Robert Moore Williams

“ He had never had a girl. It seemed to him that fate was playing him a cruel joke to try to give him one under these conditions, in a hole in the sand with wild Martian tribesmen surrounding him. He mentally estimated the distance to the desert buggy, considered their chances of making this trip and arriving alive. He was shaking his head at his own estimate when the Rangeley burped again.
"I missed!" the girl said. "Oh! Here he comes!"
McLean shoved her away from the sight. The Martian was moving toward them, fast. Instead of a gun, he had a spear.
"You didn't miss," the roustabout said. ”

“ The dirt on her nose made her look human. At this moment, the eyes had anger in them. Back of the anger were unshed tears.
"Did you hear what I said?" she repeated.
McLean shifted his long body so that it lay a little lower in the depression in the sand. "I guess you came here because you're an archeologist and you're getting paid to examine ruins. I came here because I'm a roustabout who is supposed to be able to do anything, which is what I'm getting paid for." He paused and removed an offending grain of sand from his right eyelid. "Dying is not much," he continued. ”

“ The dur-steel body of the car would stop the beam from that needle gun. How the hell does it happen that wild tribesmen, with no science and no industry, living here in a desert, have a weapon like that needle ray gun?"
"When they built their city there, they weren't desert tribesmen," the girl explained. "They were going somewhere, then, and they had science and at least light industry, and skilled workers. When they came back to the desert, they left everything behind them except their weapons. A primitive will always choose a weapon over anything else. ”

“ The mud flats didn't stop us. We crawled off of them and on to the high ground and into the forests and overran a planet. The atom bomb didn't hold us up too long, even when we got to using it on each other. ”