“I’m not doing it for you, I’m just hurting Savenia.”
Paula went into the room to get a drink of water. It irritated her that he spent days helping strange people leave the dome. With a lucifer match she lit the dip-lamp in the wall.
“When you get outside,” Bunker said, “you’ll have to dodge the Styths.”
Her back to them, Paula muttered, “Tell them Paula sends her love.”
“What?”
Bunker escorted his clients out through the flat toward the stairs. Paula took her clothes off. The heat made her hair frizzy. Her skin was rough with insect bites. She washed with a towel and a pan of water.
“Have you seen Luhan?” Dick said. He came into the room and slid the door shut.
“Not in days.”
The water in the pot was murky. She threw it out and poured fresh water to wash her face with. Sitting on the cot, she combed her hair. “How many of these people do you think escape from the Martians and the Styths both?”
“Very few.”
“Maybe none.” She watched him walk the length of the room. His gray beard grew like wool along his jaws. Dropping down beside her on the cot, he scratched her back.
“We ought to move,” she said. She squirmed to bring other parts of her back under his fingernails. “I’m getting a bad feeling about staying here.”
“You’re superstitious.”
“We’ve been here too long. You bring half the population of the dome in, everybody knows where we are. You should put out a sign. I’m saving the world, apply here.”
“Savenia has a reward out for those people.”
“She probably has a reward out for us. And it wouldn’t surprise me if Saba and Tanuojin have money out for us.”
“All right.” He scratched her shoulders and down her arms. “We’ll move.”
“Good.”
“After I get these people out of the dome.”
Paula woke up with a jump. Something was crashing against the apartment door. Beside her Bunker thrust himself up on his arms.
“Raid.” He left the bed like a bird from the limb.
The door crashed open. A bright light stabbed into the room. Paula scrambled across the head end of the cot toward the darkness. Men rushed into the room, surrounding her. She lunged for the door, tripped, and fell on her face halfway across the threshold. A boot tramped on her hand. She was hauled up by the arms to her feet.
In the white glare of a hand torch, Bunker stood with his arms gripped behind him and a rifle across his neck. Three men held him. He looked frail. His muscles were strung like wires along his bones. The men around him wore no uniforms, although on their upper arms there were red armbands.
“You’re the forger?” Another man stepped between Paula and Bunker.
“Who are you?” Bunker said. His voice was hoarse.
“My name is Han Ra. I’m the chief of the Red Army. We fight the Martians. If you’re anarchists, you’ll join us.” He was taller than Bunker, and lean, with a wild yellow beard and hair like a mane hanging down over his back.
“I don’t join anybody,” Bunker said.
“You have an air car. Where is it?”
More men crowded into the room. The third man was Willie Luhan, with a rifle in his arms.
“Where is the air car?” Han Ra said. He whipped a long knife out of his belt and aimed it at Bunker’s chest. Dick took a breath; his chest swelled as if to meet the knife.
“Don’t hurt him,” Willie cried.
Han Ra laughed. He ran the tip of the knife down Bunker’s breastbone. “Where is the air car?”
Bunker said nothing. Paula was standing on tiptoe, her arms crooked painfully behind her. She glanced at Willie Luhan again, caught him looking at her, and gritted her teeth, and he brushed by the man in front of him and went to Han Ra.
“You told me you wouldn’t hurt them.”
“I want that car. What about her? Does she know?”
“Yes, but—”
Han Ra drew his arm back and drove the knife into Bunker’s belly. The slight man went down bonelessly to the floor. He made no sound. Han Ra swung to Paula, the knife bright in his hand.
“Where is it?”
Willie clutched his arm. “No. Don’t hurt her. I—I know where it is. I was lying before. Keeping it for myself.” His eyes glistened. The glare of the torch shone on his face and the wild bearded face of the Red chief. “Don’t hurt her, for god’s sake.”
“Come on,” Han Ra said. He squatted to go through the door. The man with the hand torch followed him. The darkness they left behind in the room swarmed with men.
“What about her?” someone called, behind her.
“Leave her. She’s a woman. What can she do?”
They left her. Passing by, the last to go knocked her carelessly to her knees. She went after them to the low door and shut it and crept back to Bunker lying on the floor.
“Dick.” The room was utterly dark. Her hands groped over him. He was rigid, doubled up in a knot on his side on the floor, and for a moment she could not feel him breathe and thought he was dead. Her fingers slid over the skin of his ribs and down and touched the slime of blood.
“Paula.”
“Wait.” She scurried off around the room. “Just a minute—I’ll get a light—” She banged into the end of the bed so hard that for a few steps her leg would not hold her. Feeling over the wall she reached the dip-lamp in the chink by the cupboard and lit it. The medical patches were in the old cupboard. She knelt beside him and pasted one square to each of his elbows.
“Paula.”
“Don’t talk.” She yanked the bedcovers off the bed and wrapped him in a blanket. The dip-lamp made the room stuffy in a moment.
“Get out,” he said. His voice wheezed.
“I won’t leave you.”
When he breathed in, his breath whistled. “Stupid bitch. Both of us. Get out. Luhan. Doesn’t know. Where. The air car.”
“Oh.”
He closed his eyes. His skin looked black in the feeble light. She tore pieces from the second blanket and made a bandage over the slit in his belly and fastened it with a nail. He tried to help her move him but he could not even stand. She dragged him up the tunnel. Every few yards she stopped to rest, and while she rested held him tight in her arms to keep him warm. By the time she reached the surface, he was unconscious.
The warm night was unusually windy. The long slope led away from the mouth of the tunnel toward the lake. She laid him carefully on one blanket and pulled it by the edge down across the grass. The wind rustled behind her and she started so hard she went cold, thinking it was Han Ra coming back.
A hundred feet from the tunnel, the slope broke off in a sheer fourteen-foot drop, like a bite taken out of the hillside. She hid Bunker in the shadow at the back of this notch and returned to the secret room. All their food was hidden in a hole dug out of the wall behind the bed. She put it into a sack, took the sack and some rope out across the wasteland to the only tree in the area, and hoisted it up to the high branches, away from dogs.
Bunker was where she had left him: awake now. She felt of the bandage. It was so full of blood it squelched when she touched it.
He whispered, “Tools. Fire.” His voice sounded as if it were rising through water.
“I’m afraid to leave you here. It’s too close to the tunnel.” She bundled him up again in the blankets. There were only three or four hours left until daybreak. His eyes were closed and she thought he was asleep again, but when she lifted him with his arm around her neck he pushed with his feet, trying to help. She took him off over the gentle hump of the next hill and down into a narrow gulley whose sandy bottom yielded under her feet.
When she had found him a soft shelter she went back at a run to the tunnel. On the slope, she stopped still. Above the tunnel, near the crown of the slope, was the flat turret of the building’s gatehouse. A light shone through it. While she watched it faded out. She went at a jog up to the gatehouse and looked in the door.