Savage Galahad

A lost woman wanders the acid-rain-soaked swamps of Venus, her survival chances dwindling with each passing hour. Then she encounters him: a creature out of nightmare, something with wings that slice the sulfurous air and senses that perceive the world in ways human nervous systems cannot comprehend. He is called Galahad by the only other being who knows he exists, though the name is both prayer and paradox. She sees something beneath the savagery. He may be seeing the same in her. In the killing fields of an alien world, two lonely intelligences reach across an impossible gulf, each the other's last contact with anything resembling home. This is mid-century pulp science fiction at its most unexpectedly tender: a story that asks what happens when the monster and the lost soul find each other in the dark.