: World Without Glamor by Marlowe Stephen Terry W E Illustrator - Science fiction; Short stories; Life on other planets Fiction; Space colonies Fiction; Spouses Fiction

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World Without Glamor

Colonists on Talbor had little time for anything but work, which was bad for morale. So Earth sent a special ship--with a unique cargo.

Marsden had filled a basin with well water and began to lather his hands and face with soap when Marie entered their cabin. He looked up and clucked his tongue in disapproval. "Lord," he said. "Look at yourself."

Marie scowled at him as she removed her bandanna and shook loose her short-cropped hair. "How do you expect me to look?" Her plain but pretty face was sweat-streaked. She wore a simple tunic which fell halfway down her thighs and almost matched her sturdy, sun-darkened legs in color, although sweat darkened the back of the garment and left rings of white under the armpits where it had evaporated.

"I know how I'd like you to look."

"Harry Marsden, just what do you mean by that?"

He had felt it for some time now, this smouldering resentment which had wedged its way between them after only two years of marriage. He couldn't talk to her without arguing, not after they had finished working for the day under the broiling sun and returned, bone-weary and stiff-muscled, to their cabin. The routine sickened him: he would come in first, splash cold water on his face, maybe scrub up some. Marie would follow after feeding their chickens , strip off her tunic and try to scrub the grime from her body while he looked at her. And if it were warm she'd prepare their simple dinner half-naked, with no thought for modesty, until he knew every plane, every curve of her body and realized it was a body strong for work and not soft for play, a body good for bearing children, a body which could work all day in the fields like a machine but which would never lose the grit from its pores.

"I didn't mean anything by it. Forget what I said, Marie." Marsden went to the clothing rack and took down his one good suit. He looked again at Marie, then closed his eyes and let a growing eagerness engulf him.

The ship from Earth was coming. Not the ship with more farm machinery, not the battered freighter which reached Talbor twice every year, but a tourist ship--the first one in Marsden's memory. There would be real Earth people on it, men and women. He thought deliciously of the women, wasp-waisted, high-breasted, lithe-legged and delicate. Marie would seem so plain against them, so tragically unfeminine--unless the pictures lied. Born on Talbor, Marsden had never seen a real woman of Earth.

Maybe Marsden would feel more inclined to watch the patterned years drag by on Talbor if he just once saw the women of Earth. He never told this to Marie, for she wouldn't understand.

"We'd better hurry," she said, "or we won't get to town till after the ship comes in."

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