broken. “Dismissed,” said Captain Smith, and strolled off to his quarters. Tex turned to Breska.
The Martian, his leathery dark face set, was gripping the arms of his young countryman, the only other Martian in the fort.
“Listen,” hissed Breska, his teeth showing white like a dog’s fangs. “Get hold of yourself! If you don’t, you’ll get into trouble.”
Kuna trembled, his wide black eyes watching the smoke from the bodies roll up into the fog. His skin lacked the leathery burn of Breska’s. Tex guessed that he came from one of the Canal cities, where things were softer.
“I don’t want to die,” said Kuna softly. “I don’t want to die in this rotten fog.”
“Take it easy, kid.” Tex rubbed the sandy-red stubble on his chin and grinned. “The Skipper’ll get us through okay. He’s aces.”
“Maybe.” Kuna’s eyes wandered round to Tex. “But why should I take the chance?”
He was shaken suddenly by a fit of coughing. When he spoke again, his voice had risen and grown tight as a violin string.
“Why should I stay here and cough my guts out for something that will never be anyway?”
“Because,” said Breska grimly, “on Mars there are men and women breaking their backs and their hearts, to get enough bread out of the deserts. You’re a city man, Kuna. Have you ever seen the famines that sweep the drylands? Have you ever seen men with their ribs cutting through the skin? Women and children with faces like skulls?
“That’s why I’m here, coughing my guts out in this stinking fog. Because people need land to grow food on, and water to grow it with.”
Kuna’s dark eyes rolled, and Tex frowned. He’d seen that same starry look in the eyes of cattle on the verge of a stampede.
“What’s the bellyache?” he said sharply. “You volunteered, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t know what it meant,” Kuna whispered, and coughed. “I’ll die if I stay here. I don’t want to die!”
“What,” Breska said gently, “are you going to do about it?”
Kuna smiled. “She was beautiful, wasn’t she, Tex?”
The Texan started. “I reckon she was, kid. What of it?”
“You have a lock of her hair. I saw you pick it from the net. The net’ll go out soon, like the grating did. Then there won’t be anything to keep the snakes and beetles off of us. She’ll sit up there and watch us die, and laugh.
“But I won’t die, I tell you! I won’t!”
He shuddered in Breska’s hands, and began to laugh. The laugh rose to a thin, high scream like the wailing of a panther. Breska hit him accurately on the point of the jaw.
“Cafard,” he grunted, as some of the men came running. “He’ll come round all right.”
He dragged Kuna to the dormitory, and came back doubled up with coughing from the exertion. Tex saw the pain in his dark face.
“Say,” he murmured, “you’d better ask for leave when the relief gets here.”
“ If it gets here,” gasped the Martian. “That attack at Fort Nelson was just a feint to draw off our reinforcements.”
Tex nodded. “Even if the varmints broke through there, they’d be stopped by French River and the broken hills beyond it.”
A map of Fort Washington’s position formed itself in his mind; the stone blockhouse commanding a narrow tongue of land between strips of impassable swamp, barring the way into the valley. The valley led back into the uplands, splitting so that one arm ran parallel to the swamps for many miles.
To fierce and active men like the swamp-dwellers, it would be no trick to swarm down that valley, take Fort Albert and Fort George by surprise in a rear attack, and leave a gap in the frontier defenses that could never be closed in time.
And then hordes of white-haired warriors would swarm out, led by that beautiful fury on the winged lizard, rouse the more lethargic pastoral tribes against the colonists, and sweep outland Peoples from the face of Venus.
“They could do it, too,” Tex muttered. “They outnumber us a thousand to one.”
“And,” added Breska viciously, “the lousy taxpayers won’t even give us decent equipment to fight with.”
Tex grinned. “Armies are always step-children. I guess the sheep just never did like the goats, anyhow.” He shrugged. “Better keep an eye on Kuna. He might try something.”
“What could he do? If he deserts, they’ll catch him trying to skip out, if the savages don’t get him first. He won’t try it.”
But in the morning Kuna was gone, and the lock of silver hair in Tex’s pocket was gone with him.
*
Five hot, steaming days dragged by. The water sank lower and lower in the tank. Flakes of rust dropped from every metal surface at the slightest touch.
Tex squatted on a slimy block of stone in the compound, trying to forget hunger and thirst in the task of sewing a patch on his pants. Fog gathered in droplets on the reddish hairs of his naked legs, covered his face with a greasy patina.
Breska crouched beside him, coughing in deep, slow spasms. Out under the sagging net, men were listlessly washing underwear in a tub of boiled swamp water. The stuff held some chemical that caused a stubborn sickness no matter what you did to it.
Tex looked at it thirstily. “Boy!” he muttered. “What I wouldn’t give for just one glass of ice water!”
“Shut up,” growled Breska. “At least, I’ve quit being hungry.”
He coughed, his dark face twisted in pain. Tex sighed, trying to ignore the hunger that chewed his own belly like a prisoned wolf.
Nine more days to go. Food and water cut to the barest minimum. Gun parts rusting through all the grease they could put on. The strands of the net were perilously thin. Even the needle in his hand was rusted so that it tore the cloth.
Of the thirty-one men left after Kuna deserted, they had lost seven; four by green snakes slipped in through broken drain gratings, three by beetle-bombs tossed over the parapet. There had been no further attacks. In the dark, fog-wrapped nights, swamp men smeared with black mud crept silently under the walls, delivered their messages of death, and vanished.
In spite of the heat, Tex shivered. How much longer would this silent war go on? The swamp-men had to clear the fort before the relief column came. Where was Kuna, and why had he stolen that lock of hair? And what scheme was the savage beauty who led these devils hatching out?
Water slopped in the tub. Somebody cursed because the underwear never dried in this lousy climate. The heat of the hidden sun seeped down in stifling waves.
And suddenly a guard on the parapet yelled.
“Something
