Mars is My Destination

by Frank Belknap Long

The first colonists, as everyone knows, went about with oxygen tanks strapped to their backs and took a whiff or two of the stuff in Earth-atmosphere concentration through a flexible metal tube whenever their lungs started burning. And inside the early pre-fabs, of course, there were miniature aerator systems which made living indoors as comfortable as it was Earthside.

But the big aerator-system had completely eliminated the need—a health hazard-diminishing need at best and never actually mandatory—of the huge glass dome which imaginative science writers in the first three decades of the Space Age had predicted as a must for successful Martian colonization. There are seldom any musts when science advances in seven league boots and you're right on the scene in person, breathing in a planet's atmosphere for yourself and finding out that there just happens to be a little more oxygen in it than precision instruments on Earth had led you to anticipate.

It wasn't a precision instrument of any kind I was needing right at that moment—even to reassure me about my heart beat. I knew exactly how fast it was beating—much too fast. We passed a doctor in a smock so spotless it didn't seem as if he could have been wearing it for longer than a few minutes. But the look of quick suspicion he trained on us was ageless, the kind of look that comes into the eyes of a trained professional man when he can't be quite sure that a subordinate is doing the wise thing.

What right had the nurse to take me for a walk along the corridor when I looked that close to caving in? I feared for an instant I was overdoing the act, but when the suspicion faded and he went past us along the corridor I breathed more freely again. We passed a nurse who didn't even glance at us and another—blonde and pert-nosed—who smiled and nodded, just as if we were old friends. I wondered what she saw in me.

Then we were standing before an elevator at the end of the corridor and the red down light came on ... because Nurse Cherubin had pressed the down button ... and she was urging me to be cautious for the second time.

"We're going down three flights to the admitting ward," she said. She smiled, as if she'd suddenly remembered there's nothing like a touch of levity to relieve strain, even if it has to be forced. "But don't let that dishearten you. Patients are discharged from the admitting ward too. It's not quite as long as this corridor but it will be busier. Patients, nurses—at least three doctors. We'll just walk right through as if we had every right to be there. Just outside the emergency exit, a few steps further on, there's a driveway which curves around behind the hospital. Ambulances with accident victims use it, but there's not likely to be an ambulance standing there. You go down a narrow flight of stairs to get to it. Is that clear?"

I nodded. "What do I do then?"

"You just follow the driveway until it forks and the left turn will take you into the clear-away between the aerators which leads directly to the Colony. You won't have to pass in front of the hospital at all. Ambulances may pass you before you get to the Colony, but you won't be stopped and questioned. They'll think you're one of the aeration-system workers."

I had an impulse to give her a hug and tell her I loved her, quite sure that she'd know what I meant, even if I did it inside the elevator where it would have more an aspect of intimacy. You love people who go all out to help you and they don't even have to be young and beautiful. But when they are there's an added warmth somehow—

We carried it off better than I'd dared to hope. We descended in the elevator, emerged arm in arm and walked right through the admitting ward without even glancing at the fifteen or twenty people we had to pass to get to the emergency exit she'd mentioned, a third of them in white. No one stopped or questioned us, and we followed the same nurse-helping-patient routine which had proved its worth on the third floor of the hospital.