Mars is My Destination, Frank Belknap Long [reading an ebook .TXT] 📗

look. Or a more restless and discontented look. It's even hard to tell whether young people or middle-aged people predominate, or just how many very old people there are. Or how many infants in arms, except that there did seem to be an exceptionally large number of children, either being wheeled or carried or toddling along in the wake of their parents, or playing games with the fierce competitiveness of twelve-year-olds in fenced-in sand lots which no one had taken the trouble to pave.

There were theaters too—places of amusement, anyway—which you could tell featured lively entertainment just from the gaudy blue and yellow posters on their facades.

That there were machines clattering past goes without saying. A tremendous amount of new construction was under way in every part of the Colony and if you just say "Mars" in a word association test one man or woman in three will come right back with "Machinery."

There were pipes, too—huge and branching, big, shining metal tubes that arched above buildings and ran parallel with almost every street in the Colony. A tremendous brood of writhing snakes was what they reminded me of—the artificial kind that kids delight in scaring people with at birthday parties, all mottled over with the bronze sheen of copperheads, but looking more like boa constrictors in their tremendous girth.

Another kind of snake image flashed into my mind as I stared out through the windows of the ambulance at that interlocking power-fuel network. It came swimming right out of the history books I'd poured over in fascination when I was knee-high to a grasshopper. Sure, they were Diamond Back rattlesnakes and the Mars Colony was right out of the Old West of covered-wagon and gold-prospecting days.

Of course it wasn't, because the twenty-first century technology had made it completely modern in some respects. But it was like the Old West in a good many other ways. It had the same rugged, mirage-bright pioneer look, as if the desert sands were blowing right into the heart of the colony, swirling about, filling the windy places and the sand lots where the kids were playing with a haze that could just as easily have been gold dust that some careless, giant-size prospector had spilled by accident when he'd brought it in from the hills for weighing.

Actually, there's nothing on Earth or Mars that can completely shatter that cyclic aspect of history. There's nothing so new that you can look at it and say, "There's nothing of the past here. The break is complete and the past is gone forever and can never return again."

It's just not true. The past does return, shining brightly beneath the bold new pattern, the daring new way of life that Man likes to think he has chiseled from a block of marble that human hands have never touched or human eyes rested upon before.

There's no such block of marble in all the universe of stars. Not really, because what Man can visualize he has already seen and it has become a part of his heritage and the past of that heritage goes flowing into it and he starts off with a veined monolith that is brimming over with human memory patterns, with not a few buried deep in the stone.

But I've forgotten to mention the most important aspect of everything I saw through the windows of that speeding ambulance. It was ... the blurred aspect, the way everything kept changing shape and disappearing and pinwheeling at times. It wasn't surprising, because the agony was still with me and I saw everything in fitful starts, in brief flashes, between bouts of blacking out and coming to and blacking out again. But what I did see I saw clearly, with the heightened awareness that often accompanies almost unbearable pain. When white-hot needles of pain are jabbing at your nerves a strange, almost blinding kind of illumination seems to sweep into the brain. But instead of blinding you it makes everything stand out with a startling clarity and you can think clearly too, and even speculate about what you've seen.

It's as if you were caught up in a kind of sharper-than-life dream sequence, or sitting in a darkened theater watching events take place on a dazzlingly bright screen. You may be doubled up with pain, but you keep your eyes on the screen and very little that is happening to the actors and actresses on a dramatic level is lost on you. You even notice small details of background scenery that would escape your attention ordinarily, and exactly what kind of clothes the actresses are wearing. Light summer dresses with plunging necklines or tight-fitting, form-molded swim suits—things you can't help noticing even when you're doubled up with pain. It's why most of us fight to stay alive, because Nature has made us that way to keep us from letting go of the one thing that makes us stay in the pitcher's box when Death is batting a thousand.

Putting that much stress just on the engendering of life may be a trick and a snare, when Death has set so cruel a trap for the winners, but you seldom hear anyone complaining about it. It takes an awful lot of grief and despair and pain to make anyone angrily resent the sex snare, and take to eulogizing Death instead.

It wasn't the reason everything I saw through the windows of the ambulance registered so sharply in fitful flashes, because I had that right at my side. Joan was holding my hand and squeezing it and I only had to turn my head to make me just about the toughest adversary Death ever had. But what I said about the lighted cinema screen still holds. What I did see, I saw with eyes that missed very little. And between the bouts of blacking out the snatches of conversation I overheard came to me just as distinctly.

Part of the time it was a woman's voice I heard and I knew it had to be Joan's voice, because there was no other woman in the ambulance with me. But she wasn't talking to me. She was talking to one of the two men in white who were sitting opposite me. They seemed about a half-mile away most of the time, but occasionally the long bench they were sitting on floated a little closer.

The conversation, as I've said, came to me in snatches and it could hardly have been called a running dialogue. The continuity alone would have gotten a professional script writer fired, no matter how brilliant he was otherwise.

The only way I can whip it into shape is by recording it as if it were continuous, filling in the part I overheard between blackouts with what I didn't hear—staying close enough to what was probably being said to keep the script writer on the job and eating.

I'm pretty sure this is a fairly accurate re-write.

Joan: What kind of a hospital is it? I'm sorry, I ... I guess I shouldn't have asked you that. You're on the staff. No matter how frank you might want to be....

Doctor Mile-Away: If I thought it wasn't a good hospital I wouldn't say so, naturally. But it happens to match up very well with the eight or ten you'd want him to be taken to Earthside, if you had a choice. The facilities are first-rate, completely up to date. There are four surgeons I'd trust my life to with equal confidence ... and one of them happens to be my dad.

Joan: I hope to God he gets one of them.

Doctor: There are only four surgeons. We don't get too many surgical cases in the Colony—not nearly as many as you might think. There's as much violence here, perhaps, as there is in New Chicago but it takes a different form. We can't keep atomic hand-guns out of criminal hands as easily as you can in New Chicago, because the lawless element in the Colony has more socio-political power and can get more weapons in that destructive category smuggled in. As you know, an atomic hand-gun has a very limited destructive potential, since there's no fallout and it can only kill a man standing directly in its path. But when it does ... there isn't much margin left for surgery.

Joan: You mean criminals are in control here?

Doctor: Oh, it's not quite that bad. Possibly about one colonist in twenty has dangerous criminal tendencies. The proportion is larger here only because it's a new society, with a pioneering outlook. You might call it a wolf-eat-wolf society. On Earth the dog-eat-dog tendencies will probably never be completely eradicated but we've gone a long way in that respect just in the last half-century. Here we have further to go, because the dogs are still wolves.

Joan: Will you ever tame them? My husband may be dying right here; that doesn't look so tame! I think your Mars Colony is a filthy jungle!

Doctor: I didn't have much time to talk with Commander Littlefield. But from what he said I'm pretty sure you don't really feel that way. I don't know why you and your husband are here, but the Colonization Board seldom gives clearance to people who feel that way about the future of the Colony. In fact ... I can't remember ever having met a man or woman who managed to deceive the Board, because the screening is the opposite of superficial. They go into your past history, I understand, and give you psychological tests I'm not even sure I could pass, convinced as I am that the Colony is still Man's best hope in a world where to stand still is always disastrous. There's no other sane solution to the population problem, just to mention one of the fifty or sixty major problems we'll have to solve or perish in in the next two centuries. I have my moments of doubt and cynicism....

Joan: You should be having one right now. How would you feel if you were taking your wife to the hospital for an emergency operation and didn't know whether she was going to live or die? Suppose it was your wife instead of my husband? We didn't even have time to set foot in the Colony. If there's that much danger before you even—

Doctor: Just hold on a minute. Let's get this straightened out right now. It will make you feel better. No one in the Colony tried to kill your husband. That dart was aimed at him from above—by one of the passengers. They're all being held for questioning and if the firing mechanism is found on one of them—

That, for me, was the end of the dialogue. But just before I blacked out for the last time I saw a sign high up over one of the buildings. It read: WENDEL ATOMICS.

And I went down into the darkness with that sign flashing in big illuminated letters right in the middle of the darkness. WENDEL ATOMICS. WENDEL. WENDEL ATOMICS. And in much smaller letters, which were not nearly as bright: Endicott Fuel.

The big letters growing larger, brighter ... the small letters dwindling.

Just as I felt myself to be dwindling ... as I passed deeper and deeper into the darkness.

10

"He's a big man," I heard a woman's voice say. "It took every ounce of my strength to lift him. But he had to be moved to the edge of the bed, doctor. The sheets had to be changed."

A whirling in my head, needles darting in and out. I had to strain my ears to catch what another voice was saying in reply. It was a man's voice, but gruff, deep-throated and somehow less distinct than the first voice. Perhaps Gruff Voice was standing further from the bed. Or possibly he didn't want me to hear what he was telling the nurse.

She had to be a nurse, because Gruff Voice wasn't addressing her by name. He wasn't calling her Miss Hadley or Miss Betty Anne Simpson-Cruickshank. He was saying "Nurse this," and "Nurse that" and speaking with crisp authority, as if there was a gulf between a nurse and a doctor which even the kindliest, least hidebound of physicians had no right to ignore.

I rather liked his voice, gruff as it was. He spoke with the air of a man who knew his business, with a kind of restrained sympathy—the "no nonsense" approach. Too much calm self-assurance can be irritating, because it usually goes with the inflated egos of people who think very highly of themselves. But in a doctor you don't object to that sort of thing so much.

"He's waking up," Gruff Voice was saying. "Just let him rest and don't encourage him to talk. No more sedation—he won't need it. Did you take his temperature, Nurse?"

"Just ten minutes ago, Doctor. It's on the chart. I always—"

"Put it down immediately? Who do you think you're kidding, Susan, my love? Once in awhile you