even suspecting that I was slamming the Wendel Power Combine back
against a hospital-room wall. All the immense height and depth and
weight of it, the big atomic transmission lines, the towering black
turbines, the boa constrictor coils that snaked in all directions
through the center of the Colony. The war, too--the wolf-eat-wolf war
that was being waged with Endicott Fuel, and the demoralization that
was sounding taps over graves that hadn't been dug yet but would bear
the Wendel trademark.
The lawful authority that the silver bird had conferred on me would
have given me the right to act as his executioner then and there. But
you can't solve problems that way and hope to gain by it ... because
there are always other Mr. Bigs waiting to step into the shoes of the
Mr. Big you've taken care of in behalf of the common weal, with more
cocksureness than you've any right to exercise.
When you cut off the head of that kind of boa constrictor and leave the
big coils intact the new head may be twice or three times as dangerous.
That he had come to the hospital alone, completely unguarded, would
have been hard to believe if I hadn't remembered that an attempt had
been made to blast the sky ship apart in space solely because Wendel
wanted me out of the way. I was sure of that now. And if he wanted me
dead that bad, safe-guarding his person would probably have seemed of
minor importance to him. It could be waived--an inconsequential detail.
I had to be questioned and then killed, and he was the best man for the
job. He could trust no one else to handle it as well.
The joker was--he had botched it.
There were a lot more questions I wanted to ask Nurse Cherubin but
there just wasn't time for them. We'd wasted four or five minutes
already, just discussing the state of my health, and at any moment
someone might come through the door who would refuse to let me leave
when he saw what I'd done to Wendel.
It wouldn't have to be a Wendel agent. No doctor who wasn't keen
about committing suicide would have let me go until Wendel came to,
and our two stories could be compared. I didn't have the silver bird
to back up my story, and when Wendel came to he'd simply step to a
tele-communicator and the hospital would be swarming with Wendel agents
before I could hope to win any converts. The fact that he'd come to
visit me unguarded didn't mean he'd placed himself in any real
jeopardy ... in his book at least. He couldn't have known I'd knock him
out cold, and even if the hospital was located fifteen miles from the
Colony it wouldn't take the Wendel police long to get to him. Ten or
twelve minutes, at most.
Perhaps they were already on the way. It stood to reason. He'd hurried
himself and arrived ahead of them, but he'd want them to be there as
soon as he killed me, to dump my body on a stretcher and carry it out
under guard.
When he killed me--God, how easy it was to overlook the most vital
things! I hadn't even searched him. If he had a weapon on him I could
certainly use it, for nothing can boost your morale quite so much when
your life is at stake as the firm, cool feel of an atomic hand-gun
against your palm.
I was starting toward him when Nurse Cherubin said: "Stay here, and
keep the door locked until I come back. I'll tap three times. I've got
to get you some clothes."
I nodded, feeling overwhelmingly grateful, tempted to take another
minute--precious as every minute was--to tell how wonderful I thought
her. She seemed to know without my saying a word, for her wide mouth
smiled a little and she was gone.
I stepped to the door and locked it, and then returned across the room
and bent over Mr. Big.
I found the weapon but I had to roll him over to get at it, because it
was in a holster at his hip. His body was a dead weight, but when I got
the weapon free he stirred a little and groaned. I clouted him on the
jaw and he stopped groaning. Brutal? You bet it was, but I couldn't
afford to take any chances on his coming to.
What would you have done? If I'd killed him right then and there, the
Board would not have censured me. I was sure of that. Not to have done
so was perhaps foolish, a weakness in me. I was cutting down my chances
of getting as far as the Colony, before a security alert went out, and
the Wendel police started after me with instructions to blast me down
on sight.
But somehow I couldn't do it. Not only for the reasons I've
mentioned ... because a new head on the Wendel boa constrictor would
have solved nothing ... but because it went against the grain. I'd have
had a feeling of guilt I never could have completely thrown off. He'd
intended to kill me, all right ... no doubt of that. But I couldn't
return the compliment in the same coin. It made no sense, perhaps, but
that's the way it was.
The weapon pleased me. It was an atomic hand-gun that had cost a small
fortune to construct--intricate, extremely compact, the latest model,
the finest, the best. Fortunately I knew a great deal about such
weapons, because unusual-type firearms have always fascinated me.
This one I was sure I could aim and fire with accuracy, even though
some of the precision gadgetry was new to me. Twenty-five thousand
dollars at least that gun had set Henry Wendel back, but what was
twenty-five thousand to a man with a fortune of eight or ten billion?
It seemed tragic and a pity that all of that money should have been
spent on a weapon that would pass out of his hands into the possession
of a man unfriendly to him. But it didn't sadden me too much and I felt
even less sad when I'd unbuckled the holster also, strapped it to my
own hip and thrust the hand-gun back into it.
She knocked three times, as she'd promised and came in with some
clothes that some poor devil in another room would never live to put
on again. She told me as much while I was taking off my one-piece
in-patient garment.
"Cancer," she said. "They're keeping him under sedation. You think
you're in trouble, that the game is hardly worth the candle, until you
see something like that. Then you realize how lucky you are--just to be
alive."
"You don't have to tell me," I said. "I've often thought along those
lines."
She wasn't embarrassed when I stood for a moment stark naked before
her, as most nurses aren't. I wasn't particularly embarrassed either,
because right at that moment I had no more sex awareness than a totem
pole.
The clothes were a little small for me, but I had a feeling that in
the Colony not too much attention was paid to the way clothes fitted
you--or failed to fit. In a pioneering society ill-fitting clothes are
accepted as an indication that you are a rough-and-tumble sort of guy,
know your way around and are, for good measure, an old-timer, with
early-settler prestige.
There were two more questions I had to ask her before I became a
babe-in-the-woods kind of grown man on Mars, with just the hand-gun and
a few highly trained areas of native intelligence to protect me--if I
succeeded in getting out of the hospital alive. It was still a very big
_if_, but the questions were just as vital, and were directly tied in
with it.
Just how far _was_ the hospital from the Colony? And what was she going
to tell Joan to keep her from succumbing to panic when my darling
wanted to know what had become of me?
Before we left the room she answered the second question reassuringly.
It had been weighing so heavily on my mind I'd been afraid to even let
myself bring it right out into the open and face it squarely. Mr. Big
hadn't even mentioned Joan in the ugly little talk I'd had with him,
and if she was still somewhere in the hospital I had a feeling he'd
have used her nearness as one more way of tightening the thumbscrew.
I'd been right about that, apparently. "She had a talk with Commander
Littlefield on the tele-communicator," Nurse Cherubin said. "He advised
her to return to the Mars' rocket a few hours ago. He wanted to talk to
her ... said it was urgent ... and promised to check on your progress
report every half hour. She left in one of the outgoing ambulances. She
told me she'd be back just as soon as you regained consciousness. It's
a very short trip in an ambulance. The hospital is only eight miles
from the Colony."
So that answered my first question too, but only in part. If there was
just a waste of blowing sand outside it would certainly cut down my
chances. But there had to be a firm-packed road for the ambulances to
travel over, didn't there?
"No," she said, answering me in full a half-minute later, when the
door of the hospital room had been firmly closed behind us and we were
committed to the big risk and there could be no turning back. She
paused an instant to urge me to be cautious, to stagger a little and
grip her arm for support and try to look in all respects like a patient
taking his first uncertain walk after a minor operation. I didn't have
to worry about looking pale, but when she went on and explained what
she'd meant by the "no" relief swept over me and probably marred a
little the impression it was important to give anyone who chanced to
glance our way.
"There's no desert to cross," she said. "It's all built up. You'll
be passing between high stone walls with massive metal grills set
deep in the stone most of the time, with here and there a gap and a
few scattered pre-fabs occupied by aereator-system workers and their
families."
So that was it! I knew all about the Martian aerator-system and the big
turbines that pumped oxygen out over the Colony. So much oxygen, under
such stabilized pressure, that it stayed in equilibrium and didn't fly
off into space even under the light gravity. Even without the aerators
there was enough oxygen in the thin Martian atmosphere to enable a man
to stay alive for a short period, if he didn't mind going about with
his shoulders bent, gasping for breath and turning blue at intervals.
His cheeks, anyway, with the veins on his forehead standing out like
whipcords.
The first colonists, as everyone knows, went about with oxygen tanks
strapped to their backs and took a whiff or two of the stuff in
Earth-atmosphere concentration through a flexible metal tube whenever
their lungs started burning. And inside the early pre-fabs, of course,
there were miniature aerator systems which made living indoors as
comfortable as it was Earthside.
But the big aerator-system had completely eliminated the need--a health
hazard-diminishing need at best and never actually mandatory--of the
huge glass dome which imaginative science writers in the first three
decades of the Space Age had predicted as a _must_ for successful
Martian colonization. There are seldom any _musts_ when science
advances in seven league boots and you're right on the scene in person,
breathing in a planet's atmosphere for yourself and finding out that
there just happens to be a little more oxygen in it than precision
instruments on Earth had led you to anticipate.
It wasn't a precision instrument of any kind I was needing right at
that moment--even to reassure me about my heart beat. I knew exactly
how fast it was beating--much too fast. We passed a doctor in a smock
so spotless it didn't seem as if he could have been wearing it for
longer than a few minutes. But the look of quick suspicion he trained
on us was ageless, the kind of look that comes into the eyes of a
trained professional man when he can't be quite sure that a subordinate
is doing the wise thing.
What right had the nurse to take me for a walk along the corridor
when I looked that close to caving in? I feared for an instant I was
overdoing the act, but when the suspicion faded and he went past us
along the corridor I breathed more freely again. We passed a nurse who
didn't even glance at us and another--blonde and pert-nosed--who smiled
and nodded, just as if we were old friends. I wondered what she saw in
me.
Then we were standing before an elevator at the end of the corridor and
the red down light came on ... because Nurse Cherubin had pressed the
down button ... and she was urging me to be cautious for the second
time.
"We're going down three flights to the admitting ward," she said. She
smiled, as if she'd suddenly remembered there's nothing like a touch of
levity to relieve strain, even if it has to be forced. "But don't let
that dishearten you. Patients are discharged from the admitting ward
too. It's not quite as long as this corridor but it will be busier.
Patients, nurses--at least three doctors. We'll just walk right through
as if we had every right to be there. Just outside the emergency exit,
a few steps further on, there's a driveway which curves around behind
the hospital. Ambulances with accident victims use it, but there's not
likely to be an ambulance standing there. You go down a narrow flight
of stairs to get to it. Is that clear?"
I nodded. "What do I do then?"
"You just follow the driveway until it forks and the left turn will
take you into the clear-away between the aerators which leads directly
to the Colony. You won't have to pass in front of the hospital at all.
Ambulances may pass you before you get to the Colony, but you won't be
stopped and questioned. They'll think you're one of the aeration-system
workers."
I had an impulse to give her a hug and tell her I loved her, quite sure
that she'd know what I meant, even if I did it inside the elevator
where it would have more an aspect of intimacy. You love people who go
all out to help you and they don't even have to be young and beautiful.
But when they are there's an added warmth somehow--
We carried it off better than I'd dared to hope. We descended in the
elevator, emerged arm in arm and walked right through the admitting
ward without even glancing at the fifteen or twenty people we had to
pass to get to the emergency exit she'd mentioned, a third of them
in white. No one stopped or questioned us, and we followed the same
nurse-helping-patient routine which had proved its worth on the third
floor of the hospital.
And then--I did hug and kiss her, just once briefly before I went out
through the exit and down the stairs to the driveway. I hoped Joan
wouldn't mind if she ever got to hear about it.
"Goodbye," I said. "And thank you."
16
There was no waiting ambulance in the driveway. I descended the
stairway, twelve metal steps railed in on both sides, feeling grateful
for what she'd said right after I kissed her. "Don't worry about your
wife. If Wendel tries to make us send for her we'll find a way to roast
him over a slow fire until you're together again. There are three
doctors who will put up a stiff fight and I'm going to set to work on
all of them. You've no idea what a hospital can do with just the right
kind of delaying tactics."
It took me less than two minutes to half-encircle the driveway, take
the turn she'd recommended and strike out for the Colony between the
towering gray walls of the aerators.
The Big Grayness. I'd seen photographs of that tremendous engineering
project in my hell-bent-for-adventure years, when I'd sat at a desk
in a schoolroom, and imagined what it would be like to take part in
the construction work, standing on a dizzy height with an electronic
riveter in my hand, watching blue lights go on and off and sparks fly
up into the cool Martian night beneath a wilderness of stars.
The reality was very much as I'd imagined it as a school kid, except
that I wasn't a construction worker looking down over it, a human fly
with a man-size job to do, but a guy that kid wouldn't have recognized,
his footsteps echoing on the catwalk at the base of it. I had a
giant-size job to do, but how could he have known it would some day
turn into anything _that_ big?
It wasn't even a project anymore--half of it still in the blueprint
stage. It was completed and the towering gray walls were firm and
solid, and the grills were sending oxygen spiraling out over the Colony
without making me feel light-headed at all.
Right at that moment I'd have welcomed a little oxygen intoxication
but the aerator-system didn't work that way. The flow was regulated
directly at the source, kept under controlled pressure and diffused
outward high up by rotary circulators. As it spread out over the Colony
it was drawn down to breathing level by another system of circulators,
stationed at intervals about the Colony and extending twenty-five miles
out into the surrounding desert.
If you wanted to experience oxygen intoxication you had to strap a tank
to your back and breathe the stuff in through a tube in the old way.
But no one in his right mind would do that deliberately, for an excess
of oxygen can be five-ways dangerous on a planet where what you have to
worry about most is over-stimulation.
There were catwalks on both sides of the aerator walls, with a central
lane wide enough for vehicles to pass in opposite directions. I kept
to the right hand side all the way to the Colony, and it took me about
thirty minutes to get there. My strength amazed me. It probably wasn't
quite up to par. But I only had to stop twice to rest and then only for
a minute or two.
Two ambulances passed me, their red tail-lights blinking, but the
drivers didn't even turn their heads as the vehicles went droning
through the Big Grayness. Up above the sunlight was waning, and
turning red, but only a diffuse glow filled that two hundred-foot-high
artificial cavern.
Three aerator-system workers, walking shoulder to shoulder, gave me a
bad jolt for a moment, for they had the look of Wendel police agents.
I encountered them just beyond a break in the cavern wall, where a
cluster of pre-fabs with children playing in the yards made five or six
acres of stony ground resemble a manufacturing town suburb Earthside.
I should have known better than to be alarmed, because the three men
approaching me looked eager and expectant, as if they knew that a few
steps more would bring relaxation after toil and the warmth and glow of
a family reunion.
But they had the husky build and sharp-angled features of Wendel police
officers and I stayed alert until one of them came to a dead halt and
looked me over genially. "New on the job, aren't you, Buster? Don't
remember having run into you before. They keep putting on so many new
men it's hard to be sure."
"That's right," I said. "I live about two miles further on."
"Well, it isn't the best job in the world, Buster, as I guess you've
found out already. You get sucked into a grill sometimes, and breathe
nothing but oxygen until you feel like a blue baby they're trying their
best to save, even if they have to fanny-whack him to get the stuff out
of his lungs for a week or two afterwards."
"Don't discourage him, Pete," the tallest of the three chided. "You
have a cold, cold heart. It doesn't happen often."
"You bet it doesn't ... or my wife would have been a widow long before
this. Well ... good luck, Buster. Be seeing you around ... I hope."
I felt so relieved I didn't even resent the "Buster." He was just a big
grinning ape who liked to kid the living daylights out of his fellow
workers, whenever he thought he could get away with it. No harm in him,
and though there might have been times when I'd have been tempted to
take a poke at him ... I had no such impulse now. I just wanted to be
able to look back and see him dwindling in the distance.
I ran into only one other person before the Big Grayness terminated.
She was a stout, matronly-looking woman carrying a baby and she nodded
and smiled warmly when she saw me staring at the infant, as if she
wouldn't have at all minded if I had been its father.
For an instant there flashed into my mind the nerve-relaxing picture
that every normal male has of himself at times--the humble-station
husband, big-bosomed wife picture. You're Mr. Run-of-the-Mill, just a
simple guy, working hard at a lathe or feeding processed food tins into
a vacuumator. You come home at night with no worries, kick off your
shoes and she's there to make the creature comforts seem important.
A good meal on the table, fit for a king with a hearty appetite--do
kings ever have that kind of appetite?--children romping all over the
house--a round half-dozen upstairs and down--and the kind of night's
sleep you don't get when you have responsibilities weighing on you. The
top-echelon kind that can drive you half out of your mind. It's there
for the taking if you really want it, if you don't wear a silver bird
on your uniform when they add up the score and ask you why in hell you
haven't done better?
It's not quite an accurate picture, because that kind of guy has
worries too--plenty of them. He has to buy shoes for the children and
grin and be tolerant when his wife turns shrewish, as every woman with
a large family and a big grocery bill is bound to do at times. But
still, when you balance the good against the bad, who gets the most out
of life--Mr. Run-of-the-Mill or Mr. Big?
Well ... however much I might fume about it ... I had to be what I was.
I could honestly say that I'd never had any driving ambition to be the
kind of Mr. Big Wendel was. I just had a kind of inner compulsion to
be true to the best that was in me, to preserve my integrity and use
whatever wild talents I had to enrich human life and have some fun
while doing it. If I couldn't always have fun, if illness or death
or just plain bad luck prevented me from living life to the full and
enjoying it ... I'd known that when I'd cut the cards, hadn't I? You
have to play whatever cards destiny hands you.
Just before I reached the last quarter mile of the aerator marathon I
passed another dwelling section, with more kids scampering about and
three or four women standing in the doorways of the pre-fabs. They
didn't look big-bosomy, but slender as willow trees and very beautiful.
I certainly wasn't running, but it was a marathon in my book, the
walking kind where you keep your body held rigid, your arms bent
sharply at the elbows. There was only one good thing about it. I didn't
have to worry about out-distancing the other walkers, because it was a
one-man marathon.
I came out into the biggest square I'd ever seen. The one opposite the
skyport I'd crossed with just as much tension and uncertainty mounting
in me an eternity ago on Earth was just about one-fourth as large, give
or take a few square yards of shadowy pavement.
In a way, the Big Grayness was still with me, because there were
gigantic, interlocking shadows everywhere and although there was
nothing but open sky overhead spirals of wind-blown sand were swirling
across it, half-blotting out the waning sunlight.
When you're sure that Death hasn't played his final trump or even
relaxed his vigilance and you could be yanked right back to confront
him at any moment a square as big and empty and desolate-looking as
that doesn't give you any support at all.
All right, there was life and movement in it, if you want to call a
long line of tractors standing end to end on the far side, one of them
snail-active, life and movement.
One of the trucks seemed to be backing up a little and edging out from
between the others, but I couldn't even be sure of that before an
ear-splitting blast of sound and a blinding flash of light shattered my
last link with the sane universe.
17
I was lifted up and hurled backwards, so violently that if blind luck
hadn't saved me I'd have fractured my skull or felt, ripping through
my chest, the beaten-drum agony that sets in right after you've shaken
hands with a spinal concussion.
I came down heavily, hitting the pavement with a thud. But in falling I
went into a kind of half-spin, and landed on my side in a loose-jointed
sprawl that just shook me up a little.
I rolled over on my back and stared up in horror. For an instant I was
sure that the whole sky had burst into flame. Then the flare dimmed and
vanished and I could see that the dust spirals were still there.
I raised myself on one elbow and stared out across the square. The
long line of tractors was still there, too. Not one of the vehicles
had been blown sky high. And as if that wasn't enough of a miracle
the snail-paced one had turned about and was heading straight in my
direction.
It wasn't moving at a snail's pace now. It was coming directly at me
from mid-way in the square, rumbling and clattering as it came, its
heavy treads so ponderously in motion that the pavement under me was
beginning to vibrate.
Nearer it came and nearer, swaying a little, and if the driver had been
some crazy killer bent on crushing me to death under the treads he
couldn't have gone about it more expertly, for he was maneuvering the
vehicle just enough to make sure that it would pass directly over me.
How could I doubt it? It had veered slightly and swung back into a
straight-line course again, and if I'd tried to drag myself out of its
path there was room enough for it to veer again before I could hope to
save myself.