And then—I did hug and kiss her, just once briefly before I went out through the exit and down the stairs to the driveway. I hoped Joan wouldn't mind if she ever got to hear about it.
"Goodbye," I said. "And thank you."
[16]
There was no waiting ambulance in the driveway. I descended the stairway, twelve metal steps railed in on both sides, feeling grateful for what she'd said right after I kissed her. "Don't worry about your wife. If Wendel tries to make us send for her we'll find a way to roast him over a slow fire until you're together again. There are three doctors who will put up a stiff fight and I'm going to set to work on all of them. You've no idea what a hospital can do with just the right kind of delaying tactics."
It took me less than two minutes to half-encircle the driveway, take the turn she'd recommended and strike out for the Colony between the towering gray walls of the aerators.
The Big Grayness. I'd seen photographs of that tremendous engineering project in my hell-bent-for-adventure years, when I'd sat at a desk in a schoolroom, and imagined what it would be like to take part in the construction work, standing on a dizzy height with an electronic riveter in my hand, watching blue lights go on and off and sparks fly up into the cool Martian night beneath a wilderness of stars.
The reality was very much as I'd imagined it as a school kid, except that I wasn't a construction worker looking down over it, a human fly with a man-size job to do, but a guy that kid wouldn't have recognized, his footsteps echoing on the catwalk at the base of it. I had a giant-size job to do, but how could he have known it would some day turn into anything that big?
It wasn't even a project anymore—half of it still in the blueprint stage. It was completed and the towering gray walls were firm and solid, and the grills were sending oxygen spiraling out over the Colony without making me feel light-headed at all.
Right at that moment I'd have welcomed a little oxygen intoxication but the aerator-system didn't work that way. The flow was regulated directly at the source, kept under controlled pressure and diffused outward high up by rotary circulators. As it spread out over the Colony it was drawn down to breathing level by another system of circulators, stationed at intervals about the Colony and extending twenty-five miles out into the surrounding desert.