Mars is My Destination

by Frank Belknap Long

There'd be a hue and cry—and they'd be out for my blood. I had no identification papers—nothing. I'd be as naked and vulnerable as the day I was born in more ways than one—except that I'd be a grown man in body and mind with a grown man's resourcefulness.

I could only hope I'd prove equal to the task and acquit myself well and succeed in silencing the skeptical part of myself that was shaking its head in furious disbelief.

I'd decided to make no attempt to get anyone into the room by sounding off. Much as I needed an ally, the risk would be too great. No one had come rushing in, and the fact that I'd been able to prevent Glacial Stare from uttering a sound by taking him by complete surprise and battering his skull against the wall until he folded was a point in my favor. Not to regard it as a break and take full advantage of it would have been foolish.

Slipping quickly from the room and taking my chances made more sense than waiting around for an ally to come to my assistance, because he might not be an ally at all, but another Wendel agent.

I was deliberately shutting my mind to the greatest danger—the Big One.

You're deliberately shutting your mind to the Big One, Ralphie boy. Getting back to the sky ship will be tough sledding, every foot of the way, and you'll have to dodge and weave about and you may end up dead in the darkest of Martian alleys, half blown apart by an atomic hand-gun. But the Big One is getting out of the hospital itself, and you're afraid to let yourself think about that because you know how heavily the odds will be stacked against you.

You don't know what the hospital is like—how big it is, even. You don't know how many corridors there are, or how many alarm bells will start ringing the instant anyone sees you. There may be a dozen nurses to a floor and doctors constantly on the move from the operating rooms to the recovery wards, and a Wendel agent or two on guard at the end of each corridor.

All the exits may be blocked, with Wendel agents aimed with atomic hand-guns just waiting for you to show up running. You don't even know how far the hospital is from the center of the Colony, only that—just before you blacked out for the last time in the ambulance—you seemed to be quite a distance from the heart of the Colony.

Even if there are no guards at any of the exits and no one tries to stop you how will you be able to find your way back to the spaceport without a compass if the hospital is ten or fifteen miles from the Colony, and all about you is a waste of desert sand and there are no outgoing ambulances standing by to give you a lift.

High up in one of the rooms there'll be a Wendel agent you've belted into insensibility and he'll be stirring and calling out for help and when they come swarming into the hospital room to lift him up—the nurses and the doctors who can't help but blanch a little when he reminds them just how powerful the Wendel Combine is—he'll have only one thing to say to them.