She knocked three times, as she'd promised and came in with some clothes that some poor devil in another room would never live to put on again. She told me as much while I was taking off my one-piece in-patient garment. "Cancer," she said. "They're keeping him under sedation. You think you're in trouble, that the game is hardly worth the candle, until you see something like that. Then you realize how lucky you are--just to be alive." "You don't have to tell me," I said. "I've often thought along those lines." She wasn't embarrassed when I stood for a moment stark naked before her, as most nurses aren't. I wasn't particularly embarrassed either, because right at that moment I had no more sex awareness than a totem pole. The clothes were a little small for me, but I had a feeling that in the Colony not too much attention was paid to the way clothes fitted you--or failed to fit. In a pioneering society ill-fitting clothes are accepted as an indication that you are a rough-and-tumble sort of guy, know your way around and are, for good measure, an old-timer, with early-settler prestige. There were two more questions I had to ask her before I became a babe-in-the-woods kind of grown man on Mars, with just the hand-gun and a few highly trained areas of native intelligence to protect me--if I succeeded in getting out of the hospital alive. It was still a very big _if_, but the questions were just as vital, and were directly tied in with it. Just how far _was_ the hospital from the Colony? And what was she going to tell Joan to keep her from succumbing to panic when my darling wanted to know what had become of me? Before we left the room she answered the second question reassuringly. It had been weighing so heavily on my mind I'd been afraid to even let myself bring it right out into the open and face it squarely. Mr. Big hadn't even mentioned Joan in the ugly little talk I'd had with him, and if she was still somewhere in the hospital I had a feeling he'd have used her nearness as one more way of tightening the thumbscrew. I'd been right about that, apparently. "She had a talk with Commander Littlefield on the tele-communicator," Nurse Cherubin said. "He advised her to return to the Mars' rocket a few hours ago. He wanted to talk to her ... said it was urgent ... and promised to check on your progress report every half hour. She left in one of the outgoing ambulances. She told me she'd be back just as soon as you regained consciousness. It's a very short trip in an ambulance. The hospital is only eight miles from the Colony." So that answered my first question too, but only in part. If there was just a waste of blowing sand outside it would certainly cut down my chances. But there had to be a firm-packed road for the ambulances to travel over, didn't there?