Free Dark Benediction by Walter M. Miller Page A

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.
    The digger started to call after him but only closed his mouth again, tightly. Friends? He needed friends, but not a troffie. He couldn't even bear to look at them, for fear he might he looking into the mirror of his own future.
    Manue climbed out of his bunk and donned his fleece-skins. Night had fallen, and the temperature was already twenty below. A soft sift of icedust obscured the stars. He stared about in the darkness. The mess hall was closed, but a light burned in the canteen and another in the foremen's club, where the men were playing cards and drinking. He went to get his alcohol ration, gulped it mixed with a little water, and trudged back to the barracks alone.
     
    The Tibetan was in bed, staring blankly at the ceiling. Manue sat down and gazed at his flat, empty face. "Why did you come here, Gee?"
    "Come where?"
    "To Mars."
    Gee grinned, revealing large black-streaked teeth. "Make money. Good money on Mars."
    "Everybody make money, huh?"
    "Sure."
    "Where's the money come from?"
    Gee rolled his face toward the Peruvian and frowned "You crazy? Money come from Earth, where all money come from."
    "And what does Earth get back from Mars?"
    Gee looked puzzled for a moment, then gathered anger because he found no answer. He grunted a monosyllable in his native tongue, then rolled over and went to sleep.
    Manue was not normally given to worrying about such things, but now he found himself asking, "What am doing here?"—and then, "What is anybody doing here?'
    The Mars Project had started eighty or ninety years ago, and its end goal was to make Mars habitable for colonists without Earth support, without oxies and insulated suits and the various gadgets a man now had to use to keep himself alive on the fourth planet. But thus far, Earth had planted without reaping. The sky was a bottomless well into which Earth poured her tools, dollars, manpower, and engineering skill. And there appeared to be no hope for the near future.
    Manue felt suddenly trapped. He could not return to Earth before the end of his contract. He was trading five years of virtual enslavement for a sum of money which would buy a limited amount of freedom. But what if he lost his lungs, became a servant of the small aerator for the rest of his days? Worst of all: whose ends was he serving? The contractors were getting rich—on government contracts. Some of the engineers and foremen were getting rich—by various forms of embezzlement of government funds. But what were the people back on Earth getting for their