![]() ![]() ![]() On Earth, in order to receive a pension and a prescription, the astronauts must stay far away from their crewmates as the desire to kill remains. The conditioning is “like a straightjacket”–Byron elaborates: “You know how to make a baby cry? Hold his hands What they did to us so we couldn’t kill each other, it was like being tied up, like having out hands held so we couldn’t get free” (50).Īnd the conditioning against violence only lasts until his return to Earth. Byron, the narrator, wants a knife for Sam, to strangle Gilvey with his bear hands, gun Chowderhead with one bullet to the belly, turn a tommy gun on Wally, and cage the captain with hungry lions. The continuous sounds of machine and crew, the fetid taste of the air filled with sweat, the omniscient fear of crushing your oxygen line while sleeping, the free fall, the dreams of drowning, generates an intense drive to kill your crewmates. In Pohl’s future, the Mars-craft crams six men in a space the size of a Buick (51). ![]() “The Hated” (1958) postulates that astronauts will require psychological conditioning to survive the confines of space travel to Mars. He wrote it under the pseudonym Paul Flehr. Robert Foster’s cover for the 1969 edition of Turn Left at Thursday (1961)įrederik Pohl’s “The Hated” (1958) first appeared in the January 1958 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction, ed. H. ![]()
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