and I could feel sweat oozing out all over me. There was only one
difference. The pain was in my shoulder, not my leg, and it wasn't
easing up the way spasm pain does after a minute or two. It couldn't
have gotten worse, because it had been excruciating from the beginning.
But other things started getting worse fast. The burning sensation
spread to my lungs and my throat muscles started constricting, so that
every breath I drew was an agony.
I couldn't pretend any longer, and I didn't try to. I went down on
my knees, clutching at my chest and swaying back against the rail. I
suppose I must have groaned or made some sort of sound, because Joan
swung about and was kneeling beside me in an instant, her face ashen.
I must have looked terrible, or all of the color would not have drained
out of her face so fast, or her eyes gone quite so wide with alarm.
I made a half-hearted try at straightening up, but only succeeded in
bringing my collapse closer to zero-count by sagging more heavily back
against the rail.
"Darling, what is it? _Tell me!_" Her voice was demanding, wildly
insistent. "Please ... I've got to know. If it's your heart--"
I shook my head. I went through a kind of little death just trying to
get a few words out. "Something struck me ... in the back. See ... what
it is. Feel around with your hand."
"All right, darling. Just don't move. No--you'll have to lift yourself
up a little more. Try, darling. Your back's right against the rail."
I did more than try. I helped her by gritting my teeth and flopping
over on my stomach. But the pain that lanced through my chest made me
almost black out for an instant.
There was a clamor above us now, and I thought I heard Littlefield's
voice raised in a shout, followed by a scream of terror. Possibly
someone had seen me slump and jumped to the conclusion that the spiral
was collapsing.
There was no chance of that, so I couldn't have cared less how close to
panic the people up above were. Right at the moment it didn't concern
me. I was only concerned with what Joan might find when her fingers
started probing. If a bullet had ploughed into me and her fingers came
away wetly red I'd know for sure whether it was as bad as I feared. It
helps to know, when there's a tormenting uncertainty in your mind along
with the physical pain.
I could feel her hand fumbling with my shirt, getting it loosened. Then
they were moving up, down and across my back. Cautiously, gently, with
the nurselike competence which women usually manage to summon to their
aid in an emergency, no matter how shaken they are.
After a moment her fingers stopped moving and she drew in her breath
sharply.
Being in agony and on the verge of blacking out carries with it a
penalty. You can't always hear what someone close to you may be saying,
even when it's of life-and-death importance.
I caught a few words, however, just enough to know it was a dart before
I lost consciousness. And her look told me what kind of dart it was.
Or maybe it wasn't her look, just what I knew about darts in general.
The kind of dart that's in common use today as a weapon is quite unlike
the primitive blowgun darts of South American Indians a century ago.
Science, like everything else, progresses, especially in the field of
weapons. The modern dart is just as simple, in a way, but you take it
out of a wafer-thin metal case as you would a hypodermic needle and
you fit the three parts very carefully together and you use a liquid
propellant to blow it out of a very slender tube of gleaming metal. And
there's space in it for poison.
It's handier, tidier than the small robot killers with their intricate
internal gadgetry, even though it requires precision aiming and you're
much more likely to be observed while you're taking aim, and be
compelled to pay the customary penalty for murder.
I'd managed to roll back on my side, and lying then in agony, trying to
catch what Joan was saying, sort of telescoped all that for me, so that
it registered in my mind in a more rapid way than it does when you're
trying to explain it academically. Everything I knew about darts came
sweeping into my mind, and I remembered something else that helped to
explain the agony.
The modern dart changes shape the instant it enters a man's body,
opening up like a pair of six-bladed scissors, cutting, slashing,
severing veins and muscles and nerve ganglions. And if it strikes an
artery--
It doesn't even have to be a poisoned dart to kill a man. The feathered
part remains in the wound, only slightly embedded. But if you have any
sense you resist an impulse to pull it out, because when you do that
it's very difficult to stop the bleeding. It's a job for a skilled
surgeon and Joan's look told me that there was no time to be lost. The
wisest thing I could do was to put my complete trust in Commander
Littlefield. The quicker he got one of the passengers or a crewman to
help him carry me down to ground level and bundle me into an ambulance
the better my chances would be.
Joan seemed to be one jump ahead of me, for she leapt up quickly
and started back up the spiral. She didn't even press my hand in
reassurance, but that was all right with me. I knew why she hadn't.
Every second counted, and she loved me too much to be anything but
firmly practical about it.
I remember thinking, just before I blacked out, _how adequate are the
hospital facilities here? And what about the surgeons? Oh God, what if
they are fifth-raters, what if the hospital is understaffed? What if
they bungle it, but good?_
When you black out and stay blacked out for a long period, questions
like that lose most of their tormenting aspects. You may still feel
emotionally disturbed by them, when the darkness lifts a little and
you remember having asked yourself questions someone somewhere should
have answered--if you'd only stayed around long enough to make a lot
of friends and influence people and make them eager to oblige you in
every possible way. But it isn't too disturbing, because you can't even
remember what the questions were.
The trouble was ... I didn't stay blacked out. Not completely. I woke
up at intervals and heard snatches of conversation and I even saw--the
Mars Colony.
I saw quite a bit of the Colony before they eased me down in a hospital
bed, and covered me with warm blankets and I blacked out again.
I saw the streets I'd traveled forty million miles to visit, and the
people I'd come to make friends with, and the kids in their space
helmets, looking precisely as they did on Earth. (What further frontier
did they hope to explore ... Alpha Centauri or just one of the giant
outer planets?) I saw the prefabricated metal buildings, four, eight
and twenty stories high, with their slanting roofs, rust-red and
verdigris-green blue in the early morning sunlight and the stores
that were all glass and the strange looking supermarkets with their
almost cathedral-like domes. And just for good measure, eight or ten
bar-flanked streets with big parking lots where the bars gave way
to barracks that straggled out into the desert and had a primitive,
twentieth century, shanty-town look.
There were people everywhere, but when you're propped up on a cot in
a speeding ambulance you can't tell whether the people who go flying
past look just the way people do on Earth, or have a more robust,
happier look. Or a more restless and discontented look. It's even
hard to tell whether young people or middle-aged people predominate,
or just how many very old people there are. Or how many infants in
arms, except that there did seem to be an exceptionally large number
of children, either being wheeled or carried or toddling along in the
wake of their parents, or playing games with the fierce competitiveness
of twelve-year-olds in fenced-in sand lots which no one had taken the
trouble to pave.
There were theaters too--places of amusement, anyway--which you could
tell featured lively entertainment just from the gaudy blue and yellow
posters on their facades.
That there were machines clattering past goes without saying. A
tremendous amount of new construction was under way in every part of
the Colony and if you just say "Mars" in a word association test one
man or woman in three will come right back with "Machinery."
There were pipes, too--huge and branching, big, shining metal tubes
that arched above buildings and ran parallel with almost every street
in the Colony. A tremendous brood of writhing snakes was what they
reminded me of--the artificial kind that kids delight in scaring people
with at birthday parties, all mottled over with the bronze sheen of
copperheads, but looking more like boa constrictors in their tremendous
girth.
Another kind of snake image flashed into my mind as I stared out
through the windows of the ambulance at that interlocking power-fuel
network. It came swimming right out of the history books I'd poured
over in fascination when I was knee-high to a grasshopper. Sure, they
were Diamond Back rattlesnakes and the Mars Colony was right out of the
Old West of covered-wagon and gold-prospecting days.
Of course it wasn't, because the twenty-first century technology had
made it completely modern in some respects. But it was like the Old
West in a good many other ways. It had the same rugged, mirage-bright
pioneer look, as if the desert sands were blowing right into the heart
of the colony, swirling about, filling the windy places and the sand
lots where the kids were playing with a haze that could just as easily
have been gold dust that some careless, giant-size prospector had
spilled by accident when he'd brought it in from the hills for weighing.
Actually, there's nothing on Earth or Mars that can completely shatter
that cyclic aspect of history. There's nothing so new that you can look
at it and say, "There's nothing of the past here. The break is complete
and the past is gone forever and can never return again."
It's just not true. The past does return, shining brightly beneath the
bold new pattern, the daring new way of life that Man likes to think he
has chiseled from a block of marble that human hands have never touched
or human eyes rested upon before.
There's no such block of marble in all the universe of stars. Not
really, because what Man can visualize he has already seen and it
has become a part of his heritage and the past of that heritage goes
flowing into it and he starts off with a veined monolith that is
brimming over with human memory patterns, with not a few buried deep in
the stone.
But I've forgotten to mention the most important aspect of everything
I saw through the windows of that speeding ambulance. It was ... the
blurred aspect, the way everything kept changing shape and disappearing
and pinwheeling at times. It wasn't surprising, because the agony was
still with me and I saw everything in fitful starts, in brief flashes,
between bouts of blacking out and coming to and blacking out again. But
what I did see I saw clearly, with the heightened awareness that often
accompanies almost unbearable pain. When white-hot needles of pain are
jabbing at your nerves a strange, almost blinding kind of illumination
seems to sweep into the brain. But instead of blinding you it makes
everything stand out with a startling clarity and you can think clearly
too, and even speculate about what you've seen.
It's as if you were caught up in a kind of sharper-than-life dream
sequence, or sitting in a darkened theater watching events take place
on a dazzlingly bright screen. You may be doubled up with pain, but
you keep your eyes on the screen and very little that is happening
to the actors and actresses on a dramatic level is lost on you. You
even notice small details of background scenery that would escape
your attention ordinarily, and exactly what kind of clothes the
actresses are wearing. Light summer dresses with plunging necklines or
tight-fitting, form-molded swim suits--things you can't help noticing
even when you're doubled up with pain. It's why most of us fight to
stay alive, because Nature has made us that way to keep us from letting
go of the one thing that makes us stay in the pitcher's box when Death
is batting a thousand.
Putting that much stress just on the engendering of life may be a trick
and a snare, when Death has set so cruel a trap for the winners, but
you seldom hear anyone complaining about it. It takes an awful lot
of grief and despair and pain to make anyone angrily resent the sex
snare, and take to eulogizing Death instead.
It wasn't the reason everything I saw through the windows of the
ambulance registered so sharply in fitful flashes, because I had _that_
right at my side. Joan was holding my hand and squeezing it and I only
had to turn my head to make me just about the toughest adversary Death
ever had. But what I said about the lighted cinema screen still holds.
What I did see, I saw with eyes that missed very little. And between
the bouts of blacking out the snatches of conversation I overheard came
to me just as distinctly.
Part of the time it was a woman's voice I heard and I knew it had to be
Joan's voice, because there was no other woman in the ambulance with
me. But she wasn't talking to me. She was talking to one of the two men
in white who were sitting opposite me. They seemed about a half-mile
away most of the time, but occasionally the long bench they were
sitting on floated a little closer.
The conversation, as I've said, came to me in snatches and it could
hardly have been called a running dialogue. The continuity alone would
have gotten a professional script writer fired, no matter how brilliant
he was otherwise.
The only way I can whip it into shape is by recording it as if it were
continuous, filling in the part I overheard between blackouts with what
I didn't hear--staying close enough to what was probably being said to
keep the script writer on the job and eating.
I'm pretty sure this is a fairly accurate re-write.
Joan: What kind of a hospital is it? I'm sorry, I ... I guess I
shouldn't have asked you that. You're on the staff. No matter how frank
you might want to be....
Doctor Mile-Away: If I thought it wasn't a good hospital I wouldn't
say so, naturally. But it happens to match up very well with the eight
or ten you'd want him to be taken to Earthside, if you had a choice.
The facilities are first-rate, completely up to date. There are four
surgeons I'd trust my life to with equal confidence ... and one of them
happens to be my dad.
Joan: I hope to God he gets one of them.
Doctor: There are only four surgeons. We don't get too many surgical
cases in the Colony--not nearly as many as you might think. There's as
much violence here, perhaps, as there is in New Chicago but it takes a
different form. We can't keep atomic hand-guns out of criminal hands as
easily as you can in New Chicago, because the lawless element in the
Colony has more socio-political power and can get more weapons in that
destructive category smuggled in. As you know, an atomic hand-gun has
a very limited destructive potential, since there's no fallout and it
can only kill a man standing directly in its path. But when it does ...
there isn't much margin left for surgery.
Joan: You mean _criminals_ are in control here?
Doctor: Oh, it's not quite that bad. Possibly about one colonist in
twenty has dangerous criminal tendencies. The proportion is larger here
only because it's a new society, with a pioneering outlook. You might
call it a wolf-eat-wolf society. On Earth the dog-eat-dog tendencies
will probably never be completely eradicated but we've gone a long way
in that respect just in the last half-century. Here we have further to
go, because the dogs are still wolves.
Joan: Will you ever tame them? My husband may be dying right here; that
doesn't look so tame! I think your Mars Colony is a filthy jungle!
Doctor: I didn't have much time to talk with Commander Littlefield. But
from what _he_ said I'm pretty sure you don't really feel that way.
I don't know why you and your husband are here, but the Colonization
Board seldom gives clearance to people who feel that way about the
future of the Colony. In fact ... I can't remember ever having met a
man or woman who managed to deceive the Board, because the screening
is the opposite of superficial. They go into your past history, I
understand, and give you psychological tests I'm not even sure I could
pass, convinced as I am that the Colony is still Man's best hope in a
world where to stand still is always disastrous. There's no other sane
solution to the population problem, just to mention one of the fifty or
sixty major problems we'll have to solve or perish in in the next two
centuries. I have my moments of doubt and cynicism....
Joan: You should be having one right now. How would _you_ feel if you
were taking your wife to the hospital for an emergency operation and
didn't know whether she was going to live or die? Suppose it was your
wife instead of my husband? We didn't even have time to set foot in the
Colony. If there's that much danger before you even--
Doctor: Just hold on a minute. Let's get this straightened out right
now. It will make you feel better. No one in the Colony tried to kill
your husband. That dart was aimed at him from above--by one of the
passengers. They're all being held for questioning and if the firing
mechanism is found on one of them--
That, for me, was the end of the dialogue. But just before I blacked
out for the last time I saw a sign high up over one of the buildings.
It read: WENDEL ATOMICS.
And I went down into the darkness with that sign flashing in big
illuminated letters right in the middle of the darkness. WENDEL
ATOMICS. WENDEL. WENDEL ATOMICS. And in much smaller letters, which
were not nearly as bright: _Endicott Fuel_.
The big letters growing larger, brighter ... the small letters
dwindling.
Just as I felt myself to be dwindling ... as I passed deeper and deeper
into the darkness.
10
"He's a big man," I heard a woman's voice say. "It took every ounce of
my strength to lift him. But he had to be moved to the edge of the bed,
doctor. The sheets had to be changed."
A whirling in my head, needles darting in and out. I had to strain my
ears to catch what another voice was saying in reply. It was a man's
voice, but gruff, deep-throated and somehow less distinct than the
first voice. Perhaps Gruff Voice was standing further from the bed. Or
possibly he didn't want me to hear what he was telling the nurse.
She had to be a nurse, because Gruff Voice wasn't addressing her
by name. He wasn't calling her Miss Hadley or Miss Betty Anne
Simpson-Cruickshank. He was saying "Nurse this," and "Nurse that" and
speaking with crisp authority, as if there was a gulf between a nurse
and a doctor which even the kindliest, least hidebound of physicians
had no right to ignore.
I rather liked his voice, gruff as it was. He spoke with the air of a
man who knew his business, with a kind of restrained sympathy--the "no
nonsense" approach. Too much calm self-assurance can be irritating,
because it usually goes with the inflated egos of people who think very
highly of themselves. But in a doctor you don't object to that sort of
thing so much.
"He's waking up," Gruff Voice was saying. "Just let him rest and don't
encourage him to talk. No more sedation--he won't need it. Did you take
his temperature, Nurse?"
"Just ten minutes ago, Doctor. It's on the chart. I always--"
"Put it down immediately? Who do you think you're kidding, Susan,
my love? Once in awhile you put it off, when this kind of emergency
case makes you wish you had a dozen pairs of hands. You put if off
for fifteen or twenty minutes, when you've no reason to think some
white-coated drum major is going to barge in unexpectedly, just to lean
on you. Did you ever know me to lean, Susan--heavily or otherwise?
You're doing the best you can and it's a very good 'best.' I wish we
had more 'bests' like it."
"I do feel ... sort of wobbly, Roger. I deserve to be leaned on,
because once you start feeling that way you're no longer at peak
efficiency and you become nervously over-scrupulous. That's both good
and bad, if you know what I mean."
"What did you expect, Susan? I could have had a nurse in here to
relieve you hours ago if you hadn't been so stubborn. You've been
worrying your cute blonde head off without stopping to rest for sixteen
hours, and you never set eyes on the guy before this morning. What is
there about some men--"
"It was touch and go, Roger. You said yourself that a little of the
poison got into his blood. You told me a tenth of a cc would have been
fatal."
"That was when I first looked at the lab analysis and took the
gloomiest possible view of his chances. I didn't even know you heard
me. Damn it all, Susan. Can't a doctor think out loud without giving
his most competent nurse a martyr complex? What is there about him? I'm
asking you. If he wasn't married I could perhaps understand it. I could
at least make a stab at trying to figure it out. But you've seen his
wife. A man with a wife as attractive as she is would have to be even
more susceptible than I am to look twice at another woman. That's just
another way of saying it couldn't happen."
"I've had two long talks with her, Roger. She loves him so much that
if anything happened to him I'm afraid to think what she might do. All
alone on Mars, with no close relatives or friends to turn to for help
and warmth and comfort. She'd need a lot of support, because there's
nothing shallow about her. She's the intense type, very deep in her
emotions. I'm that way myself."
"You don't have to tell me," I could hear him saying. "You're the
empathy-plus type. It's what makes a good many otherwise sensible women
embrace the toughest profession on the list. Hard-boiled, unemotional
women make good nurses too. But I prefer the kind of nurse you can't
help being. Only ... a little moderation even in people who go all out
can be a saving grace."
"But don't you see, Roger? It means I can identify with her. I know
exactly how terrible the uncertainty must be for her, because if I
loved a man that much and lost him I'd probably go right out and kill
myself. If you want the full truth ... there's probably a little of
the male-female absurdity mixed up in it too. It's an absurdity in a
situation like this, where it makes no sense. But just the fact that
he's a man and I'm a woman--"
"Talk like that will get you nowhere," he said. "I'm too sure of you."
There was a rustling sound and a sudden gasp and I was pretty sure I
knew what it meant. He'd taken her into his arms and was kissing her.
I don't know why I didn't open my eyes. I was fully awake now, aware
of every movement in the room. But I just remained quiet and listened,
grateful that the needles had stopped jabbing at my temples and my
dizziness was practically gone.
Sometimes when you awake suddenly from a deep sleep your eyes feel
glued shut, and it takes an effort just to open them. You let it ride
for a moment, while you pull yourself together ... especially if it's a
nightmare you've just awakened from. There's a kind of pleasure in it.
He was talking again. "I've yet to meet a woman who doesn't think that
clinical self-analysis will keep a man guessing about her. But that
kind of candor will get you nowhere with me, kiddo. I know you too
well. Are you convinced?"
"Yes," she said, with a meekness that surprised me.
He didn't say anything for a moment, but I could hear him moving about
and a metallic click, as if he were folding up his stethoscope or
returning a hypodermic to its case.
A sound like that is always a little unnerving and an operating table
and a long row of gleaming instruments flashed evanescently across
my mind. I wondered how bad it was and if Martian hospitals were
well-equipped, and had just the right facilities to take care of an
emergency case requiring major surgery.
But he'd said I was out of danger, hadn't he ... that I didn't even
need more sedation? Sure he had. I'd been stabbed with a poisoned
dart, but that didn't mean I'd have to go on the operating table. They
would never have let the dart stay inside me. If an operation had been
needed, it would have been performed immediately....
Perhaps it had. Well, to hell with it. I was out of danger now and
beginning to mend and that was the only thing that counted. It had been
touch and go, she'd said. And Joan loved me so much that....