Project Gutenberg's The Man the Martians Made, by Frank Belknap Long

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Title: The Man the Martians Made

Author: Frank Belknap Long

Release Date: July 17, 2009 [EBook #29432]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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_If Frank Belknap Long is not one of the deans of science fiction
writers, there can certainly be no dispute that he is high on the
faculty board. His pen is indefatigable, it seems, and his
characters come alive as with few other writers. We're sure you'll
like this new suspenseful tale of his._

the
man
the
martians
made

_by ... Frank Belknap Long_

No mortal had ever seen the Martians, but they had heard their
whisperings--without knowing the terrible secret they kept hidden.

There was death in the camp.

I knew when I awoke that it had come to stand with us in the night and
was waiting now for the day to break and flood the desert with light.
There was a prickling at the base of my scalp and I was drenched with
cold sweat.

I had an impulse to leap up and go stumbling about in the darkness. But
I disciplined myself. I crossed my arms and waited for the sky to grow
bright.

Daybreak on Mars is like nothing you've ever dreamed about. You wake up
in the morning, and there it is--bright and clear and shining. You pinch
yourself, you sit up straight, but it doesn't vanish.

Then you stare at your hands with the big callouses. You reach for a
mirror to take a look at your face. That's not so good. That's where
ugliness enters the picture. You look around and you see Ralph. You see
Harry. You see the women.

On Earth a woman may not look her glamorous best in the harsh light of
early dawn, but if she's really beautiful she doesn't look too bad. On
Mars even the most beautiful woman looks angry on arising, too weary
and tormented by human shortcomings to take a prefabricated metal shack
and turn it into a real home for a man.

You have to make allowances for a lot of thing