left in me, and Glacial Stare was threatening me with _that_! Not
just an hour or two with the barrel-chested lads--on rare occasions
they stopped just short of the third stage--but the full, deep-cut
treatment.
14
He'd made it plain that he was representing Wendel. But he hadn't come
right out and identified himself, and I had no way of knowing exactly
what kind of Wendel agent he was. The worst kind, beyond a doubt. But
what I would have liked to know took in more territory than that.
Was he ... a replacement? Had he been instructed to step into the
shoes of the secret agent the robot had killed in space? If he had,
the satisfaction he'd get from killing me would probably exceed the
pleasure a run-of-the-mill Wendel police officer would experience.
It would be easier for him to identify with the slain crewman and feel
a sense of personal outrage strong enough to make him think of himself
as an avenger. The fact that he wasn't wearing a uniform lent support
to that grim possibility. When a man has a strong personal reason for
wanting you dead it can make the official reason seem twice as urgent.
It could also bring into his face the kind of look that Glacial Stare
was still keeping trained on me.
There was only one thing I knew with absolute certainty. Answering his
questions would do me no good--would only make the danger greater the
instant I stopped talking. I'd be signing my own death warrant with a
vengeance if I co-operated with him right there in the hospital room
and spared him the trouble of having me bound and gagged and smuggled
out of the hospital into a Big-Image interrogation room.
Why make him a present of the only card I was holding? Why be that
charitable when ... God, how silly could you get? If I'd had my
strength or there had been anyone within earshot to dispute his
authority if I shouted for help--a one in fifty chance of it, even--I
might have been holding at least a Jack or a Queen. But never an Ace,
or four of a kind or a Royal Flush. About all I was holding was the
joker. In some games the joker can be the highest card in the deck, but
not in the kind of game the three of us were playing.
It was the third player who was holding all of the really high cards.
He was hovering just behind Glacial Stare, with a shroud with my name
embroidered on it draped over his arm. He could see my hand clearly,
because he was looking straight at me out of eyes like holes in a skull.
That scythe-and-sickle round is almost unbeatable because of the way
Death has of just quietly raising the ante until all hope is gone.
Sometimes you've no choice but to let him call your bluff, lay your
cards face up on the table, and wait for the blow to fall.
Sometimes ... but not always. Death is a weird-o who doesn't really
want anyone to live to a crusty old age and that can anger you, and
there are no limits to what a certain kind of resentment can do for
you. You'll take desperate chances when you know the sands have just
about run out.
I came up out of the bed so fast the electricity my body generated made
the sheets crackle. It wasn't the helplessly weak body I'd thought
it. Not at all. When I whipped back my arm I could feel a thrust of
power and resilience in my shoulder muscles that amazed me, because it
shouldn't have been there. There was no flabbiness or lack of muscle
tone.
I crashed into him before my feet hit the floor, sinking my fist into
his mid-section and sending the chair he was sitting in skidding half
across the hospital room.
He clung to both arms of the chair, too jolted to straighten up and try
to heave himself out of it before I shortened the distance between us
by hurling myself directly at him again. I just missed fumbling that
crucial follow-up, because my legs were deficient in muscle tone and
they almost collapsed under me before I got to him.
I dragged him out of the chair and had him down on the floor and was
banging his head against the floor before he could get any kind of grip
on me. I wasn't in the least bit gentle about it. If I'd been banging
him around for five or ten minutes without stopping I couldn't have
heightened the look of shock and absolute horror in his eyes.
The best he could do was twist about under me and try desperately to
raise himself a little, thrusting his head forward to keep me from
bringing it so violently into contact with the floor. He seemed to
be trying so hard to get out from under that I decided to help him.
I lifted him clean off the floor and slammed him back against the
wall--not once, but several times.
I don't know where my strength came from, but even my legs were doing
all right now. They were still the weakest part of me, but they went
right on supporting me until I'd finished clouting him with something
that was just as good as a sledgehammer--the firm wall itself,
completely stationary as it was. If I'd been standing behind it using
it as a forward-thrusting shield his skull couldn't have cracked
against it any harder.
I suppose it wasn't really the hospital room wall I was clouting him
with, because, as I say, it was stationary. But when you're extracting
the fangs of a dangerous little reptile who has just threatened you
with Big-Image interrogation and know that your strength may give out
at any moment cause and effect get swallowed up in an urgency that
can distort reality. His face was a confused blur for a moment. But a
second or two before all of the expression drained out of it and he
slumped jerkily to the floor my vision steadied and I saw that his look
of absolute horror had been replaced by the deadliest kind of hatred.
It's always a little jolting, no matter how you slice it, to know that
a man who should be incapable of feeling anything but shock and pain
can pass out cold with that kind of look in his eyes.
I'd gone berserk for a moment, but when I have to, when there's some
compelling reason for it, I can cool off fast. _Calm down_ would be
a more accurate way of phrasing it, for I knew it would take a long
time for the way I felt about Glacial Stare to turn from anger to
enlightened scientific detachment. He couldn't really help being what
he was, because what is known as the bastard-pattern gets grooved
into the poor unhappy devils who are afflicted with it way back in
childhood. They injure themselves more than they injure others, even
though what they do to others in the process often doesn't bear
thinking about.
Right at the moment Glacial Stare had injured himself, but not
deliberately. I had done most of the injuring for him. But there would
be times when he'd punish himself twice as remorselessly, and he'd go
on doing it to the end of his days. If there's a hell on Earth the
sadistic bastards occupy it, and it's unscientific to feel anything but
pity for them.
It was equally unscientific for me to feel anything but concern for
my own safety right at the moment, because I was still trapped in a
hospital room with all of the physical weakness I'd felt a few minutes
before creeping back and with no guarantee that if I walked out of the
room in a tottering condition I wouldn't run smack into another Wendel
agent.
Quite possibly they had the hospital surrounded and when they saw what
I'd done to Glacial Stare they wouldn't talk with me as long as he had
done before I'd belted him unconscious.
They'd either blast me down, cold-bloodedly and on the spot, with one
of the compact little hand-guns Doctor Mile-Away had discussed with
Joan on the ambulance--how many days, weeks away that ride seemed--or
gag and bind me and carry me out on a stretcher.
Glacial Stare himself no longer worried me. He'd be out for as long as
it would take me to decide whether it would be better to go staggering
out of the hospital room and trust the first person I collided with not
to betray me, or flop back on the bed and shout for help from there.
You do crazy things, sometimes, when you're that uncertain. There
wasn't a chance of his coming to immediately, but just automatically I
crouched beside him and rolled one of his eyelids back with my thumb.
The glazed pupil that stared sightlessly back at me gave me a jolt,
because it could have meant that I'd killed him. I thrust my hand under
his shirt and felt around for a heartbeat and found no trace of one.
His skin was clammy and very cold.
Then I saw that he was still breathing. His chest rose and fell and
there was a sudden, dull thumping where my palm was resting.
All right, that took care of him. He would live to turn vicious again.
But it didn't take care of me. I was still in the worst kind of danger,
and sounding off might be the unwisest thing I could do. But what
chance would I have otherwise? Someone would have to know or I'd likely
as not take all of the wrong risks.
I had to fight off the weakness that was coming back and be ready for
anything--even a set-to with another Wendel agent or a half-dozen of
them. But I had to have an ally, someone who knew the hospital as well
as I knew the lines of my palm. I had to be briefed in advance, or I'd
have no way of knowing how good my chances were.
How long could I stay on my feet, despite the weakness, if I decided
on a desperate gamble and attempted to get out of the hospital alive?
Did any of the doctors have enough authority to oppose Wendel, if I
told them who I was and they believed me. Or did Wendel have so much
power here they'd have to actually see the silver bird to take risks
on my behalf which would bring the entire staff an exceptional courage
citation from the Board--if I lived to set the record straight.
And where was the silver bird and my secret-code identification papers?
Not on my person. All of my clothes had been removed and I was wearing
just a one-piece, in-patient garment with no pockets in it. It stood to
reason they'd gone through my clothes before attaching a tag to them
and filing them away, on the off-chance I might live to reclaim them.
In an emergency case they'd have displayed that much curiosity, at
least. It would have been no more than a routine procedure.
Unless--Commander Littlefield had warned them not to tamper with my
clothes and to return them to him immediately. No, no--that was crazy.
The chances were he'd removed the silver bird and the identification
papers from my inner breast pocket before they'd bundled me into the
ambulance and they were now safely in his possession. Or perhaps Joan
had them. It was all pure guesswork, but I was fairly certain of one
thing. They hadn't found the silver bird or Glacial Stare would never
have been permitted--
Hell ... why not face it. I couldn't even be completely sure of that.
If Wendel was all-powerful here the doctors' hands would be tied, no
matter how much they knew about me. I'd have to be in robust health and
on my feet, with the silver bird gleaming on my shoulder, to overcome
that kind of power.
Actually, I didn't think Commander Littlefield had told them anything.
It was the kind of secret he'd guard with his life, unless he'd had
reason to suspect that Wendel would send an agent to kill me before
I had a chance to tell him whether or not I thought the danger was
great enough to justify abandoning all secrecy ... immediately and as
a simple safety precaution. He'd respect my wishes in the matter, and
could certainly be excused for not having had the foresight to take
maximum precautions on his own initiative. It could very easily be
argued that he should have done so ... that he had blundered badly. But
I refused to condemn him for keeping the secrecy obligation so firmly
in mind that he'd failed to realize precisely how fast and ruthlessly
Wendel could move. And even if I'd been ringed about with security
precautions Wendel might have succeeded in convincing the hospital
staff that the silver bird was a lead counterfeit and Littlefield an
anti-Colony conspirator.
A lot of suspicion hovered over the heads of the big sky ship
commanders, anyway--a sinister, shadowy aura woven of lies and slander
that accompanied them everywhere and greatly curtailed their authority
when they attempted to intervene in the affairs of the Colony.
All that passed through my mind as I stood staring down at Glacial
Stare and helped me come to a decision. If I lived to get out of
the hospital I'd be on my own with a vengeance. But Littlefield was
still my best bet I'd be completely alone in totally unfamiliar
surroundings, facing a challenge such as no man had ever faced before
and survived to tell about it.
I'd have to make my way through the Colony on foot, a stranger in
a world I'd had no time to adjust to and get back to the sky ship
somehow--even if it meant talking my way into the good graces of
criminals and hiding in dark alleys and learning new ways of thinking
and acting the hard way--but fast--and resorting to every dodge in the
book to keep one jump ahead of the Wendel agents.
There'd be a hue and cry--and they'd be out for my blood. I had no
identification papers--nothing. I'd be as naked and vulnerable as the
day I was born in more ways than one--except that I'd be a grown man in
body and mind with a grown man's resourcefulness.
I could only hope I'd prove equal to the task and acquit myself well
and succeed in silencing the skeptical part of myself that was shaking
its head in furious disbelief.
I'd decided to make no attempt to get anyone into the room by sounding
off. Much as I needed an ally, the risk would be too great. No one had
come rushing in, and the fact that I'd been able to prevent Glacial
Stare from uttering a sound by taking him by complete surprise and
battering his skull against the wall until he folded was a point in my
favor. Not to regard it as a break and take full advantage of it would
have been foolish.
Slipping quickly from the room and taking my chances made more sense
than waiting around for an ally to come to my assistance, because he
might not be an ally at all, but another Wendel agent.
I was deliberately shutting my mind to the greatest danger--the Big One.
You're deliberately shutting your mind to the Big One, Ralphie boy.
Getting back to the sky ship will be tough sledding, every foot of
the way, and you'll have to dodge and weave about and you may end up
dead in the darkest of Martian alleys, half blown apart by an atomic
hand-gun. But the Big One is getting out of the hospital itself, and
you're afraid to let yourself think about that because you know how
heavily the odds will be stacked against you.
You don't know what the hospital is like--how big it is, even. You
don't know how many corridors there are, or how many alarm bells will
start ringing the instant anyone sees you. There may be a dozen nurses
to a floor and doctors constantly on the move from the operating rooms
to the recovery wards, and a Wendel agent or two on guard at the end
of each corridor.
All the exits may be blocked, with Wendel agents aimed with atomic
hand-guns just waiting for you to show up running. You don't even know
how far the hospital is from the center of the Colony, only that--just
before you blacked out for the last time in the ambulance--you seemed
to be quite a distance from the heart of the Colony.
Even if there are no guards at any of the exits and no one tries to
stop you how will you be able to find your way back to the spaceport
without a compass if the hospital is ten or fifteen miles from the
Colony, and all about you is a waste of desert sand and there are no
outgoing ambulances standing by to give you a lift.
High up in one of the rooms there'll be a Wendel agent you've belted
into insensibility and he'll be stirring and calling out for help and
when they come swarming into the hospital room to lift him up--the
nurses and the doctors who can't help but blanch a little when he
reminds them just how powerful the Wendel Combine is--he'll have only
one thing to say to them.
"Get me the Central Police Agency on the tele-communicator."
You'll be out in the red desert, fighting your way toward the Colony
through a sandstorm perhaps, but ten or twelve minutes after that call
goes through you'll hear a droning overhead and that will be the end of
you.
The hell of it was--no man ever needed an ally more desperately. I
needed a confederate, right at that moment in the room with me, if only
because I couldn't hope to cheat death for ten minutes running if I
ever reached the streets of the Colony without some Colony-type clothes
to replace the one-piece, in-patient garment I was wearing. A doctor's
white smock wouldn't do, and neither would a nurse's uniform. I didn't
have the right build to pass for a nurse even inside the walls of the
hospital, not to mention the craggy cast of my features and the heavy
growth of stubble which covered my cheeks.
15
Far back in the twentieth century, when World War II was just coming
to a close, the anti-Nazi underground movement had helped quite a few
soldiers escape from prison camps disguised as women. It certainly
wasn't a stratagem to be rejected out of hand, when your life was at
stake. But somehow my masculine pride was affronted by the thought and
I did not take kindly to it.
There had to be a lot of male patient's clothes hanging somewhere in
the hospital, but how was I to get my hands on a complete outfit if
I had to leave the hospital like a thief in the night, just one leap
ahead of Death in a Wendel police uniform?
Stealth? Would that solve it? If I moved very cautiously at first,
putting the thought of what could happen out of my mind, and trying to
find a room where clothes were hanging?
No--I couldn't afford to move too cautiously. I'd have to move fast and
boldly, trusting to blind ruck to protect me. But the clothes problem
still remained, and unless I could solve it--
She solved it for me. I didn't know that at first and neither did
she--I mean, she had no idea when she came back into the room that any
such problem would confront her. All she saw was Glacial Stare lying
slumped against the wall, his jaw sagging and the patient she'd left
flat on his back a short while before standing in the middle of the
room with his in-patient garment twisted grotesquely about his bony,
knobby knees and looking one hell of a mess. It's always been hard
for me to understand how a woman can find the angular, bony body of
a man attractive, especially when it's in a state of half-undress.
But there's no explaining the mystery of sex, and I'll give her this
much--she didn't give me a second glance for a moment. She had eyes
only for Glacial Stare. She stood staring down at him with all the
blood draining from her face, as if she'd never seen a dead man before
or a man as close to death as Glacial Stare seemed to be.
I saw the scream coming just in time. I stepped in front of her and
clamped my hand over her mouth, drawing her close to me, and keeping a
tight grip on her shoulder to prevent her from breaking away from me
and making a dash for the door.
I couldn't blame her for being scared or feeling, as she obviously did,
that I was responsible for the terrible state Glacial Stare was in. And
whatever Joan had told her about me ... and despite everything _she'd_
told the doctor ... she'd been a nurse long enough to know that even a
woman who has been married to a man for many years can never be sure
he won't develop some odd, wild quirk of character which will turn him
into a murderer overnight.
And that's even more true of a hospital patient who has been close to
death and running a fever and may still be in an irresponsible state,
his reason undermined by the suffering he's undergone.
And she was completely right about one thing. I was entirely
responsible for the terrible state Glacial Stare was in. Only ... there
had been a reason for the violence I had unleashed against him, and I
wanted her to hear the full story as quickly as possible, so that she
would calm down and become a responsible person again herself.
Hysteria is a woman's worst enemy ... and a man's too, for that matter.
But since it's ten times as common in women as in men it's a very
special problem which every man should know how to deal with. I was no
expert at it, but she helped me by listening to what I had to say in
my own defense as if her life depended on it. And when I was through
she seemed to agree with me that if someone had put an ether cone over
Glacial Stare's face in his sleep and relieved him of life's burdens in
a painless, merciful way they would have been doing humanity a service.
"It's not right to feel that way," she said. "It makes you wonder about
yourself when you even think you'd like to see someone who's that
ruthless removed from a world that has too many merciless people in it.
But I guess everyone who isn't that way ... thinks about it at times."
"I did more than think about it," I said. "But in the main I battered
him unconscious just to give myself a one in ten chance of staying
alive. The odds against me have shrunk a little, but not much. Unless I
can get out of here fast--"
"You can!" she breathed. "I'll help you. No one will try to stop us,
if we make it look as if I was just walking with you to the end of
the corridor and back. We get patients right out of bed after minor
surgery, to keep them from losing their strength. It's the best way."
"Minor surgery! You mean--"
Nurse Cherubin nodded. "They didn't have to probe to get the dart out.
It didn't go deep into your back. It was the poison that made you so
ill. The dart struck a bone and that jammed the poison mechanism. The
dart splintered just a little, but not enough poison got into your
bloodstream to kill you. But you ran a fever and once or twice I was
really frightened, because your pulse started fluttering and you almost
stopped breathing."
"Good God!" I looked at her, wondering. "If I was that close to death
how could my strength have come back so fast? I don't feel too good
right now. But I had enough strength when I crashed into him to drag
him from the chair, lift him up and slam him back against the wall."
She nodded. "Even a dying man can do that sometimes, if he's threatened
in a violent enough way and desperately wants to stay alive. But
you weren't that weak, and you're not going to die. You've got more
strength right now than you realize. And you'll get stronger--not
weaker. After minor surgery the post-operative shock is usually minor
too, and the fever didn't last long enough to seriously weaken you. The
last blood test was good. No poison--not even a millionth of a c.c. You
perspired freely, and that helped to save your life."
"All right," I said. "That's good news. Just the fact that you're the
only one who knows what would happen if I don't get out of here fast
would be better news--the best there is. Except that--"
I shook my head and looked past her toward the door. "What good would a
walk up the corridor do me if there's a Wendel agent stationed at the
end of it? A doctor might be taken in, but a Wendel agent would wonder
why a nurse was helping me to keep my strength up when I could answer
questions better flat on my back. He'd come right back into this room
with us, to find out what happened."
"There are no Wendel agents anywhere in the hospital," she said. "The
hospital would have put up a fight if a Wendel police officer had
insisted on questioning you as _he_ did--in private. It would have
been a losing battle, and we couldn't have held out for very long. By
tomorrow an armed guard would have demanded that you be released in
Wendel custody and you can't run a hospital in the Colony if you defy
the Wendel police to that extent."
I stared at her, amazed. "Then how did he get in here to see me?"
It was then that she exploded the bombshell.
"If the Wendel Combine, with all of its socio-political power, came
here in the person of just one man and threatened to make full use of
that power if he was not allowed to talk to you in strict privacy ...
and that man was Henry Wendel himself--"
She shrugged, glancing steadily for a moment at the slumped form of
Glacial Stare, with just an uncanny silence hovering over him. No trace
now of the power-aura that must have made hundreds of his yes-men turn
pale and snap to attention at various times in the past, if the look
he'd trained on me was ingrained and habitual with him. And I rather
thought it was.