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 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 its modus 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 the modus operandi may 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 y
oung 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.
The Frank Belknap Long Science Fiction Novel Page 26