The dark basement was crowded with people, packed together body to body. The man behind Paula directed her through the room. His hand torch flashed a narrow light ahead of her. She stepped over legs and bodies sprawled over the floor. Two people squeezed apart to make room for her.
“Paula—”
She caught An Chu’s hand and pulled her after her. There was room for only one of them to sit, and they stood, An Chu in front of Paula. The soldiers were gone.
“Attention. We are experiencing a meteorite barrage. There is no need for alarm. Please remain quiet and obey your building commandos.”
“Meteorites,” An Chu said. “What do they—”
“Sssh.” Paula slid one arm around An Chu’s waist. Her hip hurt and she shifted her balance to the other leg. In the wasteland they hardly noticed the air raids. The door was behind them, ten yards away: twenty people away. Wait. Under her feet the floor vibrated. The people around her talked in low voices. The soldier who had brought them still had her job-card. He might be checking it. The sirens began to howl again.
“Attention. Your attention please. The all-clear is sounding—”
The crowd got to their feet in a sudden relieved roar of voices, their feet loud, reaching for coats and children. Paula shoved An Chu forward.
“Hurry.”
They worked their way through the shifting mob toward the door. The ceiling lights came on, dazzling bright, drawing a gasp from most of the people in the room. Between Paula and the door a man helped another into a coat. He had been sitting on an hourly, which clung to his backside. In passing, Paula removed it. She bundled it in her fist and followed An Chu to the door. They slid out to the cool night air and ran down the gentle slope toward the fence.
Government Police have arrested over a thousand anarchist terrorists in raids that broke the back of a dome-wide subversive organization.
“Over a thousand,” Paula said. Even allowing for official exaggeration, that meant hundreds of prisoners. There were very few places in New York large enough to keep hundreds of people. Even after the immigrations of the past months, the Martians did not have enough men here to guard hundreds of prisoners in small groups: they all had to be together. Paula swept a look around them. They were walking along the side of a hill, outside the fences of the Martians. Dawn was coming.
“How’s your butt?” An Chu stuffed her hands in her jacket pockets.
“It’s all right.”
“They don’t expect anybody to believe that was meteorites,” An Chu said.
“They do have meteor storms on Mars,” Paula said. “The air’s that thin.” She folded the hourly. A dry ridge of hillside rose up ahead of them, beyond a forest of tree stumps four feet high. She swung around the foot of the hill.
Climbing the gentler slope beyond, she smelled smoke, and when she reached the crest of the hill saw a ruin, still burning, on the level ground beyond. She stopped. An Chu caught up with her.
“What’s the matter?”
Paula was staring at the ruin. It had been bombed out long before; the old walls had sagged almost to the ground. Someone had bombed it again last night. An Chu said, “That must have happened during the raid. Then it’s the Styths, isn’t it?”
Paula went on without answering. With masers, they could bomb inside the dome, and they obviously had some way of finding buildings, although without distinguishing inhabited places from ruins. She thought nervously of Bunker in the building near the lake and went faster down the hillside.
The wound in her cheek itched. She hoped that meant it was healing. Limping after An Chu across the barren wasteland, she thought wryly of what Tanuojin had said; she wished for him now, with his doctor’s hands. An Chu ran off over the crest of a hill, out of sight.
The night was much warmer than the one before had been. The dust made her nose itch. They had spent an hour talking over the whole dome and the places where the Martians could house hundreds of prisoners. There was only one: the entry port on the northwest wall. She rounded the hillside and a dry wind brushed her face. An Chu dashed up to her.
“Look what I found.”
She had half an overripe melon, lightly peppered with coffee grounds. They ate it while they walked. The sweet juice ran down Paula’s chin and she caught it on her fingers and licked it off. They crossed a stretch of low ground that had been bulldozed flat, as if for a new building. Paula looked south. The dome stretched off below her, spotted with islands of lights. The sirens began.
“Again?” An Chu put her head back to look up.
“Come on,” Paula said. “This will make it easier—they’ll all be indoors.”
They went on side by side toward the west wall of the dome. The sirens’ hound-voices rose and fell, reached their high note, and stayed there. The first crash boomed in the peak of the dome. The thunder radiated out like a wave. Paula found herself walking at top speed in spite of her bad hip.
Another, louder bang sounded. Suddenly, just ahead of her and a hundred feet off the ground, there was a silent explosion of light, blue-white, brilliant as a sun. It was gone at once. She stopped, her breath caught in her lungs, An Chu beside her. They were near the top of a hill; to the north was another complex of buildings. The booming in the dome grew louder and the reports closer together. Another star burst at ground level between the two women and the buildings. For an instant the buildings, the land, the dead stumps of the trees were printed on Paula’s eyes like a photographic negative. The blackness that fell afterward was like being blind. Another boom echoed through the dome and a few seconds later another light shone, and one of the buildings to the north exploded into a stalk of flames.
Paula turned and ran down the hillside. Her ears rang. The thunder rolls of the attack came so fast they blended into one long crash. The light-bombs burst with every stride she took. An Chu ran beside her. The grass broke under Paula’s feet and a sharp dry stalk jabbed her in the leg. Dazzled by the bombs, her head throbbing from the racket, she ran straight into a heavy wire-mesh fence.
The attack ended. The sirens of the all-clear began to moan. Paula and An Chu climbed the fence and dropped down onto the smooth clipped grass of a Martian lawn. Limping, Paula jogged toward the dome wall, just ahead of them beyond a building. Voices sounded, and people began to spill out of the below-ground floors onto the grass. The lights in the building came on. Paula and An Chu went unnoticed in the crowd; they sneaked down into a basement to hide for the day.
An Chu found them a banquet in the garbage: soggy bread and apple cores and four containers with beans and vegetables still clinging to the bottoms. They drank from a public fountain and spent most of the day in the basement of the building, in behind the cleaning machines. After dark they started along the wall of the dome, going north, to find the entry port, the most secure place in the dome.
It bulged out of the side of the dome, taller than any building, about fifteen minutes’ walk from where they had spent the day. The wire fence surrounding it was strung on rubberized posts. Five feet inside this fence was another fence, higher, also insulated.
Paula sat down. Her backside hurt more than yesterday and she knew it was infected. “That must be where those prisoners are.”
“Is it electric?” An Chu put her hand out.
“Touch it and find out.”
“Why are you in a mood?”
Paula looked away. Now that they had found Jennie, there was nothing to do to help her. She got up and went on along the fence, limping. The blank wall of the entry port rose up beyond the second fence. She could see people walking on the ramp over her head, perhaps sentries. One leaned on the rail a moment and she saw the barrel of a gun on his shoulder.