She yelped and darted back, fleeing frantically for the front. A boa constrictor lay coiled in the hall; it slithered toward her. She screamed again and raced to-ward the stairway.
She made it to the top and looked back. The living room was filling slowly with murky water. She rushed shrieking into the bedroom and bolted the door.
She smelled smoke. Her dress was on fire! The flames licked up, searing her skin.
She tore at it madly, and got it off, but her slip was afire. She ripped it away, scooped up the flaming clothing on a transom hook, opened the screen, and dropped them out the window. Flames still licked about her, and she rolled up in the bed-clothing to snuff them out.
Quiet laughter.
She lay sobbing in hysterical desperation. He was just down the street now, coming rapidly up the walk. A car whisked slowly past. He felt her terrified despair and pitied her. The torment ceased.
She stayed there, panting for a moment, summoning spirit. He was nearing the intersection just two blocks south, and she could hear the rapid traffic with his ears.
Suddenly she clenched her eyes closed and gritted her teeth. He was stepping off the curb, walking across —
She imagined a fire engine thundering toward her like a juggernaut, rumbling and wailing. She imagined another car racing out into the intersection, with herself caught in the crossfire. She imagined a woman screaming, “Look out, Mister!”
And then she was caught in his own responding fright, and it was easier to imagine. He was bolting for the other corner. She conjured a third car from another direction, brought it lunging at him to avoid the impending wreck. He staggered away from the phantom cars and screamed.
A real car confused the scene.
She echoed his scream. There was a moment of rending pain, and then the vision was gone. Brakes were still yowling two blocks away. Someone was running down the sidewalk. A part of her mind had heard the crashing thud. She was desperately sick.
And a sudden sense of complete aloneness told her that Grearly was dead. A siren was approaching out of the distance.
VOICES from the sidewalk: “…just threw a fit in the middle of the street… running around like crazy and hollering… it was a delivery truck… crushed his skull… nobody else hurt…”
After the street returned to normal, she arose and went to get a drink of water. But she stood staring at her sick white face in the mirror. There were crow’s feet forming at the corners of her eyes, and her skin was growing tired, almost middle-aged.
It was funny that she should notice that now, at this strange moment. She had just killed a man in self- defense. And no one would believe it if she told the truth. There was no cause for guilt.
Was there?
Frank would be back soon, and everything would be the same again: peace, security, nice kids, nice home, nice husband. Just the way it always had been.
But something was already different. An emptiness. A loneliness of the mind that she had never before felt. She kept looking around to see if the lights hadn’t gone dim, or the clock stopped ticking, or the faucet stopped dripping.
It was none of those things. The awful silence was within her.
Gingerly, she touched the soft spot in the top of her head and felt an utter aloneness. She closed her eyes and thought a hopeless plea to the Universe:
There was only complete silence, the silence of the voiceless void.
And for the first time in her life she felt the confinement of total isolation and knew it for what it was.
Crucifixes Etiam
Manue Nanti joined the project to make some dough. Five dollars an hour was good pay, even in A.D. 2134 and there was no way to spend it while on the job. Everything would be furnished: housing, chow, clothing, toiletries, medicine, cigarettes, even a daily ration of one hundred eighty proof beverage alcohol, locally distilled from fermented Martian mosses as fuel for the project’s vehicles. He figured that if he avoided crap games, he could finish his five-year contract with fifty thousand dollars in the bank, return to Earth, and retire at the age of twenty- four. Manue wanted to travel, to see the far corners of the world, the strange cultures, the simple people, the small towns, deserts, mountains, jungles—for until he came to Mars, he had never been farther than a hundred miles from Cerro de Pasco, his birthplace in Peru.
A great wistfulness came over him in the cold Martian night when the frost haze broke, revealing the black, gleam-stung sky, and the blue-green Earth-star of his birth. El mundo de mi carne, de mi alma, he thought—yet, he had seen so little of it that many of its places would be more alien to him than the homogenously ugly vistas of Mars. These he longed to see: the volcanoes of the South Pacific, the monstrous mountains of Tibet, the concrete cyclops of New York, the radioactive craters of Russia, the artificial islands in the China Sea, the Black Forest, the Ganges, the Grand Canyon—but most of all, the works of human art: the pyramids, the Gothic cathedrals of Europe, Notre Dame du Chartres, Saint Peter’s, the tile-work wonders of Anacapri. But the dream was still a long labour from realization.
Manue was a big youth, heavy-boned and built for labour, clever in a simple mechanical way, and with a wistful good humour that helped him take a lot of guff from whisky-breathed foremen and sharp-eyed engineers who made ten dollars an hour and figured ways for making more, legitimately or otherwise.
He had been on Mars only a month, and it hurt. Each time he swung the heavy pick into the red-brown sod, his face winced with pain. The plastic aerator valves, surgically stitched in his chest, pulled and twisted and seemed to tear with each lurch of his body. The mechanical oxygenator served as a lung, sucking blood through an artificially grafted network of veins and plastic tubing, frothing it with air from a chemical generator, and returning it to his circulatory system. Breathing was unnecessary, except to provide wind for talking, but Manue breathed in desperate gulps of the 4.0 psi Martian air; for he had seen the wasted, atrophied chests of the men who had served four or five years, and he knew that when they returned to Earth—if ever—they would still need the auxiliary oxygenator equipment.
“If you don’t stop breathing,” the surgeon told him, “you’ll be all right. When you go to bed at night, turn the oxy down low—so you feel like panting. There’s a critical point that’s just right for sleeping. If you get it too low, you’ll wake up screaming, and you’ll get claustrophobia. If you get it too high, your reflex mechanisms will go to pot and you won’t breathe; your lungs’ll dry up after a time. Watch it.”
Manue watched it carefully, although the oldsters laughed at him—in their dry wheezing chuckles. Some of them could scarcely speak more than two or three words at a shallow breath.
“Breathe deep, boy,” they told him. “Enjoy it while you can. You’ll forget how pretty soon. Unless you’re an engineer.”
The engineers had it soft, he learned. They slept in a pressurized barracks where the air was ten psi and twenty-five per cent oxygen, where they turned their oxies off and slept in peace. Even their oxies were self- regulating, controlling the output according to the carbon dioxide content of the input blood. But the Commission could afford no such luxuries for the labour gangs. The payload of a cargo rocket from Earth was only about two per cent of the ship’s total mass, and nothing superfluous could be carried. The ships brought the bare essentials, basic industrial equipment, big reactors, generators, engines, heavy tools.
Small tools, building materials, foods, non-nuclear fuels—these things had to be made on Mars. There was an open pit mine in the belly of Syrtis Major where a “lake” of nearly pure iron-rust was scooped into smelter, and processed into various grades of steel for building purposes, tools, and machinery. A quarry in the Flathead Mountains dug up large quantities of cement rock, burned it and crushed it to make concrete.
