"She's alive as flesh-and-blood is alive," he said, glaring at me.
"Easy, Steve!"
I could see that I was going to have trouble with my stout-hearted buddy, Captain Stephen Claymore.
He could have stared at a mountain of gold unmoved. He could have knelt with a wry chuckle, and let a handful of diamonds trickle through his wiry, bronze-knuckled hands, in utter contempt for what diamonds could buy on Earth.
He could have thrown back his head and laughed, at wealth, at glory, at anything you want to name that men prize highly on Earth. But a beautiful woman was a temptation apart. A beautiful woman—
Steve grabbed my arm. "Look out, Tom!" he cried. "Watch it!"
The bullet whizzed past like a heat-maddened insect. Steve leapt back, and I flattened myself.
The attack was no great surprise. When people take up a new way of life, when they pull up stakes and go striding into the sunrise, strife paces after like a ravenous hound, red tongue lolling. When the first colonists from Earth swarmed into the crumbling Martian cities a good third of them ended up in stony desolation with their hearts drilled through.
They danced to riotous tunes, calling for louder music and stronger wine, and they fought savagely to set up little kingdoms of tyranny eighty feet square.
Everywhere anarchy reigned, and haggard-eyed, desperate men crouched behind smoke-blackened ruins and held off other men as greedy as themselves. They fought and died by dozens, by hundreds, their minds inflamed by the quickly-made discovery that the Martian cities were vast treasure troves.