The soldiers and the man with the blue cloth were moving slowly down the line, stopping to let each person salute. Paula gripped her hands together.
“Salute the flag!”
“Why?” a girl’s voice asked.
“She’s an anarchist. Take her in custody.”
Paula burst out of the line, running away from the soldiers down the string of waiting people. Someone shouted. She ran close to the line; they would not shoot into the crowd. A hand snatched for her and she eluded it. A man raced past her, fleeing. Her foot slipped on a loose hourly and she fell. A bullet whispered past her ear. People screamed. She leaped up, dodging between two buildings. The little metal whisper hummed by her again. She ran around the corner of a building. Something hit her like a hammer and knocked her flying. She rolled over and over, leaped up, and ran on. People shouted, somewhere behind her. Her hip began to hurt. Through the screams behind her she heard the clatter of gunfire. She limped away into the wasteland, panting.
Some while later their building was raided. She and Bunker, Willie and An Chu sat for hours in the tunnel. It was freezing cold. She laid her cheek against Bunker’s shoulder and closed her eyes. Once they heard Jennie Morrison screaming. Finally, just before dawn, they crept down into the secret room again.
Jennie was gone. The apartment was wrecked. The desk had been smashed and the cupboards and counter pulled off the kitchen wall. The wall between this and the next apartment had been broken out. The man who lived there was gone too.
An Chu leaned on Willie’s shoulder and cried. Paula took her jacket off. The healing bullet wound ached in her backside. She and Bunker went out to the hall.
All up and down the hall the doors to the apartments were broken inward. She went along the hall, looking into the rooms. In some of them even the mat flooring had been ripped up and the floors cracked open. No one was there. Paula wiped her hands on her sleeves. So they had done it, rounded everybody up and taken them away. Bunker went ahead of her toward the stairs. She turned back to Jennie’s room.
Willie paced up and down the room, his arms swinging. “This proves it. We have to get out of here.”
“Where?” Paula said. Bunker returned, and her shoulders sank an inch with relief.
“The people hidden under the floor in 73 are still here,” he said. “And the two women who live in the broom closet. I guess the police just didn’t bother to look in there.”
Willie walked past them, his strides quick as a soldier’s. “I’ll kill them. I’ll smash hell out of them, if I can just get my hands on them.” He brandished his fists.
An Chu came in from the secret room with a cup of water. “What are we going to do about Jennie?”
“We have to get out of here,” Willie said.
“We can’t leave,” Bunker said to Willie. “Not right away. They’ll be watching to see if anybody bolts.” He slid under the sink to open the secret door.
Paula and An Chu followed Bunker into the narrow room. The smell of mildew grew strong just inside the door. An Chu dropped down onto the cot she and Willie shared, her face tipped up to Paula’s.
“We have to find out where they’ve taken Jennie.”
At the end of the room, Bunker turned around. “No. There’s nothing we can do for Jennie now.”
“When we find her we can decide what to do,” Paula said. Her left buttock throbbed deep in the wound. Willie Luhan was stalking down the room, his fists still clenched tight.
“You know, I think you’re a coward,” he said to Bunker.
“I think you’re an idiot,” Bunker said. He went head-first out of the room into the ruined building.
An Chu straightened, her hand on Paula’s arm. “They took dozens of people. It won’t be that hard to find them.”
“I’ll help you,” Willie said. “I know where I can get a gun.”
Paula’s hand pressed against her bad hip. She went to the bucket for a drink of water. It was nearly morning. They would have to wait until night to look for Jennie. The pain in her hip nagged her. She was going nowhere with Willie and his gun. Of all the people she knew, the only one she needed was Bunker. He would not help her, and he was right. She hunched her shoulders.
At a lope she crossed the close-cropped lawn to the next building, An Chu behind her, and sat down in the lee of the wall. An Chu raced up beside her. Paula wiped her hand over her face.
“This is impossible.”
An Chu muttered something. There were four buildings in this complex, all above ground, rising six or eight stories above the trim lawns. Down the hill, Paula could see a section of the wire fence that separated the buildings and grass from the wasteland. A light came on in the building she was sitting against.
“We aren’t doing this right.” She got up. Her hip had stiffened and when she put her weight on it she nearly fell. She led An Chu the length of the building to the door. It was locked. She pressed her nose to the window. Inside was a hall, and along the wall a row of vending machines.
“We need an hourly.”
An Chu pushed her out of the way to look. “They won’t say where they took them in an hourly.” She rattled the door, Paula turned, casting around the lawn for loose paper.
“Listen.” An Chu clutched her arm. “Is that about us?”
Somewhere nearby a siren moaned up toward a whistling shriek. Paula moved away from the building, toward the dark. Another siren joined the first, and another, and another, and suddenly one on the roof before her, so loud she jumped a foot.
“Come on.” Limping, she started down the hill toward the fence. The grass was even as pavement under her feet.
The sirens screeched up to a high note and stuck there. An Chu beside her broke into a trot. She glanced back.
“Watch out!”
Paula wheeled. A searchlight snapped on near the building they had just left. An Chu whispered, “Run!”
“No.” Paula grabbed the other woman’s arm and held her. She faced the searchlight’s blinding eye. The sirens’ high scream needled her ears. Two indistinct figures ran down the gentle slope toward her.
“Stay where you are. Put your hands up.”
Paula raised her hands. She called, “What’s going on? We’re trying to get home.”
Two Martian soldiers reached them. One carried a heavy automatic pistol. The other slapped his hands down Paula’s sides.
“All right. Where’s home? You know you’re half an hour past curfew.”
Paula gave the address on her identification. She took the white job-card out of the collar pocket on her jacket to show the soldier. The searchlight went off; the round eye of the lamp faded slowly through yellow to brown to black. An Chu stood rigid while the soldier groped her up and down. Suddenly the sirens too were turned off. The silence rang like the aftertone of a bell. The soldier with the pistol looked up over his head at the dark dome.
“False alarm?”
The other man was reading Paula’s card, luminous in the dark. “What are you doing all the way—” He raised his head. High overhead there was a boom.
“Come with us. Run.” He grabbed Paula’s arm and dragged her across the lawn at a dead run toward the nearest building. The other man and An Chu raced after them.
Another boom sounded, nearer, like a crash of thunder. The echo rolled off around them. The sound hurt Paula’s ears. The soldier opened a sloping basement door and pushed her toward a flight of steps leading down into the underground floor. She looked back. Far down the dome, beyond the fence, there was a sudden great spark, blue-white, like a giant star, gone in an instant. The soldier thrust her down into the basement.
“Attention,” a wall speaker said. “Your attention please.”