Mars is My Destination

by Frank Belknap Long

I saw the scream coming just in time. I stepped in front of her and clamped my hand over her mouth, drawing her close to me, and keeping a tight grip on her shoulder to prevent her from breaking away from me and making a dash for the door.

I couldn't blame her for being scared or feeling, as she obviously did, that I was responsible for the terrible state Glacial Stare was in. And whatever Joan had told her about me ... and despite everything she'd told the doctor ... she'd been a nurse long enough to know that even a woman who has been married to a man for many years can never be sure he won't develop some odd, wild quirk of character which will turn him into a murderer overnight.

And that's even more true of a hospital patient who has been close to death and running a fever and may still be in an irresponsible state, his reason undermined by the suffering he's undergone.

And she was completely right about one thing. I was entirely responsible for the terrible state Glacial Stare was in. Only ... there had been a reason for the violence I had unleashed against him, and I wanted her to hear the full story as quickly as possible, so that she would calm down and become a responsible person again herself.

Hysteria is a woman's worst enemy ... and a man's too, for that matter. But since it's ten times as common in women as in men it's a very special problem which every man should know how to deal with. I was no expert at it, but she helped me by listening to what I had to say in my own defense as if her life depended on it. And when I was through she seemed to agree with me that if someone had put an ether cone over Glacial Stare's face in his sleep and relieved him of life's burdens in a painless, merciful way they would have been doing humanity a service.

"It's not right to feel that way," she said. "It makes you wonder about yourself when you even think you'd like to see someone who's that ruthless removed from a world that has too many merciless people in it. But I guess everyone who isn't that way ... thinks about it at times."

"I did more than think about it," I said. "But in the main I battered him unconscious just to give myself a one in ten chance of staying alive. The odds against me have shrunk a little, but not much. Unless I can get out of here fast—"

"You can!" she breathed. "I'll help you. No one will try to stop us, if we make it look as if I was just walking with you to the end of the corridor and back. We get patients right out of bed after minor surgery, to keep them from losing their strength. It's the best way."

"Minor surgery! You mean—"

Nurse Cherubin nodded. "They didn't have to probe to get the dart out. It didn't go deep into your back. It was the poison that made you so ill. The dart struck a bone and that jammed the poison mechanism. The dart splintered just a little, but not enough poison got into your bloodstream to kill you. But you ran a fever and once or twice I was really frightened, because your pulse started fluttering and you almost stopped breathing."