Part 8

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 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't _that_ young 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.

11

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 them _when_ it 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 that _on 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, _except_ in 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.

12

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.