fort.
Puffs of smoke burst around her but she was not hit. Low over the parapet she came, so that Tex saw the pupils of her pale-green eyes, the vital flow of muscles beneath pearly skin.
He fired, but his gun was empty.
She flung one hand high in derisive salute, and was gone. And Breska spoke softly behind Tex.
“You’re in command now. And there are just the fourteen of us left.”
*
Tex stood staring down at the dead and dying caught in the rusty net. He felt suddenly tired; so tired that just standing and looking seemed too much drain on his wasted strength.
He didn’t want to fight any more. He wanted to drink, to sleep, and forget.
There was only one possible end. His mouth and throat were dry with this strange new dryness, his thirst intensified a hundredfold. The swamp men had only to wait. In another week they could take the fort without losing a man.
Even with the reduced numbers of the defenders, this fiendish thing would make their remaining water supply inadequate. And then another thought struck him.
Suppose it stayed there, so that even if by some miracle the garrison held out, it made holding the fort impossible no matter how many men, or how much water there was.
The men were looking at him. Tex let the dead snake drop to the catwalk and vanish under a pall of scarlet beetles.
“Clean up this mess,” said Tex automatically. Breska’s black eyes were brilliant and very hard. Why didn’t the men move?
“Go on,” Tex snapped. “I’m ranking officer here now.”
The men turned to their task with a queer reluctance. One of them, a big scar-faced hulk with a mop of hair far redder far than Tex’s, stood long after the others had gone, watching him out of narrowed green eyes.
Tex went slowly down into the compound. There were no breaks in the net, but another few days of rust would finish them.
What was the use of fighting on? If they left now, they might get out alive. Headquarters could send more men, retake Fort Washington.
But Headquarters didn’t have many men. And the woman with the eyes like pale-green flames wouldn’t waste any time.
Some falling body had crushed a beetle-bomb caught in the net. The scarlet things were falling like drops of blood on Kuna’s body. Tex smiled crookedly. In a few seconds there’d be nothing left of the flesh Kuna had cherished so dearly.
And then Tex rubbed freckled hands over his tired blue eyes, wondering if he were at last delirious.
The beetles weren’t eating Kuna.
They swirled around him restlessly, scenting meat, but they didn’t touch him. His face showed parchment dry under the whorls of fog. And suddenly Tex understood.
“It’s because he’s dry. They won’t touch anything dry.”
Recklessly, he put his own hand down in the scarlet stream. It divided and flowed around it, disdaining the parched flesh.
Tex laughed, a brassy laugh with an edge of hysteria in it. Now that they were going to die anyway, they didn’t have to worry about beetle-bombs.
Feet, a lot of them, clumped up to where he knelt. The red-haired giant with the green eyes stood over him, the men in a sullen, hard-faced knot behind him.
The red-haired man, whose name was Bull, had a gun in his hand. He said gruffly,
“We’re leavin’, Tex.”
Tex got up. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. We figure it’s no use stayin’. Comin’ with us?”
Why not? It was his only chance for life. He had no stake in the colonies. He’d joined the Legion for adventure.
Then he looked at Kuna, and at Breska, thinking of all the people of two worlds who needed ground to grow food on, and water to grow it with. Something, perhaps the ancestor who had died in the Alamo, made him shake his sandy head.
“I reckon not,” he said. “And I reckon you ain’t, either.”
He was quick on the draw, but Bull had his gun already out. The bullet thundered against Tex’s skull. The world exploded into fiery darkness, through which he heard Breska say,
“Sure, Bull. Why should I stay here to die for nothing?”
Tex tried to cry out, but the blackness drowned him.
He came to lying on the catwalk. His head was bandaged. Frowning, he opened his eyes, blinking against the pain.
Breska hunched over the nearest gun, whistling softly through his teeth. “The Lone Prairee.” Tex stared incredulously.
“I—I thought you’d gone with the others.”
Breska grinned. “I just wasn’t as dumb as you. I hung behind till they were all outside, and then I barred the door. I’d seen you weren’t dead, and—well, this cough’s got me anyway, and I hate forced marches. They give me blisters.”
They grinned at each other. Tex said,
“We’re a couple of damn fools, but I reckon we’re stuck with it. Okay. Let’s see how long we can fool ’em.” He got up, gingerly. “The Skipper had some books in his quarters. Maybe one of ’em would tell what this dry stuff is.”
Breska coughed and nodded. “I’ll keep watch.”
Tex’s throat burned, but he was afraid to drink. If the water evaporated in his mouth as it had in Kuna’s....
He had to try. Not knowing was worse than knowing. A second later he stood with an empty cup in his hand, fighting down panic.
Half the water had vanished before he got the cup to his mouth. The rest never touched his tongue. Yet there was nothing to see, nothing to feel. Nothing but dryness.
He turned and ran for Captain Smith’s quarters.
Hertford’s Jungles of Jupiter , the most comprehensive work on a subject still almost unknown, lay between Kelland’s Field Tactics and Alice in Wonderland . Tex took it down, leafing through it as he climbed to the parapet.
“Here it is,” he said suddenly. “‘Dry Spots. These are fairly common phenomena in certain parts of the swamplands. Seemingly Nature’s method for preserving the free oxygen balance in the atmosphere, colonies of ultra-microscopic animalcules spring up, spreading apparently from spores carried by animals which blunder into the dry areas.
“‘These animalcules attach themselves to hosts, inanimate or otherwise, and absorb all water vapor or still water nearby, utilizing the hydrogen in some way not yet determined, and liberating free oxygen. They become dormant during the rainy season, apparently unable to cope with running water. They expand only within definite limits, and the life of each colony runs about three weeks, after which it vanishes.’”
“The rains start in about a week,” said Breska. “Our relief can’t get here under nine days. They can pick us off with snakes and beetle-bombs, or let us go crazy with thirst, let the first shower clear out the ani—the whatyoucallits, and move in. Then they can slaughter our boys when they come up, and have the whole of Jupiter clear.”
Tex told him about Kuna and the beetles. “The snakes probably won’t touch us, either.” He pounded a freckled fist on the stones. “If we could find some way to drink, and if the guns and the net didn’t rust, we might hold them off long enough.”
“‘If’,” grunted Breska. “If we were in heaven, we wouldn’t have to worry.”
*
The days that followed blurred into a daze of thirst and ceaseless watching. For easier defence, there was only one way down from the parapet through the net. They