THE CROWDED COLONY By Jay B. Drexel Oh, how decadent these Martians were! Burke, Barnes and the rest of the Conquerors laughed loudly at the dusty shrines, those crude and homely temples in the desert. More softly laughed the Martians, who dreamed of laughing last.... [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1950. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] When the Martians had built the village of Kinkaaka there had been water in the canal, a cool, level sweep of green water from the northern icecap. Now there was none, and Kinkaaka clung to the upper swell of the bank and curved its staggered residential terraces like tragic brows over the long slope of sand and clay, the dead wall baked criss-cross by the sun, that bore at its deep juncture with the opposite bank the pitiful, straggling trench cut by Mars' last moving waters an untold time ago. Kinkaaka's other side, away from the canal, was coated rust-red by the desert winds that came with sunset. Here were the crumbling market arenas of the ancient traders, the great mounds of underground warehouses long empty; and here now, with Mars' conquest, was the "native" section into whose sandstone huts the village's few inhabitants were shoved firmly, but not brutally, to rest when they weren't needed to work. Like most of the Conquerors, Jack Burke and his companions preferred the canal side of Kinkaaka. There they could sit in the stone-cool shade of the Expedition Restaurant and look through the broad glassless windows down the sun-scalded canal bank, across to the opposite slope with its dotting of nomad caves, the desert beyond and the red-tainted blue of the sky. "Happy day we came to Mars," said Jack Burke. He picked up his stone mug and drank with a shudder. He was big and brown, typical of the Conquerors, and spoke, as they all did when within earshot of natives, the Martian dialect which the Linguistics Squad had translated and reasoned to completion from the pages of script found in the metal cairn, half-buried in desert sands and upon which they had conveniently almost landed their space-cube upon arrival two days ago. That was one of the dicta of the Psychologists: Always speak the native tongue, and learn it preferably from graphics or a specimen before contacting the native collective. There were other policies as strange, or more so; but the Psychologists, off-world in the home-ship and poring over the translations beamed to them, must know what they were doing. Barnes looked up in quick response to Burke's sarcasm. Of the three Conquerors at this table, he was the smallest. He fiddled nervously with his one-pronged fork, turning a piece of badly cooked _huj_ over and over, not looking at it.