"I know," she said hopelessly. "But I'm still afraid. Day and night, I'm afraid. There are worse things than death. Joe."
"But afraid of what?"
"I don't know. Fear itself, maybe. How do I know something won't suddenly be deadly? But I'm not afraid of death. Even with the baby, I wouldn't be afraid of wild beasts or plague or—anything that I could understand." She shook her shining head, slowly. "That's just it, Joe. I don't understand this planet. Nobody does. You don't.... You admit it yourself."
"Someday I'll know it."
"When? A thousand years from now? A thousand years of horror.... Joe, some of those things are so hideous I think I'll go mad when they appear."
"A deep-sea fish on Terra is hideous."
"Not this way. These things aren't right. They can't exist, but still there they are, and I can't forget them, and I never know when they'll appear next or what they'll be this time—" She checked herself, gulping.
"This is a very beautiful world," he said stubbornly. "The colors, the forms, the sounds—"
"None of them are right. Grass may look just as well when it's red or blue or yellow—but it shouldn't be all of them at different times. The sky is wrong, the trees are wrong. Those hideous lakes of life and the things in them, obscene—those voices singing out in the mists, nobody knows what they are—those images of things a hundred million years dead—and the faces, and the whisperings, and there's always something watching and waiting and moving just a little outside the corner of your eye.... Oh, Joe, Joe, this planet is haunted!"