pink young face, rather less pink than usual, bending over him.
Lehn’s hand came out awkwardly. “I’m sorry, MacIan. Thekla told me; I made him. I should have known.” His grey eyes were ashamed. MacIan smiled and gripped his hand with what strength the fever had left him.
“My own fault, boy. Forget it.”
Lehn sat down on the bed. “What did you do to the swamp-rats?” he demanded eagerly. “They all have a coating as though they’d been dipped in paraffin!”
MacIan chuckled. “In a way, they were. You know how they breathe; each skin cell forming a miniature electrolysis plant to extract oxygen from water. Well, it extracts hydrogen too, naturally, and the hydrogen is continually being given off, just as we give off carbon dioxide.
“Black smoke means soot, soot means carbon. Carbon plus hydrogen forms various waxy hydrocarbons. Wax is impervious to both water and air. So when the oily soot from the smoke united with the hydrogen exuded from the Nahali’s bodies, it sealed away the life-giving water from the skin-cells. They literally smothered to death, like an Earthly ant doused with powder.”
Lehn nodded. He was quiet for a long time, his eyes on the sick-bay’s well-scrubbed floor. At length, he said:
“My offer still goes, MacIan. Officer’s examinations. One mistake, an honest one, shouldn’t rob you of your life. You don’t even know that it would have made any difference if your decision had been the other way. Perhaps there was no way out.”
MacIan’s white head nodded on the pillow.
“Perhaps I will, Lehn. Something Thekla said set me thinking. He said he’d rather die on Mars than live another month in exile. I’m an exile too, Lehn, in a different way. Yes, I think I’ll try it. And if I fail again—” he shrugged and smiled—”there are always Nahali.”
It seemed for a minute after that as though he had gone to sleep. Then he murmured, so low that Lehn had to bend down to hear him:
“Thekla will hang after the court-martial. Can you see that they take him back to Mars, first?”
The Dragon-Queen of Jupiter
More feared than the deadly green snakes, the hideous red beetles of that outpost of Earth Empire, was the winged dragon-queen of Jupiter and her white Legions of Doom.
Tex stirred uneasily where he lay on the parapet, staring into the heavy, Jupiterian fog. The greasy moisture ran down the fort wall, lay rank on his lips. With a sigh for the hot, dry air of Texas, and a curse for the adventure-thirst that made him leave it, he shifted his short, steel-hard body and wrinkled his sandy-red brows in the never-ending effort to see.
A stifled cough turned his head. He whispered. “Hi, Breska.”
The Martian grinned and lay down beside him. His skin was wind-burned like Tex’s, his black eyes nested in wrinkles caused by squinting against sun and blowing dust.
For a second they were silent, feeling the desert like a bond between them. Then Breska, mastering his cough, grunted:
“They’re an hour late now. What’s the matter with ’em?”
Tex was worried, too. The regular dawn attack of the swamp-dwellers was long overdue.
“Reckon they’re thinking up some new tricks,” he said. “I sure wish our relief would get here. I could use a vacation.”
Breska’s teeth showed a cynical flash of white.
“If they don’t come soon, it won’t matter. At that, starving is pleasanter than beetle-bombs, or green snakes. Hey, Tex. Here comes the Skipper.”
Captain John Smith—Smith was a common name in the Volunteer Legion—crawled along the catwalk. There were new lines of strain on the officer’s gaunt face, and Tex’s uneasiness grew.
He knew that supplies were running low. Repairs were urgently needed. Wasn’t the relief goin’ to come at all?
But Captain Smith’s pleasant English voice was as calm as though he were discussing cricket-scores in a comfortable London club.
“Any sign of the beggars, Tex?”
“No, sir. But I got a feeling....”
“H’m. Yes. We all have. Well, keep a sharp....”
A scream cut him short. It came from below in the square compound. Tex shivered, craning down through the rusty netting covering the well.
He’d heard screams like that before.
A man ran across the greasy stones, tearing at something on his wrist. Other men ran to help him, the ragged remnant of the force that had marched into new Fort Washington three months before, the first garrison.
The tiny green snake on the man’s wrist grew incredibly. By the time the first men reached it, it had whipped a coil around its victim’s neck. Faster than the eye could follow, it shifted its fangs from wrist to throat.
The man seemed suddenly to go mad. He drew his knife and slashed at his comrades, screaming, keeping them at bay.
Then, abruptly, he collapsed. The green snake, now nearly ten feet long, whipped free and darted toward a drainage tunnel. Shouting men surrounded it, drawing rapid-fire pistols, but Captain Smith called out:
“Don’t waste your ammunition, men!”
Startled faces looked up. And in that second of respite, the snake coiled and butted its flat-nosed head against the grating.
In a shower of rust-flakes it fell outward, and the snake was gone like a streak of green fire.
Tex heard Breska cursing in a low undertone. A sudden silence had fallen on the compound. Men fingered the broken grating, white-faced as they realized what it meant. There would be no metal for repairs until the relief column came.
It was hard enough to bring bare necessities over the wild terrain. And air travel was impracticable due to the miles-thick clouds and magnetic vagaries. There would be no metal, no ammunition.
Tex swore. “Reckon I’ll never get used to those varmints, Captain. The rattlers back home was just kid’s toys.”
“Simple enough, really.” Captain Smith spoke absently, his gray eyes following the sag of the rusty netting below.
“The green snakes, like the planarians, decrease evenly in size with starvation. They also have a vastly accelerated metabolism. When they get food, which happens to be blood, they simply shoot out to their normal size. An injected venom causes their victims to fight off help until the snake has fed.”
Breska snarled. “Cute trick the swamp men thought up, starving those things and then slipping them in on us through the drain pipes. They’re so tiny you miss one, every once in a while.”
“And then you get that.” Tex nodded toward the corpse. “I wonder who the war-chief is. I’d sure like to get a look at him.”
“Yes,” said Captain Smith. “So would I.”
He turned to go, crawling below the parapet. You never knew what might come out of the fog at you, if you showed a target. The body was carried out to the incinerator as there was no ceremony about burials in this heat. A blob of white caught Tex’s eye as a face strained upward, watching the officer through the rusty netting.
Tex grunted. “There’s your countryman, Breska. I’d say he isn’t so sold on the idea of making Venus safe for colonists.”
“Oh, lay off him, Tex.” Breska was strangled briefly by a fit of coughing. “He’s just a kid, he’s homesick, and he’s got the wheezes, like me. This lowland air isn’t good for us. But just wait till we knock sense into these white devils and settle the high plateaus.”
If he finished, Tex didn’t hear him. The