several quarts of water in vain attempts to drink. Then they gave it up. The final irony of it made Tex laugh.
“Here we are, being noble till it hurts, and it won’t matter a damn. The Skipper was right. It’s the rust that’ll lose us Venus in the end—that, and these Dry Spots.”
Food made thirst greater. They stopped eating. They became mere skeletons, moving feebly in sweat-box heat. Breska stopped coughing.
“It’s breathing dry air,” he said, in a croaking whisper. “It’s so funny I could laugh.”
A scarlet beetle crawled over Tex’s face where he lay beside the Martian on the catwalk. He brushed it off, dragging weak fingers across his forehead. His skin was dry, but not as dry as he remembered it after windy days on the prairie.
“Funny it hasn’t taken more oil out of my skin.” He struggled suddenly to a sitting position. “Oil! It might work. Oh, God, let it work! It must!”
Breska stared at him out of sunken eyes as he half fell down the steps. Then a sound overhead brought the Martian’s gaze upward.
“A scout, Tex! They’ll attack!”
Tex didn’t hear him. His whole being was centered on one thing—the thing that would mean the difference between life and death.
Dimly, as he staggered into the room where the oil was kept, Tex heard a growing thunder of wings. He groaned. If Breska could only hold out for a moment.
It took all his strength to turn the spigot of the oil drum. It was empty. All the stuff had been used to burn bodies. Almost crying, Tex crawled to the next one, and the next. It was the fourth drum that yielded black, viscous fluid.
Forcing stiff lips apart, Tex drank.
If there’d been anything in him, he’d have vomited. The vile stuff coated lips, tongue, throat. Outside, Breska’s gun cut in sharply. Tex dragged himself to the water tank.
“Running water,” he thought. Tilting his head up under the spigot, he turned the tap. Water splashed out. Some of it hit his skin and vanished. But the rest ran down his oil-filmed throat. He felt it, warm and brackish and wonderful, in his stomach.
He laughed, and let go a cracked rebel yell. Then he turned and lurched back outside, toward the steps.
The net sagged to the weight of white-haired warriors and roaring lizards. Breska’s gun choked and stammered into silence. Tex groaned in utter agony.
It was too late. The rust had beaten them.
His freckled, oil-smeared face tightened grimly. Drawing his gun, he charged the steps.
“Where the hell did you go?” snarled Breska. “The ammo belt jammed.” He grabbed for the other gun set in the narrow gap.
Then it wasn’t rust! And Tex realized something else. There were no rust flakes falling from the net.
Something had stopped the rusting. Before, his physical anguish had been too great for him to see that the net strands grew no thinner, the gun-barrels no rustier.
Scraps of the explanation shot through Tex’s mind. Breska’s cough stopping because the air was dried before it reached his lungs. Dry stone. Dry clothing.
Dry metal! The water-eating organisms kept the surface dry. There could be no rust.
“We’ve licked ’em, Breska! By God, we’ve licked ’em!” He shouldered the Martian out of the way, gripped the triggers of the gun. Shouting over the din, he told Breska how to drink, sent him lurching down the steps. He could hold the gap alone for a few minutes.
Looking up, Tex found her, swooping low over the fight, her silver hair flying in the wind. Tex shouted at her.
“You did it! You outsmarted yourself, lady. You showed us the way!”
Scientists could find out how to harness the Dry Spots to keep off the rust, and still let the soldiers drink.
And some day the swamps would be drained, and men and women would find new wealth, new life, new horizons here on Jupiter.
Breska came back, grinning, and fought the jam out of the gun. White bodies began to pile up, mixed with the saurian carcasses of their war-dogs. And presently the notes of the war-chief’s horn drifted down, and the attackers faded back into the swamps.
And suddenly, wheeling her mount away from the others, the warrior woman swooped low over the parapet. Tex held his fire. For a moment he thought she was going to dash her lizard into them. Then, at the last second, she pulled him up in a thundering climb.
Her face was a cut-pearl mask of fury, but her pale-green eyes held doubt, the beginning of an awed fear. Then she was gone, bent low over her mount, her silver hair hiding her face.
Breska watched her go. “For Mars,” he said softly. Then, pounding Tex on the chest until he winced.
Two voices, cracked, harsh, and unmusical, drifted after the retreating form of the white-haired war-chief.
“Oh, bury us not on the lone praire-e-e....”
A World is Born
The first ripples of blue fire touched Dio’s men. Bolts of it fastened on gun-butts, and knuckles. Men screamed and fell. Jill cried out as he tore silver ornaments from her dress.
Mel Gray flung down his hoe with a sudden tigerish fierceness and stood erect. Tom Ward, working beside him, glanced at Gray’s Indianesque profile, the youth of it hardened by war and the hells of the Eros prison blocks.
A quick flash of satisfaction crossed Ward’s dark eyes. Then he grinned and said mockingly.
“Hell of a place to spend the rest of your life, ain’t it?”
Mel Gray stared with slitted blue eyes down the valley. The huge sun of Mercury seared his naked body. Sweat channeled the dust on his skin. His throat ached with thirst. And the bitter landscape mocked him more than Wade’s dark face.
“The rest of my life,” he repeated softly. “The rest of my life!”
He was twenty-eight.
Wade spat in the damp black earth. “You ought to be glad--helping the unfortunate, building a haven for the derelict....”
“Shut up!” Fury rose in Gray, hotter than the boiling springs that ran from the Sunside to water the valleys. He hated Mercury. He hated John Moulton and his daughter Jill, who had conceived this plan of building a new world for the destitute and desperate veterans of the Second Interplanetary War.
“I’ve had enough ‘unselfish service’,” he whispered. “I’m serving myself from now on.”
Escape. That was all he wanted. Escape from these stifling valleys, from the snarl of the wind in the barren crags that towered higher than Everest into airless space. Escape from the surveillance of the twenty guards, the forced companionship of the ninety-nine other veteran-convicts.
Wade poked at the furrows between the sturdy hybrid tubers. “It ain’t possible, kid. Not even for ‘Duke’ Gray, the ‘light-fingered genius who held the Interstellar Police at a standstill for five years’.” He laughed. “I read your publicity.”
Gray stroked slow, earth-stained fingers over his sleek cap of yellow hair. “You think so?” he asked softly.
Dio the Martian came down the furrow, his lean, wiry figure silhouetted against the upper panorama of the valley; the neat rows of vegetables and the green riot of Venusian wheat, dotted with toiling men and their friendly guards.
Dio’s green, narrowed eyes studied Gray’s hard face.
“What’s the matter, Gray? Trying to start something?”
“Suppose I were?” asked Gray silkily. Dio was the unofficial leader of the convict-veterans.