“The Crowded Colony” a 1950 short story by Jerome Bixby

Over at the Internet Archive, you can read or download the Fall 1950 issue of Planet Stories magazine, which contains “The Crowded Colony,” a new-to-me short story written by Jay B. Drexel (pseud. of Jerome Bixby). The plot revolves around conquerors on Mars. Apparently, colonization is a healthy thing, a noble mission in time and space. Here are the opening lines:

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...

According to the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, "The Crowded Colony" has never been reprinted in an anthology.

[via Tinkoo Valia of Variety SF]