Astounding British Edition, Vol. 9, No. 7 — page 32: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

OT aw ae ge oe baat a) Seen ee peste Ree nae fs oars sah ee es a -- ‘- s wa ee a « | ener ae i a Be OP et ee * Le See LA. te ~ CRUCIFIXUS EF By WALTER M. MILLER, Jr. 3 TIAM SO ae ak rh PR a ne le a ee ae Animals learned that if you killed, you could eat. Man moved higher; he learned that if you sowed in the spring, you could reap in the fall, But there’s still a step to go. JVANUE NANTI joined the project to make some dough. Five dollars an hour was good pay, even in 2134 A.D., and there was no way to spend it while on the job. Everything would be fur- nished: 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 homo- geneously 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 radio-active craters of Russia, the arti- ficial 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 Ana- capri. But the dream was still a long labor from realization. Manue was a big youth, heavy-boned and built for labor, clever in a simple mechanical way, and with a wistful good humor 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 mechani- cal oxygenator served as a lung, sucking blood through an artificially grafted net- work 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 pro- vide 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 equip- ment. “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 low you feel like pant- ing. 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 (COVMIICE OCOKS (S@) eS ee A yey Ge» F, —_ ~ 4 ~~... . > - sms ——% —) i oF —- or r “ . a aa , im