VENUS HATE

By JOHN McGREEVEY

She was joy. She was death. She was part of the Desert Rouge—and the desert blotted out her sins.

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories May 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

When the patrol found her it was impossible to say how long she had been in the humidi-hut alone. She was incoherent but, as Morrissey observed, most Venusians are.

Not that Selo was an ordinary Venusian woman. Even in her madness, as she babbled to the patrol about red dust devils and punctured thermiteens, there was a haunting beauty about her. Those deep-set violet eyes, the blue-black hair, the shapely, well-rounded body—easy to understand why an earthman might be hypnotized by such a woman.

At first she was passive. Their questions made no impression upon her. She nodded her head absently and gestured vaguely toward the vac-lock that led to the dust-tortured world outside. Once or twice, Morrissey thought he heard her mutter Yancey's name but he couldn't be sure. Her speech was a confused mixture of English and the indecipherable polyglot of Venus.

The simplest solution seemed to be to take Selo back to Athens where technicians could subdue her hysteria and perhaps eventually draw the whole tragic story from her paralyzed mind.

Morrissey wouldn't have admitted it to any of the members of his patrol, but he found the woman's manner disconcerting. She stared at the vac-lock as though she momentarily expected Yancey to appear there. So intense was the stare that if Morrissey hadn't seen Yancey Ritter's desiccated body himself, he could have believed that the woman had second sight.

Her passivity was abruptly shattered when they tried to get ready for the trip. She clawed and bit like a mad animal as they struggled to slip the plasti-shield over her shoulders.

"Let me die as Brian died!" she wailed. "I do not want to live without him. You cannot make me live."

"Hey, captain," a panting patrolman shouted, "what do we do with her?"

"Put that plasti-shield on her. Tie it if you have to. She's not to go through that vac-lock without it."

The frenzy that had seized Selo seemed to 

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