Sue called out, "Sam what are you doing? Kill him, Sam!"
His lips spread into a little circle on my flesh and began sucking gently. There was no pain, just the throb of my jugular under his mouth. Now his long, soft, hairy arms became firmer around my neck. I jerked back and they gripped hard. A chill of panic stabbed me, and I could feel the taut flesh of my neck drawn more deeply into his puckered lips.
I tugged at him silently, not wishing to frighten Sue. He wouldn't come loose. In broad, noon-daylight I had a Sirian vampire in my arms, threatening to rupture my jugular vein and kill me within speaking distance of half a hundred people. I tried to level my voice. "Joe, would you come out here, please?"
He came at once, stared with a blank expression and said, "You have been drinking much tala?"
"Help me, dammit!" I said, holding my voice down. "I can't shake him loose. He's trying to—" The long, tight arm squeezed off my breath. In turn I tried to strangle him, but under the thick fur was a bony protection where there should have been soft neck.
"It does no good to kill the koodi," Joe said. "There is always another. Once they hold you tightly it is too late."
Sue thought differently. She came through the door like a hell-cat. Catching up her garden hoe she swung a blow that, had it missed Toots, would have crushed my skull. But Sue didn't miss. I fell on my back, and Toots let go, dead of a broken spine.
The "liquor control board" was Benson's best idea. Not only did it put tala on a legitimate basis, but it controlled our dealings with the natives. Bromley, the chemist, who was the original offender, was charged with manufacturing the wooden matches, and the medium of exchange was concentrated in the hands of the commissary "purchasing agent".
The reason that Benson sanctioned the controlled tala trade with the natives stemmed from our apparent failure to sterilize the males. There was, indeed, a huge crop of native babies, tiny little dolls that looked like spider monkeys and dropped from their mothers' breasts after little more than a week.