Dark Benediction

“Hoy!” Vogeli bellowed from across the pit. “Get back on that pick! Hoy, there! Get with it—”

Manue moved dizzily to recover the tool, saw patches of black swimming before him, sank weakly back to pant in shallow gasps. The nagging sting of the valves was a portable hell that he carried with him always. He fought an impulse to jerk them out of his flesh; if a valve came loose, he would bleed to death in a few minutes.

Vogeli came stamping along the heap of fresh earth and lumbered up to stand over the sagging Manue in the trench. He glared down at him for a moment, then nudged the back of his neck with a heavy boot. “Get to work!”

Manue looked up and moved his lips silently. His forehead glinted with moisture in the faint sun, although the temperature was far below freezing.

“Grab that pick and get started.”

“Can’t,” Manue gasped. “Hoses—hurt.”

Vogeli grumbled a curse and vaulted down into the trench beside him. “Unzip that jacket,” he ordered.

Weakly, Manue fumbled to obey, but the foreman knocked his hand aside and jerked the zipper down. Roughly he unbuttoned the Peruvian’s shirt, laying open the bare brown chest to the icy cold.

“No!—not the hoses, please!”

Vogeli took one of the thin tubes in his blunt fingers and leaned close to peer at the puffy, calloused nodule of irritated skin that formed around it where it entered the flesh. He touched the nodule lightly, causing the digger to whimper.

“No, please!”

“Stop snivelling!”

Vogeli laid his thumbs against the nodule and exerted a sudden pressure. There was slight popping sound as the skin slid back a fraction of an inch along the tube. Manue yelped and closed his eyes.

“Shut up! I know what I’m doing.” He repeated the process with the other tube. Then he seized both tubes in his hands and wiggled them slightly in and out, as if to ensure a proper resetting of the skin. The digger cried weakly and slumped in a dead faint.

When he awoke, he was in bed in the barracks, and a medic was painting the sore spots with a bright yellow solution that chilled his skin.

“Woke up, huh?” the medic grunted cheerfully. “How do you feel?”

“Maio!” he hissed.

“Stay in bed for the day, son. Keep your oxy up high. Make you feel better.”

The medic went away, but Vogeli lingered, smiling at him grimly from the doorway. “Don’t try goofing off tomorrow too.”

Manue hated the closed door with silent eyes, and listened until Vogeli’s footsteps left the building. Then, following the medic’s instructions, he turned his oxy to maximum, even though the faster flow of blood made the chest-valves ache. The sickness fled, to be replaced with a weary afterglow. Drowsiness came over him, and he slept.

Sleep was a dread black-robed phantom on Mars. Mars pressed the same incubus upon all newcomers to her soil: a nightmare of falling, falling, falling into bottomless space. It was the faint gravity, they said. that caused it. The body felt buoyed up, and the subconscious mind recalled down-going elevators, and diving aeroplanes, and a fall from a high cliff. It suggested these things in dreams, or if the dreamer’s oxy were set too low, it conjured up a nightmare of sinking slowly deeper, and deeper in cold, black water that filled the victim’s throat. Newcomerswere segregated in a separate barracks so that their nightly screams would not disturb the old-timers who had finally adjusted to Martian conditions.

But now, for the first time since his arrival, Manue slept soundly, airily, and felt borne up by beams of bright light.

When he awoke again, he lay clammy in the horrifying knowledge that he had not been breathing! It was so comfortable not to breathe. His chest stopped hurting because of the stillness of his rib-cage. He felt refreshed and alive. Peaceful sleep.

Suddenly he was breathing again in harsh gasps, and cursing himself for the lapse, and praying amid quiet tears as he visualized the wasted chest of a troffie.

“Heh heh!” wheezed an oldster who had come in to readjust the furnace in the rookie barracks. “You’ll get to be a Martian pretty soon, boy. I been here seven years. Look at me.”

Manue heard the gasping voice and shuddered; there was no need to look.

“You just as well not fight it. It’ll get you. Give in, make it easy on yourself. Go crazy if you don’t.”

“Stop it! Let me alone!”

“Sure. Just one thing. You wanna go home, you think. I went home. Came back. You will, too. They all do, ‘cept engineers. Know why?”

“Shut up!” Manue pulled himself erect on the cot and hissed anger at the old-timer, who was neither old nor young, but only withered by Mars. His head suggested that he might be around thirty-five, but his body was weak and old.

The veteran grinned. “Sorry,” he wheezed. “I’ll keep my mouth shut.” He hesitated, then extended his hand. “I’m Sam Donnell, mech-repairs.”

Manue still glowered at him. Donnell shrugged and dropped his hand.

“Just trying to be friends,” he muttered and walked away.