Slipping quickly from the room and taking my chances made more sense than waiting around for an ally to come to my assistance, because he might not be an ally at all, but another Wendel agent. I was deliberately shutting my mind to the greatest danger--the Big One. You're deliberately shutting your mind to the Big One, Ralphie boy. Getting back to the sky ship will be tough sledding, every foot of the way, and you'll have to dodge and weave about and you may end up dead in the darkest of Martian alleys, half blown apart by an atomic hand-gun. But the Big One is getting out of the hospital itself, and you're afraid to let yourself think about that because you know how heavily the odds will be stacked against you. You don't know what the hospital is like--how big it is, even. You don't know how many corridors there are, or how many alarm bells will start ringing the instant anyone sees you. There may be a dozen nurses to a floor and doctors constantly on the move from the operating rooms to the recovery wards, and a Wendel agent or two on guard at the end of each corridor. All the exits may be blocked, with Wendel agents aimed with atomic hand-guns just waiting for you to show up running. You don't even know how far the hospital is from the center of the Colony, only that--just before you blacked out for the last time in the ambulance--you seemed to be quite a distance from the heart of the Colony. Even if there are no guards at any of the exits and no one tries to stop you how will you be able to find your way back to the spaceport without a compass if the hospital is ten or fifteen miles from the Colony, and all about you is a waste of desert sand and there are no outgoing ambulances standing by to give you a lift. High up in one of the rooms there'll be a Wendel agent you've belted into insensibility and he'll be stirring and calling out for help and when they come swarming into the hospital room to lift him up--the nurses and the doctors who can't help but blanch a little when he reminds them just how powerful the Wendel Combine is--he'll have only one thing to say to them. "Get me the Central Police Agency on the tele-communicator." You'll be out in the red desert, fighting your way toward the Colony through a sandstorm perhaps, but ten or twelve minutes after that call goes through you'll hear a droning overhead and that will be the end of you.