Attempting to make Venus safe for colonists turns out to be a very dangerous job for Tex and his partner Breska. excerpt Tex stirred uneasily where he lay on the parapet, staring into the heavy, Venusian 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..."
Author
Leigh Brackett was born on December 7, 1915 in Los Angeles, and raised near Santa Monica. Having spent her youth as an athletic tom-boy - playing volleyball and reading stories by Edgar Rice Burroughs and H Rider Haggard - she began writing fantastic adventures of her own. Several of these early efforts were read by Henry Kuttner, who critiqued her stories and introduced her to the SF personalities then living in California, including Robert Heinlein, Julius Schwartz, Jack Williamson, Edmond Hamilton - and another aspiring writer, Ray Bradbury. In 1944, based on the hard-boiled dialogue in her first novel, No Good From a Corpse, producer/director Howard Hawks hired Brackett to collaborate with William Faulkner on the screenplay of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep. Brackett maintained an on-again/off-again relationship with Hollywood for the remainder of her life. Between writing screenplays for such films as Rio Bravo, El Dorado, Hatari!, and The Long Goodbye, she produced novels such as the classic The Long Tomorrow (1955) and the Spur Award-winning Western, Follow the Free Wind (1963). Brackett married Edmond Hamilton on New Year's Eve in 1946, and the couple maintained homes in the high-desert of California and the rural farmland of Kinsman, Ohio. Just weeks before her death on March 17, 1978, she turned in the first draft screenplay for The Empire Strikes Back and the film was posthumously dedicated to her.
