Mars is My Destination

by Frank Belknap Long

I suppose it wasn't really the hospital room wall I was clouting him with, because, as I say, it was stationary. But when you're extracting the fangs of a dangerous little reptile who has just threatened you with Big-Image interrogation and know that your strength may give out at any moment cause and effect get swallowed up in an urgency that can distort reality. His face was a confused blur for a moment. But a second or two before all of the expression drained out of it and he slumped jerkily to the floor my vision steadied and I saw that his look of absolute horror had been replaced by the deadliest kind of hatred.

It's always a little jolting, no matter how you slice it, to know that a man who should be incapable of feeling anything but shock and pain can pass out cold with that kind of look in his eyes.

I'd gone berserk for a moment, but when I have to, when there's some compelling reason for it, I can cool off fast. Calm down would be a more accurate way of phrasing it, for I knew it would take a long time for the way I felt about Glacial Stare to turn from anger to enlightened scientific detachment. He couldn't really help being what he was, because what is known as the bastard-pattern gets grooved into the poor unhappy devils who are afflicted with it way back in childhood. They injure themselves more than they injure others, even though what they do to others in the process often doesn't bear thinking about.

Right at the moment Glacial Stare had injured himself, but not deliberately. I had done most of the injuring for him. But there would be times when he'd punish himself twice as remorselessly, and he'd go on doing it to the end of his days. If there's a hell on Earth the sadistic bastards occupy it, and it's unscientific to feel anything but pity for them.

It was equally unscientific for me to feel anything but concern for my own safety right at the moment, because I was still trapped in a hospital room with all of the physical weakness I'd felt a few minutes before creeping back and with no guarantee that if I walked out of the room in a tottering condition I wouldn't run smack into another Wendel agent.

Quite possibly they had the hospital surrounded and when they saw what I'd done to Glacial Stare they wouldn't talk with me as long as he had done before I'd belted him unconscious.

They'd either blast me down, cold-bloodedly and on the spot, with one of the compact little hand-guns Doctor Mile-Away had discussed with Joan on the ambulance—how many days, weeks away that ride seemed—or gag and bind me and carry me out on a stretcher.

Glacial Stare himself no longer worried me. He'd be out for as long as it would take me to decide whether it would be better to go staggering out of the hospital room and trust the first person I collided with not to betray me, or flop back on the bed and shout for help from there.

You do crazy things, sometimes, when you're that uncertain. There wasn't a chance of his coming to immediately, but just automatically I crouched beside him and rolled one of his eyelids back with my thumb. The glazed pupil that stared sightlessly back at me gave me a jolt, because it could have meant that I'd killed him. I thrust my hand under his shirt and felt around for a heartbeat and found no trace of one. His skin was clammy and very cold.

Then I saw that he was still breathing. His chest rose and fell and there was a sudden, dull thumping where my palm was resting.