"Get me the Central Police Agency on the tele-communicator."
You'll be out in the red desert, fighting your way toward the Colony through a sandstorm perhaps, but ten or twelve minutes after that call goes through you'll hear a droning overhead and that will be the end of you.
The hell of it was—no man ever needed an ally more desperately. I needed a confederate, right at that moment in the room with me, if only because I couldn't hope to cheat death for ten minutes running if I ever reached the streets of the Colony without some Colony-type clothes to replace the one-piece, in-patient garment I was wearing. A doctor's white smock wouldn't do, and neither would a nurse's uniform. I didn't have the right build to pass for a nurse even inside the walls of the hospital, not to mention the craggy cast of my features and the heavy growth of stubble which covered my cheeks.
[15]
Far back in the twentieth century, when World War II was just coming to a close, the anti-Nazi underground movement had helped quite a few soldiers escape from prison camps disguised as women. It certainly wasn't a stratagem to be rejected out of hand, when your life was at stake. But somehow my masculine pride was affronted by the thought and I did not take kindly to it.
There had to be a lot of male patient's clothes hanging somewhere in the hospital, but how was I to get my hands on a complete outfit if I had to leave the hospital like a thief in the night, just one leap ahead of Death in a Wendel police uniform?
Stealth? Would that solve it? If I moved very cautiously at first, putting the thought of what could happen out of my mind, and trying to find a room where clothes were hanging?
No—I couldn't afford to move too cautiously. I'd have to move fast and boldly, trusting to blind ruck to protect me. But the clothes problem still remained, and unless I could solve it—
She solved it for me. I didn't know that at first and neither did she—I mean, she had no idea when she came back into the room that any such problem would confront her. All she saw was Glacial Stare lying slumped against the wall, his jaw sagging and the patient she'd left flat on his back a short while before standing in the middle of the room with his in-patient garment twisted grotesquely about his bony, knobby knees and looking one hell of a mess. It's always been hard for me to understand how a woman can find the angular, bony body of a man attractive, especially when it's in a state of half-undress. But there's no explaining the mystery of sex, and I'll give her this much—she didn't give me a second glance for a moment. She had eyes only for Glacial Stare. She stood staring down at him with all the blood draining from her face, as if she'd never seen a dead man before or a man as close to death as Glacial Stare seemed to be.