VENUS HAS GREEN EYES By CARL SELWYN Space-trotting Flip Miller was prisoner of the lovely, cruel Venusian queen. It looked like star's end for the stubborn-jawed young Earthling until he remembered that women are women--on Earth or on Venus! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1940. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Charlie Mead, trapper, and Flip Miller, ex-prospector, started a forty-day drunk. Charlie just liked the idea. Flip had reasons. "In a few hours it'll be wetter'n a swamp duck's gullet," said Charlie, grinning behind his whiskers. "And darker'n West Pluto!" Charlie had been trapping otters here for five years and accepted the long nights as resignedly as the mud, the eternal fog and the heat. He poured another glass of _loku_, squinted at its blue sparkle in the tube-light. The gray mists swirled through the open door and the raw wind whistled through the rusty holes in the wall. Flip leaned back against the bundles of fur and held up four fingers. "To hell with the following," he counted, "I.M.C., radios, fuel tanks, and this soggy planet of yours, Venus!" * * * * * Noted for his wild-goose chases and wilder ideas, Flip Miller was always running into trouble. In fact it was just two months ago that the Space Patrol found him marooned on Pallas. He had one pint of air left when they found him, said he fell out of his plane while looking for diamonds. The Patrol took him to Mars. There, he immediately got in a poker game and made a fortune--and immediately got in another and lost it all. That is, all except a doubtful map of a Venusian xanite mine which nobody else would accept as stakes. Which was his reason for being here, if Flip ever needed a sane reason for being anywhere. For once however his screwball ventures panned out. "And I've been here all these years without knowing a billion dollars was in my back yard," said Charlie who considered the matter very funny. "Leastwise it was a billion till--" "Shut up, you blinking old veedle-chaser," said Flip. People always laughed at his misfortunes. Maybe it was because he did too.... Charlie's island was in the middle of the Black Swamp. The mine was a few hundred miles east. Fused with asphalt and deep in the mire, thousands of miles from nowhere, it was small wonder it had lain there unvisited since its original discovery. The map had passed through the hands of sundry dissolute, short-lived sourdoughs till the location became as dubious as other bar-room talk. It was Flip's luck that the map eventually got around to him. He was probably the only man in the system who would have believed in it.