Dark Benediction

Handell turned his back on the supervisor and called out to the others. “Don’t be a bunch of cowards! Don’t let him bully you!”

“You men sitting around Handell. Pull him down.”

There was no response. The men, including Manue, stared up at the wild-eyed Handell gloomily, but made no move to quiet him. A pair of burly foremen started through the gathering from its outskirts.

“Stop!” Kinley ordered. “Turpin, Schultz—get back. Let the men handle this themselves.”

Half a dozen others had joined the rebellious Handell. They were speaking in low tense tones among themselves, “For the last time, men! Sit down!”

The group turned and started grimly towards the cliff. Without reasoning why, Manue slid to his feet quietly as Handell came near him. “Come on, fellow, let’s get him,” the leader muttered.

The Peruvian’s fist chopped a short stroke to Handell’s jaw, and the dull thunk echoed across the clearing. The man crumpled, and Manue crouched over him like a hissing panther. “Get back!” he snapped at the others. “Or I’ll jerk his hoses out.”

One of the others cursed him.

“Want to fight, fellow?” the Peruvian wheezed. “I can jerk several hoses out before you drop me!”

They shuffled nervously for a moment.

The guy’s crazy!” one complained in a high voice. “Get back or he’ll kill Handell!”

They sidled away, moved aimlessly in the crowd, then sat down to escape attention. Manue sat beside the fallen man and gazed at the thinly smiling Kinley.

“Thank you, son. There’s a fool in every crowd.” He looked at his watch again. “Just a few minutes, men. Then you’ll feel the earth-tremor, and the explosion, and the wind. You can be proud of that wind, men. It’s new air for Mars, and you made it.”

“But we can’t breathe it!” hissed a troffie.

Kinley was silent for a long time, as if listening to the distance. “What man ever made his own salvation?” he murmured.

They packed up the public address amplifier and came down the hill to sit in the cab of a truck, waiting.

It came as an orange glow in the south, and the glow was quickly shrouded by an expanding white cloud. Then, minutes later the ground pulsed beneath them, quivered and shook. The quake subsided, but remained as a hint of vibration. Then after a long time, they heard the dull-throated thundering across the Martian desert. The roar continued steadily, grumbling and growling as it would do for several hundred years.

There was only a hushed murmur of awed voices from the crowd. When the wind came, some of them stood up and moved quietly back to the trucks, for now they could go back to a city for reassignment. There were other tasks to accomplish before their contracts were done.

But Manue Nanti still sat on the ground, his head sunk low, desperately trying to gasp a little of the wind he had made, the wind out of the ground, the wind of the future. But his lungs were clogged, and he could not drink of the racing wind. His big calloused hand clutched slowly at the ground, and he choked a brief sound like a sob.

A shadow fell over him. It was Kinley, come to offer his thanks for the quelling of Handell. But he said nothing for a moment as he watched Manue’s desperate Gethsemane.

“Some sow, others reap,” he said.

“Why?” the Peruvian choked.

The supervisor shrugged. “What’s the difference? But if you can’t be both, which would you rather be?”

Nanti looked up into the wind. He imagined a city to the south, a city built on tear-soaked ground, filled with people who had no ends beyond their culture, no goal but within their own society. It was a good sensible question: which would he rather be—sower or reaper?

Pride brought him slowly to his feet, and he eyed Kinley questioningly. The supervisor touched his shoulder. “Go on to the trucks.”

Nanti nodded and shuffled away. He had wanted something to work for, hadn’t he? Something more than the reasons Donnell had given. Well, he could smell a reason, even if he couldn’t breathe it.

Eight hundred years was a long time, but then—long time, big reason. The air smelled good, even with its clouds of boiling dust.

He knew now what Mars was—not a ten-thousand-a-year job, not a garbage can for surplus production. But an eight-century passion of human faith in the destiny of the race of Man. He paused short of the truck. He had wanted to travel, to see the sights of Earth, the handiwork of Nature and of history, the glorious places of his planet.

He stooped, and scooped up a handful of the red-brown soil, letting it sift slowly between his fingers. Here was Mars—his planet now. No more of Earth, not for Manue Nanti. He adjusted his aerator more comfortably and climbed into the waiting truck.

I, Dreamer

THERE WERE LIGHTS, objects, sounds; there were tender hands.