Chapter 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.

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.”

“Good God!” I looked at her, wondering. “If I was that close to death how could my strength have come back so fast? I don’t feel too good right now. But I had enough strength when I crashed into him to drag him from the chair, lift him up and slam him back against the wall.”

She nodded. “Even a dying man can do that sometimes, if he’s threatened in a violent enough way and desperately wants to stay alive. But you weren’t that weak, and you’re not going to die. You’ve got more strength right now than you realize. And you’ll get stronger--not weaker. After minor surgery the post-operative shock is usually minor too, and the fever didn’t last long enough to seriously weaken you. The last blood test was good. No poison--not even a millionth of a c.c. You perspired freely, and that helped to save your life.”

“All right,” I said. “That’s good news. Just the fact that you’re the only one who knows what would happen if I don’t get out of here fast would be better news--the best there is. Except that--”

I shook my head and looked past her toward the door. “What good would a walk up the corridor do me if there’s a Wendel agent stationed at the end of it? A doctor might be taken in, but a Wendel agent would wonder why a nurse was helping me to keep my strength up when I could answer questions better flat on my back. He’d come right back into this room with us, to find out what happened.”

“There are no Wendel agents anywhere in the hospital,” she said. “The hospital would have put up a fight if a Wendel police officer had insisted on questioning you as he did--in private. It would have been a losing battle, and we couldn’t have held out for very long. By tomorrow an armed guard would have demanded that you be released in Wendel custody and you can’t run a hospital in the Colony if you defy the Wendel police to that extent.”

I stared at her, amazed. “Then how did he get in here to see me?”

It was then that she exploded the bombshell.

“If the Wendel Combine, with all of its socio-political power, came here in the person of just one man and threatened to make full use of that power if he was not allowed to talk to you in strict privacy ... and that man was Henry Wendel himself--”

She shrugged, glancing steadily for a moment at the slumped form of Glacial Stare, with just an uncanny silence hovering over him. No trace now of the power-aura that must have made hundreds of his yes-men turn pale and snap to attention at various times in the past, if the look he’d trained on me was ingrained and habitual with him. And I rather thought it was.

Mr. Big himself! And I’d banged him around without knowing, without even suspecting that I was slamming the Wendel Power Combine back against a hospital-room wall. All the immense height and depth and weight of it, the big atomic transmission lines, the towering black turbines, the boa constrictor coils that snaked in all directions through the center of the Colony. The war, too--the wolf-eat-wolf war that was being waged with Endicott Fuel, and the demoralization that was sounding taps over graves that hadn’t been dug yet but would bear the Wendel trademark.

The lawful authority that the silver bird had conferred on me would have given me the right to act as his executioner then and there. But you can’t solve problems that way and hope to gain by it ... because there are always other Mr. Bigs waiting to step into the shoes of the Mr. Big you’ve taken care of in behalf of the common weal, with more cocksureness than you’ve any right to exercise.

When you cut off the head of that kind of boa constrictor and leave the big coils intact the new head may be twice or three times as dangerous.

That he had come to the hospital alone, completely unguarded, would have been hard to believe if I hadn’t remembered that an attempt had been made to blast the sky ship apart in space solely because Wendel wanted me out of the way. I was sure of that now. And if he wanted me dead that bad, safe-guarding his person would probably have seemed of minor importance to him. It could be waived--an inconsequential detail. I had to be questioned and then killed, and he was the best man for the job. He could trust no one else to handle it as well.

The joker was--he had botched it.

There were a lot more questions I wanted to ask Nurse Cherubin but there just wasn’t time for them. We’d wasted four or five minutes already, just discussing the state of my health, and at any moment someone might come through the door who would refuse to let me leave when he saw what I’d done to Wendel.

It wouldn’t have to be a Wendel agent. No doctor who wasn’t keen about committing suicide would have let me go until Wendel came to, and our two stories could be compared. I didn’t have the silver bird to back up my story, and when Wendel came to he’d simply step to a tele-communicator and the hospital would be swarming with Wendel agents before I could hope to win any converts. The fact that he’d come to visit me unguarded didn’t mean he’d placed himself in any real jeopardy ... in his book at least. He couldn’t have known I’d knock him out cold, and even if the hospital was located fifteen miles from the Colony it wouldn’t take the Wendel police long to get to him. Ten or twelve minutes, at most.

Perhaps they were already on the way. It stood to reason. He’d hurried himself and arrived ahead of them, but he’d want them to be there as soon as he killed me, to dump my body on a stretcher and carry it out under guard.

When he killed me--God, how easy it was to overlook the most vital things! I hadn’t even searched him. If he had a weapon on him I could certainly use it, for nothing can boost your morale quite so much when your life is at stake as the firm, cool feel of an atomic hand-gun against your palm.

I was starting toward him when Nurse Cherubin said: “Stay here, and keep the door locked until I come back. I’ll tap three times. I’ve got to get you some clothes.”