Mars is My Destination

by Frank Belknap Long

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."