by Johnny's father and mother.
Johnny sighed again.
"Don't be so sad," Baba clicked. "We've been real lucky so far."
"I suppose so." Johnny had to admit they'd both been lucky. Baba had been lucky not to be killed as his mother and brother had been. And Johnny had been lucky to get Baba at all. If there had been any other way of raising the bear until his black baby claws turned blue, Johnny never would have gotten him. All other young marva that had been captured had died. They refused to eat or drink. They simply squatted down and whimpered piteously until they died of what seemed to be loneliness and heartbreak.
When Baba had been captured, Mrs. Watson brought him home, hoping to save his life. Two-year-old Virgil Dare, as Johnny was called then, was fascinated.
"Ba-ba," he had cried, trying to say bear, and had thrown his arms around it. Surprisingly, the little bear had stopped whimpering and had hugged Johnny back. A few minutes later it had eaten some diamond-wood nuts.
After a week, the colonists had decided that the little bear would live and he was taken away and put in a small diamond-wood cage for safe keeping. The little bear promptly refused to eat and almost died, whimpering over and over a sound that was just like "Johnny, Johnny, Johnny." It was the only sound he could make beside the clicking noise. He had to be sent back to the little boy. From then on Virgil Dare was called Johnny.