The Frank Belknap Long Science Fiction Novel

by Frank Belknap Long

  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 throug
h 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 abo
ut 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.