The conversation, as I've said, came to me in snatches and it could hardly have been called a running dialogue. The continuity alone would have gotten a professional script writer fired, no matter how brilliant he was otherwise. The only way I can whip it into shape is by recording it as if it were continuous, filling in the part I overheard between blackouts with what I didn't hear--staying close enough to what was probably being said to keep the script writer on the job and eating. I'm pretty sure this is a fairly accurate re-write. Joan: What kind of a hospital is it? I'm sorry, I ... I guess I shouldn't have asked you that. You're on the staff. No matter how frank you might want to be.... Doctor Mile-Away: If I thought it wasn't a good hospital I wouldn't say so, naturally. But it happens to match up very well with the eight or ten you'd want him to be taken to Earthside, if you had a choice. The facilities are first-rate, completely up to date. There are four surgeons I'd trust my life to with equal confidence ... and one of them happens to be my dad. Joan: I hope to God he gets one of them. Doctor: There are only four surgeons. We don't get too many surgical cases in the Colony--not nearly as many as you might think. There's as much violence here, perhaps, as there is in New Chicago but it takes a different form. We can't keep atomic hand-guns out of criminal hands as easily as you can in New Chicago, because the lawless element in the Colony has more socio-political power and can get more weapons in that destructive category smuggled in. As you know, an atomic hand-gun has a very limited destructive potential, since there's no fallout and it can only kill a man standing directly in its path. But when it does ... there isn't much margin left for surgery. Joan: You mean _criminals_ are in control here? Doctor: Oh, it's not quite that bad. Possibly about one colonist in twenty has dangerous criminal tendencies. The proportion is larger here only because it's a new society, with a pioneering outlook. You might call it a wolf-eat-wolf society. On Earth the dog-eat-dog tendencies will probably never be completely eradicated but we've gone a long way in that respect just in the last half-century. Here we have further to go, because the dogs are still wolves. Joan: Will you ever tame them? My husband may be dying right here; that doesn't look so tame! I think your Mars Colony is a filthy jungle!