“A little slip of the pen,” Blackey sighed. “You can’t win them all.”
He dodged the kick Bill swung at him, then waited patiently while the MPs beat Bill senseless with their clubs and dragged him aboard the ship.
III
Veneria … a fog-shrouded world-of untold horrors, creeping in its orbit around the ghoulish green star Hernia like some repellent heavenly trespasser newly rose from the nethermost pit. What secrets lie beneath the eternal mists? What nameless monsters undulate and gibber in its dank tarns and bottomless black lagoons? Faced by the unspeakable terrors of this planet men go mad rather than face up to the faceless. Veneria … swamp world, the lair of the hideous and unimaginable Venians . .
It was hot and it was damp and it stank. The wood of the newly constructed barracks was already soft and rotting away. You took your shoes off, and before they hit the floor fungus was growing out of them. Once inside the compound their chains were removed, since there was no place for laborcamp prisoners to escape to, and Bill wheeled around looking for Blackey, the fingers of Tembo’s arm snapping like hungry jaws. Then he remembered that Blackey had spoken to one of the guards as they were leaving the ship, had slipped him something, and a little while later had been unlocked from the line and led away. By now he would be running the file section and by tomorrow he would be living in the nurses’s quarters. Bill sighed, let the whole thing slip out of his mind and vanish, since it was just one more antagonistic factor that he had no control over, and dropped down onto the nearest bunk. Instantly a vine flashed up from a crack in the floor, whipped four times around the bunk lashing him securely to it, then plunged tendrils into his leg and began to drink his blood.
“Grrrrk … !” Bill croaked against the pressure of a green loop that tightened around his throat.
“Never lie down without you got a knife in your hand,” a thin, yellowish sergeant said as he passed by, and severed the vine, with his own knife, where it emerged from the floorboards.
“Thanks, Sarge,” Bill said, stripping off the coils and throwing them out the window.
The sergeant suddenly began vibrating like a plucked string and dropped onto the foot of Bill’s bunk. “P-pocket … shirt … p-p-pills …” he stuttered through chattering teeth. Bill pulled a plastic box of pills out of the sergeant’s pocket and forced some of them into his mouth. The vibrations stopped, and the man sagged back against the wall, gaunter and yellower and streaming with sweat.
“Jaundice and swamp fever and galloping filariasis, never know when an attack will hit me, that’s why they can’t send me back to combat, I can’t hold a gun. Me, Master Sergeant Ferkel, the best damned flamethrower in Kirjassoff’s Kutthroats, and they have me playing nursemaid in a prison labor camp. So you think that bugs me? It does not bug me, it makes me happy, and the only thing that would make me happier would be shipping off this cesspool-planet at once.”
“Do you think alcohol will hurt your condition?” Bill asked, passing over a bottle of cough syrup. “It’s kind of rough here?”
“Not only won’t hurt it, but it will …” There was a deep gurgling, and when the sergeant spoke again he was hoarser but stronger. “Rough is not the word for it. Fighting the Chingers is bad enough, but on this planet they have the natives, the Venians, on their side. These Venians look like moldy newts, and they got just maybe enough I.Q. to hold a gun and pull the trigger, but it is their planet and they are but murder out there in the swamps. They hide under the mud and they swim under the water and they swing from the trees and the whole planet is thick with them. They got no sources of supply, no army divisions, no organizations, they just fight. If one dies the others eat him. If one is wounded in the leg the others eat the leg and he grows a new one. If one of them runs out of ammunition or poison darts or whatever he just swims back a hundred miles to base, loads up, and back to battle. We have been fighting here for three years, and we now control one hundred square miles of territory.”