Chapter VI: Part 6

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.

Mr. Big himself! And I'd banged him around without knowing, without 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.

It takes several seconds to recover from a scare like that, even when the danger evaporates right before your eyes. All at once the tractor _was_ veering again, but far enough to the left to make me feel certain that I wouldn't be flattened to a pancake if I stayed where I was. But you can feel certain about something like that and go right on remembering what big tractors have done at various times in the past to men unfortunate enough to be caught off guard when there's a killer in the driver's seat.

The vehicle came to a jolting, grinding halt a few yards to the left of me, and the driver swung himself out of the glass-shielded front seat, descended lightly to the ground, and was grabbing me by the arm and helping me to rise before I could get a really good look at him.

He'd descended from the tractor lightly because he was that kind of a man--just about the most fragile-looking guy I'd ever seen. He was lean to the point of emaciation, with gaunt cheeks and sparse white hair that was fluffed out like thistledown by the wind that was blowing across the square.

He had deepset brown eyes, very sharp and piercing and they were glowing now with a kind of feverish brightness, as if his agitation matched my own or had reached a peak that was just a trifle higher. There was nothing surprising about that, if he knew exactly what had happened and it was as bad as I feared it might be.

Despite his frailness, he had the features of a strong-willed man, the chin and mouth firm, the nose pinched a little at the nostrils, as if stubbornness in adversity had become an ingrained habit with him. I had the feeling I'd seen that face before, but I couldn't remember where or under what circumstances.

I was certainly seeing it now under the most nerve-shattering of all circumstances and would not be likely to forget it a second time.

"How are you, all right?" he asked, his eyes searching my face as if he was far from sure I knew myself and the way I looked would tell him more than just a guess on my part. "That explosion was miles from here," he went on breathlessly, "but it lifted the tractor right off the ground, treads and all, for a second. I had the craziest kind of floating sensation until it settled down and kept right on in this direction. I increased the speed, because I sort of felt that a fast-moving machine would have a better chance of not overturning."

I stared at him half-dazedly, feeling like a pawn on a chessboard that had tilted just far enough to make me wonder if it might not still be precariously poised and go crashing at any moment. And since I couldn't see the players I didn't know what the rules of that particular game were or how far they had been abrogated.

"How do you feel?" he asked.

His solicitude amazed me, because if what he'd just said was true--and I had no reason to doubt it--he should have been more shaken up than I was and he seemed to have something on his mind that was making him stare straight past me toward the Big Grayness.

I was staring in the opposite direction. "I'm all right," I assured him. "Just feel ... a little dizzy." I gestured toward the tractors on the far side of the square. "What's over there? Did the explosion come from there?"

He shook his head. "No. I told you it was miles from here, in the direction of the spaceport. That's the Endicott Administration Building, fuel conveyor sections and two-thirds of the distributing units. The tractors are all owned by Endicott. I backed this one out from between them and had just about gotten it turned around when the blast hit me."

"I know," I said. "I saw you. I wondered why only one tractor--"

That was as far as I got, because what hit me then was more jolting than any blast could have been, and it wasn't even physical. Just one word he'd let drop with a delayed-action fuse attached to it made me snap my head back and look at him in desperation. He had no way of knowing what was in my mind, but you don't think of that when you want someone to do you a favor that's of life-and-death importance to you.

I wanted him to withdraw that one word, to pretend at least that he hadn't said it. It didn't have to be true, he could have been just guessing.

The word was "spaceport." It couldn't matter that much to him, surely. It wasn't his wife but mine who was at the spaceport, and if he was wrong about where the explosion had taken place it would cost him nothing to be merciful and admit that he was far from sure about it.

But before I could hope to get such an admission out of him he sounded a knell to the granting of favors by saying: "Wendel technicians are activating Endicott fuel cylinders in different sections of the Colony. They're trying to turn the Colonists against Endicott by committing mass murder. The cylinders will only destroy an area of a few square miles, because they're not in the multiple-megaton, nuclear warhead category. We never thought they'd be turned into bombs."

Then came the knell. "We were warned about this, by a Colonist who's on his way to the spaceport with one of the cylinders. Or he may be there already. He just spoke to us briefly on the tele-communicator. That explosion came from the direction of the spaceport, but it may not be the one we were warned about. They may be trying to dismantle another cylinder at the spaceport right now. They won't succeed, because only an Endicott technician would know how to go about it."

"Do you know?"

He nodded. "Yes ... I can dismantle it. I can get to the spaceport in about fifteen minutes, if I drive between the aerators and turn right just before I get to the hospital. The clear-away from that point on will take me through a section of the Colony and then straight out across the desert to the spaceport. The Colonist who talked with us made a serious mistake, but it wasn't his fault. He had no way of knowing that it takes a fuel cylinder at least forty-five minutes to build up to critical mass after it's been activated. In some cases--fifty or fifty-five minutes."

He paused an instant, then went on quickly. "He should have brought it here. We could have dismantled it in time. But he was afraid it would kill several thousand people if it went off anywhere near his home, or in this section of the Colony. He also over-estimated the area that would be demolished by the blast. When he talked to us he was two-thirds of the way to the spaceport and if we'd told him to turn back then and bring the cylinder here the risks would have been too great. We had to let him go on. I said they can't dismantle it at the spaceport. But there's a slim chance they can ... because there may be an Endicott man there or someone who knows enough about Endicott cylinders to make a hit-or-miss try. With luck, he may just possibly succeed. But I doubt it."

"You doubt it? Good God--"

"I doubt it very much. That's why it's so important for me to get there as fast as I can. It's my responsibility--and I refuse to share it with anyone. There are times when a man must face death alone."

"Who are you?" I asked.

"A man with much to answer for, the opposite of a good man. I'm Kenneth H. Hillard, President of the Endicott Combine."

It stunned me for a moment, because it was as big a bombshell as Nurse Cherubin had exploded back at the hospital when she'd nodded toward a slumped caricature of a man and told me exactly who I'd been banging around.

But it didn't stun me for long, because even the showdown miracle of two Mr. Big's taking matters into their own hands when all of the chips were down--Hillard was also a giant despite his frailness and a better man than Wendel could ever hope to be--even the wonder and strangeness of it was of less concern to me at that moment than the danger that Joan was in.

I told him then. "I'm going with you," I said. "I've every right. If I'm cutting in on your yen to face death alone ... that's just too bad. I'm going with you, or you don't go at all. I pack quite a wallop, and you may as well know it. Wendel does."

"Your wife. I see...."

"I hope to Christ you do--"

"Get in!" he said sharply. "I may need you. I'm not a well man. My heart--"

We climbed in and he tugged at the brakes, releasing them and the big vehicle lumbered into motion.

It was already pointed in the right direction, and in less than half a minute--the second time within fifteen minutes for me--we were deep in the Big Grayness, with the walls of the aerators looming up on both sides of us.

Up above all of the sunlight had dwindled to the vanishing point and the gigantic artificial cavern was lighted now along its entire length by cold light lamps embedded in the walls at fifty-foot intervals. The solid, three-dimensional world outside our minds, whatever segment of reality we happen to be passing through, never looks quite the same to any two individuals. It is always, in a sense, a special creation, colored and altered by the human imagination.

To me the cold light lamps were chillingly like enormous eyes, keeping us under constant scrutiny. The scrutiny of giants, standing motionless in shadows, with just their luminous eye-sockets visible. It was as if any moment, promoted by some wild whim, the giant forms might take a violent dislike to us, might raise mace-like metal fists and smash the tractor, very much as a robot giant had smashed a Wendel agent in space, with a fiendishly mechanical rancor.

But to the frail man at my side the aerator walls may have been chilling in a quite different way, if he was giving the Big Grayness any thought at all.

Apparently he wasn't, because when his voice rose above the rumble of the treads he didn't once mention the aerators or the pale blue light that was glimmering on the hood of the tractor.

"It's the beginning of the end--either one way or the other," he shouted. "Either Wendel will be destroyed by the Colonists themselves for committing mass murder, or we'll go down under a juggernaut that can't be stopped. Sometimes you can't smash absolute evil, when it's backed up by absolute power."

I raised my voice as high as he'd done, because I wanted to be sure he'd hear me. "It will always be stopped in the end, I think--if you have enough moral courage. That's a dynamic in itself, the most formidable of all weapons. All history confirms it."

"I wish I could believe that!" he shouted back. "But I'm not so sure. And you have to fight with reasonably clean hands. Endicott is almost as guilty as Wendel, except that it would rather be destroyed than resort to mass murder."

"That's two-thirds of the right," I shouted back. "That's where the biggest dividing line comes. Every tyranny in human history that has resorted to mass murder has gone down into everlasting night and darkness and very quickly. The few that survived to die a natural death drew back at that point. The great, utterly ruthless destroyers always perish."

We both fell silent then, because there are times when the whole of the future and everything that human anger and courage can do to safeguard the future and keep it from destruction seems less important than coming to grips with an immediate, life-and-death emergency. When you do that you're going all out to safeguard the future as well, but you don't think of it in that way. Just getting to the spaceport in time--Oh, God, yes, in time to be at least a little ahead of time, so that Hillard would have steady nerves and could dismantle the cylinder with cautious precision, with no zero-count demoralization to make his fingers stray from the right wires--just getting there and finishing the job before the spaceport could become a translucent cone of fire was a million times as important to me, right at that moment, as the Wendel-Endicott war.

A million times as important, Ralphie boy. Don't be ashamed of feeling that way. If the spaceport blows up, and there's no Joan any more, and the universe comes to an end for you, you've no sure guarantee that the actors who will step into your shoes and occupy the center of the stage will make any better job of it than you've been doing. So it will be a loss, however you slice it, because the death of two lovers is always a loss. You fight better when you've been given that best of all head starts.

18

We stayed silent until the tractor had rumbled past eight or ten of the breaks in the Big Grayness. They were shrouded in dusk-light now, with no kids playing in the front yards of the housing area pre-fabs. Then, just as we were turning into the clear-away that branched off from the one I'd taken on leaving the hospital, Hillard shouted: "We've got to get over to the left! There's an ambulance right up ahead!"

I heard the siren before I saw it, a banshee-like wail cutting through the twilight, unnerving in its shrillness. It took a moment or two for its winking red headlights to come sweeping toward us and if Hillard had seen them before that it had to mean he had exceptionally sharp eyesight.

It careened past without slowing, almost grazing the hood of the tractor. I thought for an instant, when the banshee wail became shrill again, that it was still coming from the same ambulance. Then I saw four more furiously blinking headlights coming out of the dusk ahead of us, and another ambulance swept past, as swiftly as the first had done, but missing us by a wider margin.

A third followed it at a distance of less than a hundred feet, its siren at such full blast that it no longer sounded like a banshee wail.

You can be gripped by a dread that's practically breath-stopping and still manage to shout, if your only other choice is to die inwardly.

It may have been more of a groan than a shout. My voice sounded ragged and it almost broke. "Could those ambulances be coming from the spaceport? Do you think--"

He cut me off. I probably couldn't have gone on anyway.

"They could never have gotten out there and back so fast!" he shouted. "We'll be passing through a section of the Colony in about two more minutes. It's closer to the hospital, so it's just possible they've picked up a few victims at the fringe of the blast area who didn't have our luck."

"The fallout area must be pretty wide!" I shouted back. "Wherever the explosion took place--"

He cut me off again. "No fallout--or very little. What there is is gone within four or five minutes. Safe to go in after that, for the residue wouldn't mutate a fruitfly. Colonists don't know that ... closely guarded Endicott trade secret. Reason we let the Colonists store them. A fuel cylinder can be converted into a nuclear bomb, all right, but it will be the cleanest midget bomb ever built. Take fifteen or twenty of them to blow up even a third of the Colony. But that doesn't mean that one couldn't blow up the spaceport, or seriously injure hundreds of people throughout the fringe area. The ground tremor alone could do that. I told you what it did to this tractor. Has the force of a small earthquake, except that the tremors are three times as erratic. They can just shake you up a little, or break every bone in your body. Depends on where you happen to be standing. It follows a zigzagging pattern, so it can pass right by you."

All that didn't come in one shout, but I'm recording it that way because I didn't interrupt him, and though he must have stopped once or twice to take a deep breath, and keep a sharp lookout for another ambulance I wasn't aware of any break in what he was saying. He was trying his best to make it crystal clear, if only to calm me down a little.

Some of it was reassuring, but not what he'd said about the spaceport. A clean bomb with little or no fallout can leave you just as dead if you're unfortunate enough to be blown up by it.

You see things sometimes you can't bring yourself to talk about, even to close friends when the horror has receded a little and you know it can't come back in a physical way to torment you.

So I'm going to draw the veil over most of what we saw when we passed through about five square miles of the Colony, before the clear-away broadened out to twice its previous width and we headed out across the desert toward the spaceport.

We couldn't be sure, even then, just where the explosion had taken place, because it was only the fringe area we passed through. It hadn't been laid waste by the blast and there were only five or six demolished buildings. If the big square which stretched between the Endicott plant and the aerators had been a built-up section instead of a square the property damage might have been just as great and would not have seemed ruinous.

But there was one other difference. The Endicott square had been unpopulated, with just one tractor moving out from the long line of tractors on the far side. The five miles of Colony we passed through had been the opposite of unpopulated. Its streets and squares and playgrounds and vehicle-parking areas had been thronged with people.

They were still thronged with people but some of them were lying prone, and others were leaning dazedly against the walls of buildings which had remained for the most part undamaged and still others, who no longer seemed to be in a state of shock, were bending over the slumped bodies of the grievously injured and the dying, doing their best to console them and ease their pain.

I'm drawing the veil on the rest of it--the blood and the screaming--because it was pretty awful, and what possible purpose would be served if I described it? How could it benefit anyone? It would serve as a reminder of how cruel life can be at times, how uncertain and terrible. We know that, don't we? So ... to hell with it ... I say that in a very reverent way, with awe and respect, and not profanely. But it's best to consign it where it belongs, to hell, and not let it paralyze all action and make you give up when there are still sunsets, and the laughter of children, and the happiness of lovers, and ten thousand other things that are worth fighting to preserve.

It took us less than eight minutes to arrive at the spaceport, dusty from head to foot, with sand choking our lungs and gasping a little from oxygen shortage, because when there's a stiff wind blowing over the desert the aerators don't function at peak efficiency.

I didn't know there was anything wrong until the tractor began to zigzag a little, about three hundred feet from the massive, steel-mesh gates of the spaceport.

He had strength enough left to tug at the brakes and bring the tractor to a grinding halt before he slumped against me, with a strangled sob that chilled me to the core of my being. It chilled me and stunned me and frightened me, because I'd never thought that anything like that could happen.

He was frail, all right, and had the look of a man whose health had been steadily failing ... no doubt partly brought about by the battle he'd been waging with Wendel. And he'd mentioned something about heart-trouble--

The trouble was, I hadn't taken all that too seriously, because you never think that someone who has displayed extraordinary energy and firmness of will is going to collapse right when you need him most.

I swung about and looked at him, and his pallor gave me an even worse jolt than the way he'd moaned and sagged heavily against me.

He gripped my arm and tried to speak, but the words wouldn't come. His lips moved soundlessly for a moment and then--they stopped moving. His body stopped moving too. All at once, as if a clock had stopped ticking inside of him, and Time had stopped ticking for him forever just because his life and the clock were bound up together, intricate parts of the same mechanism, and if the clock stopped there was no way his life could be prolonged.

I knew he was dead before I reached out and touched him. I could tell by the dull, unseeing glaze which had over-spread his pupils and the terrible stillness which had come upon him. A stillness and a rigidity that made it impossible for me to doubt what the alarm bells were telling me as well. They had started ringing again, but this time it wasn't so much an alarm they were sounding as a dirge.

It was impossible for me to doubt, but I still had to make sure, as he would have wanted me to do, by feeling for a heartbeat that wasn't there and satisfying myself in other ways. It was an obligation I couldn't evade and had no intention of evading.

It took me less than a minute and a half--a time limit I kept firmly in mind--to fulfill that obligation. Then I descended from the tractor and headed for the steel-mesh gates of the spaceport on the run.

19

"Ralph!" she cried, running to meet me as I walked into the big, steel-walled enclosure where Commander Littlefield and eight or ten or possibly twelve men in gray skyport-technician uniforms were working over a long metal cylinder that Death had started working on well ahead of them. He was the expert and they were just amateurs doing the best they could to beat the time limit he had set for them. With a grim chuckle, no doubt, because, as I said once before, Death is a weird-o.

Joan's arms went around my shoulders and she crushed herself against me, and kissed me hard on the mouth. Then she let go of me and moved quickly to one side, so that Commander Littlefield could talk to me without interference or a moment's delay. She seemed to know without waiting for me to say a word how important that was.

One look at Littlefield's white face told me all I really wanted to know. But I decided that if he could fill in the details for me in half a minute I could risk setting another time-limit in my mind and clocking him second by second by second as he talked.

"A nurse at the hospital got word to us you'd be doing your best to get back here, Ralph," he said. "The Wendel police have orders to blast you down on sight, but now that you're here I can protect you--or you can protect yourself. I've got your papers and insignia. Right now that's not so urgent as what's happening inside this Endicott fuel cylinder. It's been triggered to build up to critical mass by a Wendel agent. A Colonist brought it here and we've been trying to dismantle it. But we don't know just how to go about it and we don't dare experiment. We've taken a few _small_ risks, naturally. We've had to. But we're getting nowhere, and what looks like a small risk could turn out to be a big one. We don't even know how much time we've got!"

He spoke almost calmly, without raising his voice, but there was nothing calm about the way he looked. The time limit I'd set to clock him by had run out and now it was my turn. I was going to have to ask him to do something that might seem only a little less terrible to him than being blown apart by a nuclear explosion.

But it would have to be done--and fast.

I clocked myself as I talked, allowing myself about forty seconds. "Those cylinders build up to critical mass when they've been tampered with and triggered to explode in about forty-five minutes," I said. "Don't ask me how I know, because I haven't time to explain. I _do_ know--you can take my word for it. I knew the cylinder was here, and I was hoping you'd find a way--"

I caught myself up. "Never mind that now. Just listen. I don't know how long it took the Colonist to bring it here or how long you've been working over it. But it hasn't exploded yet. _So there's still a chance we can get it out into space before it blows up!_"