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.