Free Dark Benediction by Walter M. Miller

first month. The aerator tubes had become nearly unbearable; the skin, in trying to grow fast to the plastic, was beginning to form a tight little neck where the tubes entered his flesh, and the skin stretched and burned and stung with each movement of his trunk. Suddenly he felt sick. He staggered dizzily against the side of the trench, dropped the pick, and swayed heavily, bracing himself against collapse. Shock and nausea rocked him, while Gee stared at him and giggled foolishly.
    "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