The clang of the opening port was still ringing in my ears when I walked out of the sky ship with Joan on my arm and looked down over the big metal corkscrew directly beneath me. I knew straight off I'd made a mistake. I should have looked up at the sky instead. I should have squared my shoulders, drawn the crisp, tangy air deep into my hangs and established rapport with Mars more gradually.
A delay of only a moment or two would have spared me the too sudden shock of finding myself three hundred feet in the air, dazzled by an unexpected brightness, and supported by nothing I'd have cared to trust my weight to on Earth.
We were standing on a thin strip of metal, a mere spiderweb tracery, and if I'd lost my balance and gone crashing through the guard rail there would have been no mountaineer's rope to save me. What was worse, I'd have taken Joan with me.
The danger was illusionary, of course ... solely in my mind. The underwriters go to a great deal of expense and trouble to make sure there will be no tragic accidents when the big risks have been left behind in space.
The guard rail was chest-high and sturdy enough, and no one had ever gone crashing through it. But you can't reason with a feeling, and for an instant the yawning emptiness beneath me made me feel that I was already past the rail, twisting and turning, flailing the air in a three-hundred-foot plunge.
I was sure that Joan was experiencing the same kind of irrational giddiness, for she drew in her breath sharply and a shiver went through her. A fear of great heights is one phobia that is shared by practically everyone.
The big metal corkscrew beneath us was the landing frame into which the rocket had descended and we were standing high up on that enormous spiral, which curved down and outward like an immense silvery cocoon.
A figure of speech, sure. But not as wide of the mark as most of the images that flash across your mind when you're keyed up abnormally and a lot of new colors, and sights and sounds rush in on you and upset all of your calculations as to how sober-minded you're going to stay. Your grasp on reality slips a little, as if you were holding it right before your eyes like a book, and wearing glasses so strong that the print blurs. You're in a fantasy world of your own creating, seeing things that can't be blamed on whoever wrote the book. A fussy, unimaginative little guy, perhaps, who has spent most of his life within sight of his own doorstep and has never felt the great winds of space blowing cold upon him.
There's a big, night-flying Sphinx moth with death-heads on each of its wings, and there were times when I'd thought of the Mars ship as not so different from that kind of moth. And now it was as if the sky ship had turned back into a caterpillar again, and spun a cocoon for itself, and was quietly reposing in the pupa stage, its rust-red end vanes folded back, its long length mottled and space-eroded where the atomic jets had seared it.
There was nothing wrong in giving my imagination carte-blanche to go into free fall like that, because when you're standing on a dizzy height staring down at a new world forty million miles from Earth you've got to let the strangeness and bursting wonder of it ... along with the dire forebodings ... take firm hold of you. Otherwise you won't feel yourself to be a part of it, won't be equipped with what it takes to probe beneath the surface of things in a realistic way and feel like a native son even in the presence of the unknown.
Three hundred feet below me more activity was taking place than I had ever seen crowded into an area of equal size on Earth. Just as a guess, I'd have said that the spaceport's disembarkation section was about six hundred feet square. But right at that moment I had no real stomach for guessing games—only a hollowness where my stomach was supposed to be.
Far below the disembarkation section was in high gear, and the clatter of it, the rushings to and fro, the grinding and screeching of giant cranes, and atomic tractors, and rising platforms crowded to capacity with specialized robots, most of them scissor-thin and all of them operated by remote control ... would have half-deafened me if I'd been standing a hundred feet lower down.
Even from the top of the spiral the clamor had to be heard to be believed. But what astounded me most was the newness, brightness, sharply delineated aspect of everything within range of my vision. I could see clear to the edge of the spaceport, and the four other securely-berthed rockets stood out with a startling clarity, their nose cones gleaming in the bright Martian sunlight. The big lifting cranes stood out just as sharply, and although the zigzagging tractors looked like painted toys, red and blue and yellow, I would have sworn under oath that not one of them cast a shadow.
The twenty-five or thirty human midgets who were moving in all directions across the field, between machines that seemed too formidable to be trusted had the brittle, sheen-bright look of figures cut out of isinglass.
Another illusion, of course. There had to be shadows, because there was nothing on Mars that could have brought about that big a change in the laws of optics. But by the same token the length and density of shadows can be altered a bit by atmospheric conditions, making light interception turn playful. So I didn't strain my eyes searching for deep purple halos around the human midges.
My only immediate concern was to reassure Joan in a calm and forceful way and escort her safely down to ground level, without letting her suspect that I shared her misgivings as to the stability of the spiral.
It was ridiculous on the face of it. But, as I've said, you can't argue with a feeling that whispers that your remote, dawn age ancestors must have felt the same way when they climbed out on a limb overhanging a precipice, and felt the whole tree begin to sway and shake beneath them.
"Hold tight to the rail and don't look down," I cautioned. "There's no real danger ... because a first-rate welding job was done on this structure. Barring an earthquake, it should be just as safe a century from now."
I shot a quick, concerned glance at her along with the warning. I guess I must have thought she'd be more shaken than she was, for she smiled when she saw the look of surprise in my eyes. It took me half a minute to realize that my guess as to how she'd be taking it hadn't gone so wide of the mark. Her pallor gave her away.
"A century would be much too long to wait," she breathed. "Another five minutes would be too long. If it's going to collapse, I'd rather find out right now."
I nodded and we started down. Several other passengers had emerged from the port and were looking up at the sky or downward as I'd done. Three men and a woman had emerged ahead of us and were almost at the base of the spiral. So far nothing had happened to them.
I've often toyed with the thought that there may be windows in the mind we can see out of sometimes—at oblique angles and around corners and without turning our heads. I could visualize the passengers who were descending behind us more clearly than you usually can in a mind's eye picture. Each face was in sharp focus and there was no blurring of their images as they moved. It was as if I was staring straight up at them through a crystal-clear pane of glass.
In that astonishingly bright inner vision—why look up and back when I did not doubt its accuracy?—Commander Littlefield was wasting no time in setting a good example. He'd descended the spiral so many times that great height meant nothing to him. He'd be ascending and descending at least ten more times just in the next few hours. But this was his big moment. I could already picture him striding across the disembarkation section to the Administration Unit with his shoulders held straight, and announcing officially, with a ring of pride in his voice, that the trip had been completed in record time, and the rocket had been berthed successfully. He was descending now with a confident smile on his lips, his Mars' legs buoyantly supporting him.
Behind him came the small group who had been closest to us in space. They were doing their best to stay calm, but there was a slight flicker of apprehension in their eyes. Our section had been the first to disembark, because Littlefield had agreed with me that it might have seemed a little strange if I'd been accorded that privilege and it had been denied to the others. Why give anyone who might have outwitted every screening precaution the idea that I might be a man apart, with so big a job awaiting me on Mars that getting started on it without delay was damned important to me. It was natural enough for one or two sections to be cleared fast and emerge with the Commander. But others would have to await their turn in line and quarantine checkups could drag along for hours.
"It's funny how long it takes to get even a little lower when you're this high up," Joan said, her fingers tightening on my arm. "We're not anything like as high as when we started. But nothing down below looks any larger."
"We're not a fourth of the way down, and the human eye is a very poor judge of distances," I said, reassuringly. "It would be better if you let go of my arm and just kept your right hand on the rail. We sway more this way."
"When you look down from the observation roof of the North-Western University Building you can see all of New Chicago, and practically half of Lake Michigan," she complained breathlessly. "But it never made me feel as giddy as this."
"You had a firmer support under you," I said. "But not a safer one. There's no danger at all. You can be absolutely sure of that. What could happen to us?"
It was one of those silly questions you sometimes ask when you want to reassure someone you're a little concerned about. But a silly question can sometimes be answered in a totally unexpected way—suddenly, terribly and with explosive violence. It can be answered by a voice of thunder out of the sky, or a wild, savage cry in the night, or in a quieter way, but with just as terrifying an outcome. There are a hundred cataclysms of nature which can give the lie to what you thought was only a silliness.
No matter where you are or how secure you feel, never ask what could happen in a world where nothing is sure, where no one is ever completely safe. Death is death. From end to end of his big estate may be a lifetime's journey for some men. But he can cover the distance with the speed of light, because Death is one space traveler—the only one—who knows exactly how to outdistance light.
Even if you're alone in a steel-walled vault it's a dangerous question to ask. It's ten times as dangerous when you're descending a swaying metal corkscrew forty million miles from Earth and there may be someone eighty feet above you who has failed twice as Death's emissary and would be covered with shame if it happened again.
I felt hardly anything for an instant when the dart sliced deep into the soft flesh between my shoulder blades. I didn't even know it was a dart and kept right on walking. It was as if a bee had stung me—a tired bee who couldn't sting very hard. There was just a little stab of pain, a burning sensation that lasted less than a second.
I felt it, all right. But it didn't startle me enough to stop me dead in my tracks. A thing like that seldom does, if you're moving steadily forward. It takes a second or two after you've felt the pain for the implications to dawn on you.
When they did the pain was back, and this time it was excruciating. My whole shoulder was laced with fire, as if a red-hot iron had been laid against it. If right at that moment I'd smelled an odor of burning flesh I'd have been sure there could be no other explanation, despite its transparent absurdity.
Even then I kept right on walking. I staggered a little but I bit down hard on my underlip to avoid crying out. I didn't want to alarm Joan until I was sure. It could still have been just a very severe muscular spasm—the kind of agonizing cramp that can hit you in the leg sometimes in the middle of the night, so that you awake out of a deep sleep bathed in cold sweat, and with your teeth chattering.
That was what seemed to be happening now. My teeth started chattering and I could feel sweat oozing out all over me. There was only one difference. The pain was in my shoulder, not my leg, and it wasn't easing up the way spasm pain does after a minute or two. It couldn't have gotten worse, because it had been excruciating from the beginning. But other things started getting worse fast. The burning sensation spread to my lungs and my throat muscles started constricting, so that every breath I drew was an agony.
I couldn't pretend any longer, and I didn't try to. I went down on my knees, clutching at my chest and swaying back against the rail. I suppose I must have groaned or made some sort of sound, because Joan swung about and was kneeling beside me in an instant, her face ashen.
I must have looked terrible, or all of the color would not have drained out of her face so fast, or her eyes gone quite so wide with alarm.
I made a half-hearted try at straightening up, but only succeeded in bringing my collapse closer to zero-count by sagging more heavily back against the rail.
"Darling, what is it?Tell me!" Her voice was demanding, wildly insistent. "Please ... I've got to know. If it's your heart—"
I shook my head. I went through a kind of little death just trying to get a few words out. "Something struck me ... in the back. See ... what it is. Feel around with your hand."
"All right, darling. Just don't move. No—you'll have to lift yourself up a little more. Try, darling. Your back's right against the rail."
I did more than try. I helped her by gritting my teeth and flopping over on my stomach. But the pain that lanced through my chest made me almost black out for an instant.
There was a clamor above us now, and I thought I heard Littlefield's voice raised in a shout, followed by a scream of terror. Possibly someone had seen me slump and jumped to the conclusion that the spiral was collapsing.
There was no chance of that, so I couldn't have cared less how close to panic the people up above were. Right at the moment it didn't concern me. I was only concerned with what Joan might find when her fingers started probing. If a bullet had ploughed into me and her fingers came away wetly red I'd know for sure whether it was as bad as I feared. It helps to know, when there's a tormenting uncertainty in your mind along with the physical pain.
I could feel her hand fumbling with my shirt, getting it loosened. Then they were moving up, down and across my back. Cautiously, gently, with the nurselike competence which women usually manage to summon to their aid in an emergency, no matter how shaken they are.
After a moment her fingers stopped moving and she drew in her breath sharply.
Being in agony and on the verge of blacking out carries with it a penalty. You can't always hear what someone close to you may be saying, even when it's of life-and-death importance.
I caught a few words, however, just enough to know it was a dart before I lost consciousness. And her look told me what kind of dart it was.
Or maybe it wasn't her look, just what I knew about darts in general. The kind of dart that's in common use today as a weapon is quite unlike the primitive blowgun darts of South American Indians a century ago. Science, like everything else, progresses, especially in the field of weapons. The modern dart is just as simple, in a way, but you take it out of a wafer-thin metal case as you would a hypodermic needle and you fit the three parts very carefully together and you use a liquid propellant to blow it out of a very slender tube of gleaming metal. And there's space in it for poison.
It's handier, tidier than the small robot killers with their intricate internal gadgetry, even though it requires precision aiming and you're much more likely to be observed while you're taking aim, and be compelled to pay the customary penalty for murder.
I'd managed to roll back on my side, and lying then in agony, trying to catch what Joan was saying, sort of telescoped all that for me, so that it registered in my mind in a more rapid way than it does when you're trying to explain it academically. Everything I knew about darts came sweeping into my mind, and I remembered something else that helped to explain the agony.
The modern dart changes shape the instant it enters a man's body, opening up like a pair of six-bladed scissors, cutting, slashing, severing veins and muscles and nerve ganglions. And if it strikes an artery—
It doesn't even have to be a poisoned dart to kill a man. The feathered part remains in the wound, only slightly embedded. But if you have any sense you resist an impulse to pull it out, because when you do that it's very difficult to stop the bleeding. It's a job for a skilled surgeon and Joan's look told me that there was no time to be lost. The wisest thing I could do was to put my complete trust in Commander Littlefield. The quicker he got one of the passengers or a crewman to help him carry me down to ground level and bundle me into an ambulance the better my chances would be.
Joan seemed to be one jump ahead of me, for she leapt up quickly and started back up the spiral. She didn't even press my hand in reassurance, but that was all right with me. I knew why she hadn't. Every second counted, and she loved me too much to be anything but firmly practical about it.
I remember thinking, just before I blacked out,how adequate are the hospital facilities here? And what about the surgeons? Oh God, what if they are fifth-raters, what if the hospital is understaffed? What if they bungle it, but good?
When you black out and stay blacked out for a long period, questions like that lose most of their tormenting aspects. You may still feel emotionally disturbed by them, when the darkness lifts a little and you remember having asked yourself questions someone somewhere should have answered—if you'd only stayed around long enough to make a lot of friends and influence people and make them eager to oblige you in every possible way. But it isn't too disturbing, because you can't even remember what the questions were.
The trouble was ... I didn't stay blacked out. Not completely. I woke up at intervals and heard snatches of conversation and I even saw—the Mars Colony.
I saw quite a bit of the Colony before they eased me down in a hospital bed, and covered me with warm blankets and I blacked out again.
I saw the streets I'd traveled forty million miles to visit, and the people I'd come to make friends with, and the kids in their space helmets, looking precisely as they did on Earth. (What further frontier did they hope to explore ... Alpha Centauri or just one of the giant outer planets?) I saw the prefabricated metal buildings, four, eight and twenty stories high, with their slanting roofs, rust-red and verdigris-green blue in the early morning sunlight and the stores that were all glass and the strange looking supermarkets with their almost cathedral-like domes. And just for good measure, eight or ten bar-flanked streets with big parking lots where the bars gave way to barracks that straggled out into the desert and had a primitive, twentieth century, shanty-town look.
There were people everywhere, but when you're propped up on a cot in a speeding ambulance you can't tell whether the people who go flying past look just the way people do on Earth, or have a more robust, happier 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 hadthatright 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 meancriminalsare 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 whathesaid 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 wouldyoufeel 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.
"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 put it off, when this kind of emergency case makes you wish you had a dozen pairs of hands. You put if off for fifteen or twenty minutes, when you've no reason to think some white-coated drum major is going to barge in unexpectedly, just to lean on you. Did you ever know me to lean, Susan—heavily or otherwise? You're doing the best you can and it's a very good 'best.' I wish we had more 'bests' like it."
"I do feel ... sort of wobbly, Roger. I deserve to be leaned on, because once you start feeling that way you're no longer at peak efficiency and you become nervously over-scrupulous. That's both good and bad, if you know what I mean."
"What did you expect, Susan? I could have had a nurse in here to relieve you hours ago if you hadn't been so stubborn. You've been worrying your cute blonde head off without stopping to rest for sixteen hours, and you never set eyes on the guy before this morning. What is there about some men—"
"It was touch and go, Roger. You said yourself that a little of the poison got into his blood. You told me a tenth of a cc would have been fatal."
"That was when I first looked at the lab analysis and took the gloomiest possible view of his chances. I didn't even know you heard me. Damn it all, Susan. Can't a doctor think out loud without giving his most competent nurse a martyr complex? What is there about him? I'm asking you. If he wasn't married I could perhaps understand it. I could at least make a stab at trying to figure it out. But you've seen his wife. A man with a wife as attractive as she is would have to be even more susceptible than I am to look twice at another woman. That's just another way of saying it couldn't happen."
"I've had two long talks with her, Roger. She loves him so much that if anything happened to him I'm afraid to think what she might do. All alone on Mars, with no close relatives or friends to turn to for help and warmth and comfort. She'd need a lot of support, because there's nothing shallow about her. She's the intense type, very deep in her emotions. I'm that way myself."
"You don't have to tell me," I could hear him saying. "You're the empathy-plus type. It's what makes a good many otherwise sensible women embrace the toughest profession on the list. Hard-boiled, unemotional women make good nurses too. But I prefer the kind of nurse you can't help being. Only ... a little moderation even in people who go all out can be a saving grace."
"But don't you see, Roger? It means I can identify with her. I know exactly how terrible the uncertainty must be for her, because if I loved a man that much and lost him I'd probably go right out and kill myself. If you want the full truth ... there's probably a little of the male-female absurdity mixed up in it too. It's an absurdity in a situation like this, where it makes no sense. But just the fact that he's a man and I'm a woman—"
"Talk like that will get you nowhere," he said. "I'm too sure of you."
There was a rustling sound and a sudden gasp and I was pretty sure I knew what it meant. He'd taken her into his arms and was kissing her. I don't know why I didn't open my eyes. I was fully awake now, aware of every movement in the room. But I just remained quiet and listened, grateful that the needles had stopped jabbing at my temples and my dizziness was practically gone.
Sometimes when you awake suddenly from a deep sleep your eyes feel glued shut, and it takes an effort just to open them. You let it ride for a moment, while you pull yourself together ... especially if it's a nightmare you've just awakened from. There's a kind of pleasure in it.
He was talking again. "I've yet to meet a woman who doesn't think that clinical self-analysis will keep a man guessing about her. But that kind of candor will get you nowhere with me, kiddo. I know you too well. Are you convinced?"
"Yes," she said, with a meekness that surprised me.
He didn't say anything for a moment, but I could hear him moving about and a metallic click, as if he were folding up his stethoscope or returning a hypodermic to its case.
A sound like that is always a little unnerving and an operating table and a long row of gleaming instruments flashed evanescently across my mind. I wondered how bad it was and if Martian hospitals were well-equipped, and had just the right facilities to take care of an emergency case requiring major surgery.
But he'd said I was out of danger, hadn't he ... that I didn't even need more sedation? Sure he had. I'd been stabbed with a poisoned dart, but that didn't mean I'd have to go on the operating table. They would never have let the dart stay inside me. If an operation had been needed, it would have been performed immediately....
Perhaps it had. Well, to hell with it. I was out of danger now and beginning to mend and that was the only thing that counted. It had been touch and go, she'd said. And Joan loved me so much that....
Hold on tight to that, Ralphie boy. It's the best news you'll ever hear, even though you knew it all along, were sure of it on the day you married her. What they didn't know and would have to guess about was the feeling of oneness we had whenever we were together.
I let that ride too, sweet as it was to dwell upon, and thought about how mistaken I'd been about the doctor. He wasn't the kind of guy I'd thought him. The "nurse this, nurse that" talk had been either a performance, put on for my benefit just in case I was a little more than semiconscious or—a routine, quickly-dropped formality.
The second supposition seemed the most likely. A kind of ritual they went through from habit, and because it's more ethical to keep a doctor-nurse relationship on a formal plane when the patient is under clinical scrutiny. After that, they could relax and be human.
I had no complaint, because I liked both aspects of Gruff Voice's personality. That I liked the nurse goes without saying, not only because of what she'd said about Joan, but because of a certain something....
All right. Gruff Voice had said that he was susceptible beyond the average and so was I. A sweet soft woman bending over you, denying herself sleep just to make sure you'll stay alive, doing her best to ease your pain, sort of ... does things to you. It had nothing to do with the way I felt about Joan. It wasn't actual disloyalty ... didn't come within a mile of disloyalty. It was just the man-woman absurdity she'd mentioned, only ... it wasn't an absurdity and never had been.
It may be a hard thing for a woman to understand, sometimes. But it's never hard for a man to understand, if he's honest with himself and knows just how powerful the mating impulse can be in human beings. Call it sex attraction if you want to, but when you've called it that it's important to remember that the mating impulse is the basic, anthropological prime mover. Sex is simply itsmodus operandi. On Earth and on Mars, whenever a normal man and a normal woman are in close proximity, even for ten or twelve seconds, the mating impulse starts unwinding. On another planet of another star themodus operandimay not be sex as we know it, but something quite different, if you can imagine another way of choosing a mate, building a home, and filling it with healthy, happy children.
It's a coiled-spring, trigger-mechanism kind of impulse and neither the man nor the woman have to be attracted to each other on the personality level, unless you want to be technical and regard the purely physical as an attribute of personality. They can be young or old, plain or good looking. Some attraction will be present, even under the most adverse circumstances. But when the woman is young and beautiful and the personality level warm and appealing you'll be deceiving yourself if you think the impulse can be kept from arising just because you already have a mate you're desperately in love with.
You can conquer the impulse if you try hard enough and your love for someone else is strong enough. That's what is meant by loyalty. But you can't keep the impulse from arising and it makes no sense at all to feel guilty about it.
The human brain is a resourceful instrument and there are a dozen ways of keeping a tight grip on your nerves when you wake up on a hospital cot and hear unfamiliar voices talking about you. I chose the way that was most natural to me. I concentrated on the scientific construct I've just summarized, letting my mind glide over, and play around with it for a minute or two and telling myself that I must thank the nurse for all that she had done for me. When Gruff Voice left there would be a glow, a brief moment of warmth between us that might have become a high-leaping flame if I hadn't been in love with Joan and she hadn't been carrying a torch for Gruff Voice.
I wasn't even sure she was beautiful, but it seemed likely, because you can tell a great deal about a woman just from the sound of her voice. Even if she bent over and kissed me, her eyes shining a little because she'd helped me outdistance Death a yard from the finish line and was feeling grateful and thrilled about it ... well, that would have been all right too. I didn't think Joan or the man who had just taken her into his arms would have held that kind of kiss against us.
I had the feeling that Gruff Voice was a generous-minded, all right guy, and if an operation had been necessary to save my life he'd done his best to increase my chances with all of the surgical know-how at his command.
Just that thought made me decide to open my eyes and try to raise myself a little, because he had a right to know how grateful I felt.
He was just going through the door. I could see that he was tall, blond and rather sturdily built, but a wave of dizziness made me sink back against the pillows again before I could get a really good look at him. It's hard to tell what a man looks like anyway, when he's facing away from you, and you can only see his disappearing shoulders and the back of his head.
When I opened my eyes for the second time, a full minute later, the eyes that looked back at me were just as I'd pictured them. A deep, lustrous brown. Her face was very much as I'd pictured it too, except that I'd no way of knowing whether she was a blonde or a brunette. She looked a little like Joan. Her hair was done up in a different way, and her lips were a little fuller than Joan's and her cheekbones not quite so prominent. Her nose, too, was a fraction of an inch shorter. But otherwise she could have passed for Joan's sister. Not a twin sister, for the resemblance wasn't anything like that pronounced. But it was close to the family likeness you see quite often in portraits of two sisters when one is smiling and the other looks seriously troubled.
It flashed across my mind that if they had been standing side by side, both wearing the same expression, the resemblance would have been considerably more striking.
It shouldn't have surprised me too much, because of what she'd said to the doctor. Women who think and feel in much the same way are very likely to bear a family resemblance physically. It's the sort of thing which makes an anthropologist shake his head in vigorous denial. But facts are facts and who was I to dispute them?
"Just lie quiet," she whispered, patting me on the shoulder. "Dr. Crawford says you mustn't try to talk. You're going to be all right. I'm Miss Cherubin, your day nurse."
She smiled, her eyes crinkling a little at the corners. "You should have a night nurse too, but I've been staying on in her place."
Cherubin. An angel? No—cherubim was spelt with an "M." And she wasn'tthatyoung or quite as rosy-cheeked as cherubs are supposed to be.
What made it really tragic was my inability to reach out and touch her or ask her a single question, because right at that moment another wave of dizziness swept over me and I blacked out again.
Right at this point there has to be a shift in the way I've been recording events as they happened, because what happened next took place elsewhere, while I was flat on my back in the hospital. By "what happened next" I mean ... to me and Joan personally and to Commander Littlefield and the Martian Colonization Board and everything I'd come to Mars to take cognizance of, and do my best to change for the better.
I know, I know. Ten million separate events are taking place all the time on Earth and on Mars and by no stretch of the imagination could they be thought of as an immediate part of this record. But when the threads all start to draw together and tighten about you in a destiny-altering way you have to keep the time-sequence in order and record developments as they take place. Otherwise when they become of immediate concern later on the entire picture will seem out of focus. The frame will start lengthening out and the people in the picture will be out-of-kelter also, and scattered all over the landscape. The only way you can keep them sharply in focus is to record what happens to themwhenit happens.
It shouldn't be too difficult, because there's a seeing eye that hovers over the Mars' Colony day and night. The big Time-Space eye that records everything that takes place in the universe, so that nothing is ever really lost beyond re-capture. The past, the present and the future keep flickering, in a backward-forward way, across that immense retina, and some day a technique may be developed for running history off in reverse and you'll see events that took place thousands of years ago as if they were happening today on a lighted screen.
So ... let's look through that Big Eye straight down at the Mars Colony, you and I together. And remember. In this particular instance we won't need a history-reversing gimmick at all, because what we'll see and hear is NOW. It starts as a two-person conversation:
"John, I'm frightened. What if the insulation isn't absolutely foolproof? What if one of those Endicott Fuel containers isn't shielded in just the right way? Suppose the radio-active stuff inside builds up to what the nuclear physicists call critical mass and there's an atomic explosion? Blowups have happened ... even in the Endicott Laboratories under the strictest kind of supervision."
"Now look. There's not the slightest danger. Do you think for one moment Endicott would take that big a risk—even though Wendel has the entire combine backed into a corner?"
"They'd take any kind of risk now, because they have no choice. John, if you were going to give me another baby you'd have given me fair warning. I could have steeled myself to endure the harshness and unfairness of it. But when you bring death home with you—"
The woman had been very pretty once. You could see that just by glancing at her. But now her face had a drawn, haggard look and her pallor was more than pronounced. It verged on grayness. Her hair was thinning and turning white and only her eyes remained lustrous, truly alive, as if all that remained of the woman she had once been had been drawn to a focus in the gaze she was training on her husband in desperate appeal.
"Why did you do it, John? You're not just endangering your life and mine. If we didn't have four children ... maybe I wouldn't be talking this way."
"I told you I was forced into it, didn't I? Wendel is calling Endicott's bluff. We can no longer go on buying Endicott fuel cylinders openly on margin, hundreds of them and letting all of them stay in Wendel's custody, because we don't really own them at all. The price goes up or the price goes down and we sell out and buy again—and we're supposed to own four-fifths of the Endicott Combine. But there's not a single Colonist who owns the equivalent of four or five cylinders outright. I don't own these six cylinders. But I had to bring them home with me."
"I just don't understand why. It's too complicated for me. A nuclear explosion would be much easier for me to understand."
"All right ... I'll go over it again. But try to listen more carefully this time. Before this big, cut-throat war started only one man suspected that one of the two competing combines might try to sell its fluid property to the Colonists on margin. They were supposed to cooperate, not compete, because it was thought that Wendel couldn't possibly keep its nuclear generators operating without fuel. It can't, of course, but only one man suspected that Endicott might refuse to be dwarfed by Wendel in a sharp-practice duel and fight to stay big and powerful by letting the Colonists buy and sell fuel on speculation. That would put the Colonists right in the middle, don't you see?"
"Yes ... I do," the woman who had once been almost beautiful said. "Thank you for giving me credit for having that much intelligence. You seem to forget that I have a fairly good memory too. We've gone over this a hundred times."
"Sure we have. But it doesn't seem to have made too deep an impression on you. You can sum it all up by saying thaton paper, from day to day, it's the Colonists who now own the Endicott Combine, or most of it. So it's the Colonists who are carrying the battle directly to Wendel, fighting for the right to go on wildcatting, to get rich overnight or end up pauperized. It's wildcatting in a sense, just as it was when oil instead of atomic fuel was the big prize to be fought over Earthside. When a Colonist buys Endicott fuel cylinders on margin, it's practically the same as if he were digging an oil well in his own backyard."
"Go on, John," the woman said wearily.
"There's that much uncertainty in it, don't you see? And he's really doing it entirely single-handed and on his own, because he's digging in what is practically a paper graveyard in some respects, unless he's one of the lucky ones. Endicott keeps the fuel. It doesn't go out of their hands. But Wendel still has to buy it directly from the Colonists, who are supposed to own it, and the price fluctuations keep Wendel from becoming all-powerful and Endicott from going under or being dwarfed.
"In the main, it's the Colonists who have most to gain by keeping Endicott powerful and solvent ... although the battle lines aren't so tightly drawn that it doesn't become profitable, at times, to go over to the Wendel side. There's a lot of sniping between the lines."
"I know all that, John."
"Well, here's what it all boils down to, what you didn't seem to grasp. You asked me why I brought these six cylinders home. It's because of the one man who did suspect, right from the first, and when the charters were drawn up, that a war of this kind might be waged. I can't even tell you his name. He was probably a minor legal expert or auditor employed by the Board, who had shrewd prophetic gifts ... enough foresight, at least ... to insert in fine print in both of the charters a provision that Wendel is now using to call Endicott's bluff.
"That provision doesn't say that Endicott can't sell some of their fluid assets on margin. But it sets a limit to that kind of speculative buying and selling. The same limit would apply to Wendel, but Wendel has no fluid assets to sell on margin, and it can't very well break up its generators and big transmission lines and sell them to the Colonists piecemeal, even on margin. It wouldn't look right, because you can't pretend that a fragment of a pipe that is still being operated by a combine is a speculative commodity that has passed into other hands and is subject to day-to-day fluctuations.
"If you want to think of fluid assets as simply a share in a Combine's profits, that's another matter. But I'm not talking about that kind of fluid asset. Endicott has been selling to the Colonists in a literal sense—moveable fluid assets. And in fine print in the Endicott charter it says that Endicott can only sell about a third of its fuel cylinders on margin. The others have to be purchased outright and carried home and held by the purchaser until the price is right and he can dispose of them at a profit. Or sell at a loss, as property."
"But you say you didn't buy those cylinders outright. How could you have done that?" the woman protested. "Just one cylinder would cost—a third of a million dollars."
"Naturally I didn't buy them outright. I bought them on margin. But Wendel can't prove that. Endicott is covering up for me and because I've brought them home and can slap my hand on the cool metal and tell Wendel to go to hell if they try to dispute my ownership—Endicott still has a chance to come out on top. Wendel is calling Endicott's bluff, sure. But Endicott is countering with another bluff and they can make it stick. Their auditing department knows just how to do that. So every Colonist who wants to go on wildcatting now has to bring a few cylinders home, to make it look as if he'd bought them outright. Possession puts you nine-tenths on the winning side in any legal argument. You ought to know that!"
"Ought I? Just suppose I did. Would that stop me from becoming terrified, when I know exactly what could happen if the metal isn't as cool as you hope it will be when you slap your hand on it, and the Wendel police stay cold-blooded about it, and wait around for the fissionable material inside to reach critical mass."
"You know damn well it would take an awful lot of accidental jarring and jolting to trigger a fuel cylinder and make it blow up. It probably couldn't happen,exceptin a laboratory where they're careless about such things because of overconfidence."
"Dinner's on the table," the woman said. "We may as well go back into the house while we've still got a home, and gather the children around us, and tell them a few more lies about what the future is going to be like in the Colony, now that one father in three will be bringing nuclear fuel cylinders home with him."
The man—his name was John Lynton—nodded and they returned into the pre-fab. Lynton preceded his wife into the dwelling and the woman paused for an instant in the doorway to stare back at the long metal shed where the six cylinders were reposing ... letting her gaze take in as well the double row of foot-high cactus plants which encircled the yard and the sun-reddened stretch of open desert beyond. Then she let the door swing shut behind her, and turned to face her four hungry children.
One thought alone sustained Grace Lynton at that moment. There had never been any need, so far, for the children to go to bed hungry. Their hunger was due solely to the demands of healthy young appetites when dinner was a little delayed and they had been playing strenuously in the yard all afternoon or going on exploring expeditions.
They were all downstairs now, waiting to be fed, hardy perennials like all children everywhere. Thomas with his shining morning face—it seemed to stay that way right up until bedtime—and Susan, seven, and still doll-wedded, and the twins, Hedy and Louise. Three girls and one boy, and Grace Lynton felt a little sorry for her son at times, until she remembered that a boy of thirteen isn't troubled by too many girls in a family when he's seven or eight years their senior. The girls were simply very young children to him and he was—well, right next door at least to being grown up.
"All right," John Lynton said, seating himself at the head of the table. "Let's fall to and see who gets through first."
"Did you have a tough day, Dad?" Thomas asked, reaching for a knife and fork, and drawing a still steaming serving bowl toward him. His unruly hair was so blond it seemed almost white and there was a double row of freckles across the bridge of his nose.
The other three children were brunettes, with hair ranging in color from chestnut brown to jet black. Even the twins did not closely resemble each other, as non-identical twins so often fail to do.
"Don't annoy your father with questions now, Thomas ... please," Grace Lynton said.
"Why not?" Lynton asked, frowning at his wife. "I did have a tough day and there's no sense in soft-pedaling it. Sometimes I almost wish we hadn't come to Mars. No matter how rigorous a Board screening is ... there are some things it can't tell you about yourself. Will you make a good father on a world without trees or grass, with no way of getting out into the green countryside and sitting down on the moss-covered bank of a trout stream, with your kid at your side and having a heart to heart talk with him in the cool shade of a big oak or cedar."
"The stew's good, Mom," Thomas said. "Is it all right if I fill up my plate again?"
"Did I ever say you couldn't, Thomas?" Grace Lynton snapped, unable to keep irritation out of her voice, despite her son's compliment. "There'll never be any food shortages in this house, if we have to sell all of the furniture."
"Leave enough for me, Thomas," Hedy Lynton said.
"Don't worry, I will," Thomas said. "But if you keep on eating the way you do you'll grow up fat, and no man in the Colony will marry a fat woman when there are so many thin ones."
"That's very well put, Thomas," Lynton said. "I have a brilliant son—practically a genius. But don't let it go to your head, boy. Unless you're in the electronic field or have some other technical specialty a straightforward, rugged he-man can do more for the Colony."
"What kind of talk is that, John?" Grace Lynton demanded. "There's nothing unmanly about a genius, in any field."
"No, I suppose not. But I wouldn't want him to be a poet or a painter. They just stand back and observe life and I'd like to see my son wade in fighting."
The daylight outside had started fading before Lynton and his wife had returned indoors. But now the quickly-arriving Mars' night was almost at hand, and the twilight had deepened outside and was giving way to complete darkness at the edge of the desert.
The two adults and four children seated about the table hadn't once glanced toward the window, for the food and contentious conversation had absorbed all of their attention.
It was Thomas who saw the light first, flickering on and off close to the shed. He had always wanted, deep down, in a secret way that he had never dared to discuss with anyone, to be an artist and paint at least a hundred pictures that would show the people who looked at them exactly what life on Mars was like. And his father's gaze, trained upon him in such a steady way, had made him squirm inwardly, as if his secret might at any moment be exposed. To avoid his father's gaze he'd looked straight out the window and seen the strange light flickering on and off.
"Dad!" he said.
"What is it, son?"
"There's a light moving around out in the yard, close to the shed."
If Thomas had suddenly toppled over dead his father could not have leapt up from the table with more horror in his eyes.
"Why ... why ... Good God! Wendel wouldn't gothatfar! It would be an act of madness!"
"John, you don't think—"
Thomas' mother was on her feet too now, her face drained of all color, her eyes darting to the window and back to the tight-lipped, violently trembling man at the head of the table. John Lynton's face had gone as white as her own.
For a minute Thomas thought that his father was going to rush right out into the yard and grab hold of the intruder, as fast as he'd leapt up from the table. Then he saw he'd guessed wrong about that.
Lynton crossed the room in five long strides, swung open the weapon locker and grabbed hold of a holstered hand-gun instead. He strapped the holster to his waist before whipping out the weapon and snapping off the safety mechanism.
He was starting for the door when Grace Lynton called out warningly: "John, don't!John!"
He swung about, staring at her in consternation. "Don't what? If they've tampered with those cylinders I'll make sure they won't live to blow up another man's home—or half the Colony!"
"You can't blast them down!" Her voice rose shrilly. "No, John! A hand-gun blast that close to a fuel cylinder would set off a chain reaction—"
"No, it won't. The blast is channeled. Don't be a fool, Grace. I know what I'm doing."
"You're the fool! You'll get us all killed!"
"If they've tampered with just one of those cylinders we won't have to worry about what a hand-gun blast will do. But they won't save their own skins before thebigblast hits us. That's one thing I can make sure of."
He turned and was gone. She started to follow him out into the yard, but became aware of how dangerous that would be just in time. If she followed her husband the children would almost certainly follow her, for she couldn't order them to stay indoors and hope to be obeyed.
She rushed to the window and stared out, her face pressed to the pane.
She could feel Thomas pressing close to her—or was it Hedy or Susan? There was a heaviness in his body which made her almost sure it was Thomas. But that meant nothing, because she loved all of her children equally.
Suddenly she was sure it was Thomas, because he was speaking to her. "Take it easy, Mom! Dad'll take care of whoever it is. He's got a hand-gun to protect him."
"Oh, I know he has!" she wanted to scream. "It will be a beautiful way of protecting us all ... by sending us straight into eternity. God, dear God, don't let him blast. Don't—"
The blast came then, lighting up the darkness outside, making the windowpanes rattle. For an instant Grace Lynton could see her husband clearly, standing by the shed with a white flare spreading outward from his shoulders.
Then the flare dwindled and vanished and Grace Lynton had no way of knowing what had happened outside in the dark. She was sure of only one thing. She couldn't stay inside the house with her husband moving about a few feet from fuel cylinders that might blow up at any moment, for there was at least a fifty percent likelihood that the intruder had accomplished what he'd come to do, before Thomas had seen the light bobbing about in the yard.
She had straightened and was hugging her son to her, just starting to turn, when John Lynton's voice rang out sharply from the doorway.
"Grace! I blasted at him but he got away! Listen carefully. I've only a moment to talk."
He was standing in the doorway with the hand-gun reholstered at his waist, its handle gleaming dully. His pallor was startling, for it went far beyond mere paleness, as if all the blood had been drawn from his face artificially, leaving the skin gray and shrunken.
"I can't be sure, but I think ... one of the cylinders has been triggered to blow up," he went on quickly. "It isn't heating up. There'd be no heat—just a faint vibration. When I put my hand on the metal I was almost sure I could feel a vibration. We've got just one chance of staying alive—and I'll have to move fast. I'm going to take it to the Spaceport—I can get there in the conveyor truck in ten minutes—and have them dismantle it. They'll know how. I don't. I'll take all six of the cylinders, to make sure."
"John, no! It will blow up in the truck. I'm sure of it. We'd better all get out in the desert, as far away from it as we can. If we start right now and run—"
"We could go in the truck, Dad!" Thomas cried.
Lynton shook his head. "If just one cylinder blows up—it will take three miles of desert with it. If all six go ... twenty miles of desert. There are at least six thousand Colonists within three or four miles of us. There are less than a thousand people at the Spaceport. Only one big sky ship is still unloading. Better a thousand deaths than six or seven thousand ... if it blows up before they can dismantle it."
"But John—Oh, God, I don't know."
"It's the best way, the surest way. We can't think only of ourselves. If I drove straight out into the desert with it and it blows up within twenty minutes the fallout would still kill several thousand Colonists. The Spaceport's in the other direction, completely isolated. And I can get there in fifteen minutes ... even if I'm stopped by the Wendel police and have to blast my way to it."
"Why should they try to stop you? They'd die themselves—"
"Why did they send someone to trigger that bomb? They'll take any risk now, because they know that Endicott's new bluff could smash them. That cylinder is smaller than the first atomic bomb ever built—much smaller than the one that was dropped on Hiroshima—and if they have to explode a half-dozen of them in different parts of the Colony to demoralize the Colonists and discredit Endicott they're prepared to do it, apparently. Even if it kills thirty thousand people. Or maybe they figured the one I'm taking to the Spaceport—and Iamtaking it there, Grace—would make the Colonists think twice about taking any more Endicott fuel cylinders home with them."
"You're right, John," Grace Lynton said, with a firmness in her voice which surprised her. "We can't think only of ourselves. Until you come back—every moment will be a living death. But—you must do it. There's no other way."
"I'll be back," Lynton said. "I—I love you, Grace."
"And I love you, John—even though I've said cruel, cutting things at times. I love you very much."
"Take care of yourself, Dad," Thomas said.
"I will, son. Don't worry. Just be the man of the family and keep the kids in line until I get back."