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Mars is My Destination

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<h2>18</h2> We stayed silent until the tractor had rumbled past eight or ten of the breaks in the Big Grayness. They were shrouded in dusk-light now, with no kids playing in the front yards of the housing area pre-fabs. Then, just as we were turning into the clear-away that branched off from the one I'd taken on leaving the hospital, Hillard shouted: "We've got to get over to the left! There's an ambulance right up ahead!" I heard the siren before I saw it, a banshee-like wail cutting through the twilight, unnerving in its shrillness. It took a moment or two for its winking red headlights to come sweeping toward us and if Hillard had seen them before that it had to mean he had exceptionally sharp eyesight. It careened past without slowing, almost grazing the hood of the tractor. I thought for an instant, when the banshee wail became shrill again, that it was still coming from the same ambulance. Then I saw four more furiously blinking headlights coming out of the dusk ahead of us, and another ambulance swept past, as swiftly as the first had done, but missing us by a wider margin. A third followed it at a distance of less than a hundred feet, its siren at such full blast that it no longer sounded like a banshee wail. You can be gripped by a dread that's practically breath-stopping and still manage to shout, if your only other choice is to die inwardly. It may have been more of a groan than a shout. My voice sounded ragged and it almost broke. "Could those ambulances be coming from the spaceport? Do you think—" He cut me off. I probably couldn't have gone on anyway. "They could never have gotten out there and back so fast!" he shouted. "We'll be passing through a section of the Colony in about two more minutes. It's closer to the hospital, so it's just possible they've picked up a few victims at the fringe of the blast area who didn't have our luck." "The fallout area must be pretty wide!" I shouted back. "Wherever the explosion took place—" He cut me off again. "No fallout—or very little. What there is is gone within four or five minutes. Safe to go in after that, for the residue wouldn't mutate a fruitfly. Colonists don't know that ... closely guarded Endicott trade secret. Reason we let the Colonists store them. A fuel cylinder can be converted into a nuclear bomb, all right, but it will be the cleanest midget bomb ever built. Take fifteen or twenty of them to blow up even a third of the Colony. But that doesn't mean that one couldn't blow up the spaceport, or seriously injure hundreds of people throughout the fringe area. The ground tremor alone could do that. I told you what it did to this tractor. Has the force of a small earthquake, except that the tremors are three times as erratic. They can just shake you up a little, or break every bone in your body. Depends on where you happen to be standing. It follows a zigzagging pattern, so it can pass right by you." All that didn't come in one shout, but I'm recording it that way because I didn't interrupt him, and though he must have stopped once or twice to take a deep breath, and keep a sharp lookout for another ambulance I wasn't aware of any break in what he was saying. He was trying his best to make it crystal clear, if only to calm me down a little. Some of it was reassuring, but not what he'd said about the spaceport. A clean bomb with little or no fallout can leave you just as dead if you're unfortunate enough to be blown up by it. You see things sometimes you can't bring yourself to talk about, even to close friends when the horror has receded a little and you know it can't come back in a physical way to torment you. So I'm going to draw the veil over most of what we saw when we passed through about five square miles of the Colony, before the clear-away broadened out to twice its previous width and we headed out across the desert toward the spaceport. We couldn't be sure, even then, just where the explosion had taken place, because it was only the fringe area we passed through. It hadn't been laid waste by the blast and there were only five or six demolished buildings. If the big square which stretched between the Endicott plant and the aerators had been a built-up section instead of a square the property damage might have been just as great and would not have seemed ruinous. But there was one other difference. The Endicott square had been unpopulated, with just one tractor moving out from the long line of tractors on the far side. The five miles of Colony we passed through had been the opposite of unpopulated. Its streets and squares and playgrounds and vehicle-parking areas had been thronged with people. They were still thronged with people but some of them were lying prone, and others were leaning dazedly against the walls of buildings which had remained for the most part undamaged and still others, who no longer seemed to be in a state of shock, were bending over the slumped bodies of the grievously injured and the dying, doing their best to console them and ease their pain. I'm drawing the veil on the rest of it—the blood and the screaming—because it was pretty awful, and what possible purpose would be served if I described it? How could it benefit anyone? It would serve as a reminder of how cruel life can be at times, how uncertain and terrible. We know that, don't we? So ... to hell with it ... I say that in a very reverent way, with awe and respect, and not profanely. But it's best to consign it where it belongs, to hell, and not let it paralyze all action and make you give up when there are still sunsets, and the laughter of children, and the happiness of lovers, and ten thousand other things that are worth fighting to preserve. It took us less than eight minutes to arrive at the spaceport, dusty from head to foot, with sand choking our lungs and gasping a little from oxygen shortage, because when there's a stiff wind blowing over the desert the aerators don't function at peak efficiency. I didn't know there was anything wrong until the tractor began to zigzag a little, about three hundred feet from the massive, steel-mesh gates of the spaceport. He had strength enough left to tug at the brakes and bring the tractor to a grinding halt before he slumped against me, with a strangled sob that chilled me to the core of my being. It chilled me and stunned me and frightened me, because I'd never thought that anything like that could happen. He was frail, all right, and had the look of a man whose health had been steadily failing ... no doubt partly brought about by the battle he'd been waging with Wendel. And he'd mentioned something about heart-trouble— The trouble was, I hadn't taken all that too seriously, because you never think that someone who has displayed extraordinary energy and firmness of will is going to collapse right when you need him most. I swung about and looked at him, and his pallor gave me an even worse jolt than the way he'd moaned and sagged heavily against me. He gripped my arm and tried to speak, but the words wouldn't come. His lips moved soundlessly for a moment and then—they stopped moving. His body stopped moving too. All at once, as if a clock had stopped ticking inside of him, and Time had stopped ticking for him forever just because his life and the clock were bound up together, intricate parts of the same mechanism, and if the clock stopped there was no way his life could be prolonged. I knew he was dead before I reached out and touched him. I could tell by the dull, unseeing glaze which had over-spread his pupils and the terrible stillness which had come upon him. A stillness and a rigidity that made it impossible for me to doubt what the alarm bells were telling me as well. They had started ringing again, but this time it wasn't so much an alarm they were sounding as a dirge. It was impossible for me to doubt, but I still had to make sure, as he would have wanted me to do, by feeling for a heartbeat that wasn't there and satisfying myself in other ways. It was an obligation I couldn't evade and had no intention of evading. It took me less than a minute and a half—a time limit I kept firmly in mind—to fulfill that obligation. Then I descended from the tractor and headed for the steel-mesh gates of the spaceport on the run. <hr class="chap" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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