He shrugged and kicked Thekla erect. “Back to the fort, scut,” he ordered, and laughed. The linked belts were fastened now around Thekla’s neck, the other end hooked to the muzzle of MacIan’s gun, so that the slightest rough pull would discharge it. “What if I stumble?” Thekla snarled, and MacIan answered, “You’d better not!”
Lehn was big and heavy, but somehow MacIan got him across his shoulders. And they started off.
*
The fringe of the swamp was in sight when MacIan’s brain became momentarily lucid. Another dose of quinine drove the mists back, so that the fort, some fifty yards away, assumed its proper focus. MacIan dropped Lehn on his back in the mud and stood looking, his hand ready on his gun.
The village swarmed with swamp-rats in the slow, watery dawn. They were ranged in a solid mass along the edges of the moat, and the fort’s guns were silent MacIan wondered why, until he saw that the dam that furnished power for the turbine had been broken down.
Thekla laughed silently. “My idea, MacIan. The Nahali would never have thought of it themselves. They can’t drown, you know. I showed them how to sneak into the reservoir, right under the fort’s guns, and stay under water, loosening the stones around the spillway. The pressure did the rest. Now there’s no power for the big guns, nor the conductor rods in the moat.”
He turned feral black eyes on MacIan. “You’ve made a fool of yourself. You can’t stop those swamp-rats from tearing the fort apart. You can’t stop me from getting away, after they’re through. You can’t stop Lehn from thinking what he does. You haven’t changed anything by these damned heroics!”
“Heroics!” said MacIan hoarsely, and laughed. “Maybe.” With sudden viciousness he threw the end of the linked belts over a low liha -branch, so that Thekla had to stand on tiptoe to keep from strangling. Then, staring blindly at the beleagured fort, he tried to beat sense out of his throbbing head.
“There was something,” he whispered. “Something I was saying back in the swamp. Something my mind was trying to tell me, only I was delirious. What was it, Thekla?”
The Martian was silent, the bloody grin set on his dark face. MacIan took him by the shoulders and shook him. “What was it?”
Thekla choked and struggled as the metal halter tightened. “Nothing, you fool! Nothing but Nahali and liha -trees.”
“ Liha -trees!” MacIan’s fever-bright eyes went to the great green pollen-pods hung among the broad leaves. He shivered, partly with chill, partly with exultation. And he began like a madman to strip Lehn and Thekla of their rubber coveralls.
Lehn’s, because it was larger, he tented over two low branches. Thekla’s he spread on the ground beneath. Then he tore down pod after pod from the liha -tree, breaking open the shells under the shelter of the improvised tent, pouring out the green powder on the groundcloth.
When he had a two-foot pile, he stood back and fired a bolt of electricity into the heart of it.
Thick, oily black smoke poured up, slowly at first, then faster and faster as the fire took hold. A sluggish breeze was blowing out of the swamp, drawn by the cooler uplands beyond the fort; it took the smoke and sent it rolling toward the packed and struggling mass on the earthworks.
Out on the battlefield, Nahali stiffened suddenly, fell tearing convulsively at their bodies. The beating rain washed the soot down onto them harder and harder, streaked it away, left a dull film over the reptilian skins, the scaly breast-plates. More and more of them fell as the smoke rolled thicker, fed by the blackened madman under the liha -tree, until only Legionnaires were left standing in its path, staring dumbly at the stricken swamp-rats.
The squirming bodies stilled in death. Hundreds more, out on the edges of the smoke, seeing their comrades die, fled back into the swamp. The earthworks were cleared. Ian MacIan gave one wild shout that carried clear to the fort. Then he collapsed, crouched shivering beside the unconscious Lehn, babbling incoherently.
Thekla, strained on tiptoe under the tree-branch, had stopped smiling.
The fever-mists rolled away at last. MacIan woke to see Lehn’s 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,
