like a drug, ensuring comfortable sleep—and like addict or alcoholic, he could no longer endure living without it. Sleep was too precious, his only comfort. Every morning he awoke with a still, motionless chest, felt frightening remorse, sat up gasping, choking, sucking at the thin air with whining rattling lungs that had been idle too long. Sometimes he coughed violently, and bled a little. And then for a night or two he would correctly adjust the oxy, only to wake up screaming and suffocating. He felt hope sliding grimly away.
He sought out Sam Donnell, explained the situation, and begged the troffie for helpful advice. But the mechrepairman neither helped nor consoled nor joked about it. He only bit his lip, muttered something noncommittal, and found an excuse to hurry away. It was then that Manue knew his hope was gone. Tissue was withering, tubercules forming, tubes growing closed. He knelt abjectly beside his cot, hung his face in his hands, and cursed softly, for there was no other way to pray an unanswerable prayer.
A glider train came in from the north to haul away the disassembled tools. The men lounged around the barracks or wandered across the Martian desert, gathering strange bits of rock and fossils, searching idly for a glint of metal or crystal in the wan sunshine of early fall. The lichens were growing brown and yellow, and the landscape took on the hues of Earth’s autumn if not the forms.
There was a sense of expectancy around the camp. It could be felt in the nervous laughter, and the easy voices, talking suddenly of Earth and old friends and the smell of food in a farm kitchen, and old half-forgotten tastes for which men hungered: ham searing in the skillet, a cup of frothing cider from a fermenting crock, iced melon with honey and bits of lemon, onion gravy on homemade bread. But someone always remarked, “What’s the matter with you guys? We ain’t going home. Not by a long shot. We’re going to another place just like this.”
And the group would break up and wander away, eyes tired, eyes haunted with nostalgia.
“What’re we waiting for?” men shouted at the supervisory staff. “Get some transportation in here. Let’s get rolling.”
Men watched the skies for glider trains or jet transports, but the skies remained empty, and the staff remained close-mouthed. Then a dust column appeared on the horizon to the north, and a day later a convoy of tractor-trucks pulled into camp.
“Start loading aboard, men!” was the crisp command. Surly voices: “You mean we don’t go by air? We gotta ride those kidney bouncers? It’ll take a week to get to Mare Ery! Our contract says—”
“Load aboard! We’re not going to Mare Ery yet!” Grumbling, they loaded their baggage and their weary bodies into the trucks, and the trucks thundered and clattered across the desert, rolling towards the mountains.
The convoy rolled for three days towards the mountains, stopping at night to make camp, and driving on at sunrise. When they reached the first slopes of the foothills, the convoy stopped again. The deserted encampment lay a hundred and fifty miles behind. The going had been slow over the roadless desert.
Everybody out!” barked the messenger from the lead truck. “Bail out! Assemble at the foot of the hill.”
Voices were growling among themselves as the men moved in small groups from the trucks and collected in a milling tide in a shallow basin, overlooked by a low cliff and a hill. Manue saw the staff climb out of a cab and slowly work their way up the cliff. They carried a portable public address system.
“Gonna get a preaching,” somebody snarled.
“Sit down, please!” barked the loud-speaker. “You men sit down there! Quiet—quiet, please!”
The gathering fell into a sulky silence. Will Kinley stood looking out over them, his eyes nervous, his hand holding the mike close to his mouth so that they could hear his weak troffie voice.
“If you men have questions,” he said, “I’ll answer them now. Do you want to know what you’ve been doing during the past year?”
An affirmative rumble arose from the group.
You’ve been helping to give Mars a breathable atmosphere.” He glanced briefly at his watch, then looked back at his audience. “In fifty minutes, a controlled chain reaction will start in the tritium ice. The computers will time it and try to control it. Helium and oxygen will come blasting up out of the second hole.”
A rumble of disbelief arose from his audience. Someone shouted: “How can you get air to blanket a planet from one hole?”
“You can’t,” Kinley replied crisply. “A dozen others are going in, just like that one. We plan three hundred, and we’ve already located the ice pockets. Three hundred wells, working for eight centuries, can get the job done.”
“Eight centuries! What good—”
“Wait!” Kinley barked. “In the meantime, we’ll build pressurized cities close to the wells. If everything pans out, we’ll get a lot of colonists here, and gradually condition them to live in a seven or eight psi atmosphere—which is about the best we can hope to get. Colonists from the Andes and the Himalayas—they wouldn’t need much conditioning.”
“What about us?”
There was a long plaintive silence. Kinley’s eyes scanned the group sadly, and wandered towards the Martian horizon, gold and brown in the late afternoon. “Nothing—about us,” he muttered quietly.
“Why did we come out here?”
“Because there’s danger of the reaction getting out of hand. We can’t tell anyone about it, or we’d start a panic.” He looked at the group sadly. “I’m telling you now, because there’s nothing you could do. In thirty minutes —”
There were angry murmurs in the crowd. “You mean there may be an explosion?”
“There will be a limited explosion. And there’s very little danger of anything more. The worst danger is in having ugly rumours start in the cities. Some fool with a slip-stick would hear about it, and calculate what would happen to Mars if five cubic miles of tritium ice detonated in one split second. It would probably start a riot. That’s why we’ve kept it a secret.”
The buzz of voices was like a disturbed beehive. Manue Nanti sat in the midst of it, saying nothing, wearing a dazed and weary face, thoughts jumbled, soul drained of feeling.
Why should men lose their lungs that after eight centuries of tomorrows, other men might breathe the air of Mars as the air of Earth?
Other men around him echoed his thoughts in jealous mutterings. They had been helping to make a world in which they would never live.
An enraged scream arose near where Manue sat. “They’re going to blow us up! They’re going to blow up Mars.”
Don’t be a fool!” Kinley snapped.
Fools they call us! We are fools! For ever coming here! We got sucked in! Look at me!” A pale dark-haired man came wildly to his feet and tapped his chest. “Look! I’m losing my lungs! We’re all losing our lungs! Now they take a chance on killing everybody.”
Including ourselves,” Kinley called coldly.
We oughta take him apart. We oughta kill everyone who knew about it—and Kinley’s a good place to start!”
The rumble of voices rose higher, calling both agreement and dissent. Some of Kinley’s staff were looking nervously towards the trucks. They were unarmed.
“You men sit down!” Kinley barked.
Rebellious eyes glared at the supervisor. Several men who had come to their feet dropped to their hunches again. Kinley glowered at the pale upriser who called for his scalp.
“Sit down, Handell!”
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
