She could see down the stairway, and the light was just disappearing away along the corridor that led to Jennie’s flat. Quietly she followed it. For the first time, she remembered she had no clothes on. Her bare feet made no sound on the slick plastic floor. Ahead, the light bobbed along; the people carrying it were one dark moving thing, now and then a head and shoulders silhouetted against the ball of light before them. They went into Jennie Morrison’s old flat, and Paula went into the next one.
There was a hole blasted through the wall between this place and Jennie’s. Chunks of plasticrete and shelving littered the floor. She stepped carefully over a sink basin.
“They’re gone,” someone said loudly, in the next room. “That bitch got him out.”
“I told you to do for her.”
“We’ll find them.”
She put her hand on the wall and looked through the hole into Jennie’s flat. The low doorway under the sink was open wide and the light shone out from the secret room. Long shadows passed back and forth through it: the legs of the men walking past the light. They were looting the place. She backed up a step into the ruined apartment behind her, stooped, and in the rubble found a piece of plasticrete she could lift.
“We could use this cupboard for firewood,” one of the raiders said. “I wonder how they got it in here?”
She threw the chunk of building stone at Jennie’s kitchen wall. At the thud someone yelled.
“What’s that?”
Paula was hurrying through the darkened apartment, gathering up pieces of stone. She went back to the hole and threw the debris against the wall around the low doorway. Something crumbled and a shower of dust fell like hail.
“Hey! Who’s that? What’s going on?” A head poked out the doorway, and she flung a stone that came nowhere near him and he ducked back.
“Get away or we’ll shoot!”
She leaned against the wall in the dark room, listening to them. When no more rocks fell around them, they began to talk in low whispers, and suddenly three men burst out of the doorway. A gun went off half a dozen times, like thunder in the closed space, and the three men raced out Jennie’s door and down the corridor, taking their light with them. Paula went into the secret room. Bunker’s tools, matches, the last of their clothes, and the dip-lamp were all piled on the bed. She wrapped them up in her winter coat and lugged them up the tunnel to the wilderness.
From where she was sitting, she could see the whole lake. Three people were coming toward her along its edge. It was strange how even now that the lake had no water in it at all and the mud was dried firm as concrete, people walked along the edge instead of across. Habit. They saw what they were used to seeing. Paula sat cross-legged in the lee of the ruined building watching the three people come on.
The woman led them. Paula had seen that of the three of them the woman was the boldest. The two men followed her trustingly. They reached the big boulder that marked the southernmost tip of the lake and turned to walk along the edge of the meadow, following the curve of the next hillside. Paula stood up.
Instantly the man second in the line saw her and tapped the woman on the shoulder and pointed. Paula waved to them. They broke into a run toward her. Paula waited until they were nearly on her and went off past the ruin. They fell in around her.
“Where is your friend?” the woman said. “We were expecting him.”
“He’s busy.”
Beyond the ruin where Paula had waited for them the land was broken into ridges where the grass still grew thick and there were still many trees. Narrow defiles separated the ridges, their beds made of round stones. She led these people down a twisting gulley, past the place where she and Kasuk and Junna had come into the New York dome, two years before. At the mouth of this gorge, she went between two old trees and into a cave in the hillside. The cave was lined with polished tile. It was an old terminal on the Underground. A big blue arrow on the tile pointed into the gloom; a sign above it read INDEPENDENT LINE. The air car was parked against the opposite wall.
“Fantastic.” One of the men rushed to it and pried the bonnet up.
Paula put her hands into her pockets. So near its mouth the cave was light enough to make out the strange woman’s broad-nosed, pleasant face. Paula said, “Do you hear that?” and wagged her head toward the rear of the cave. The roar of the underground river came from the darkness.
“It sounds like water,” the woman said calmly.
“That’s how you get out. This car isn’t amphibious, so you have to be careful about getting it wet. Follow the river there downstream until you come to the waterfall. Then you go upstream. About fifteen miles up there’s a hole in the roof of the tunnel.”
The woman was smiling at her. In the same placid voice, she said, “You and he are the last ones, you know. Every free anarchist has gone.”
The two men were climbing over the air car. One called, “This is super-check, Kadrin.” The woman waved her hand at them.
Paula said, “If you’re smart, you’ll go when it’s light out. After dawn. The Styths don’t like bright light.”
“Thank you,” the woman said.
“Don’t thank me. I don’t think you’re going to make it. There’s nothing to thank us for.”
The woman laughed. She clapped Paula on the arm, as if Paula had made some tremendous joke, and went to join her friends. Their voices rose, excited, as they explored the car. Paula went out of the cave. She stopped in the gorge, still hearing their voices behind her, and listened awhile, as if they were friends.
“There was something snuffling around outside,” Bunker said. “When I woke up.”
She crawled in beside him and lay down. Her hair caught on the thorny brush above her. Carefully she freed herself. In the thicket, their latest hiding place, there was just room enough for him to lie on his back and for her to lie on her side next to him. The water bucket stood near his head. She drank a cupful of water.
“How do you feel?” she asked.
“It hurts like hell.”
She could barely see his face. Dawn would come in less than an hour; she was tired, and she put her head down on her curved arm. He had his hands pressed to his belly.
“I’m beginning to know what Saba meant,” she said. “About the debts between people. There must be something. There has to be something people do for each other besides prey on each other.” The thorny brush smelled bitter, and her teeth were full of gritty dust. She wiped her face with her fingers. “Something we owe each other.”
“Where did you go?”
“To take those people to the air car. Kadrin and her friends.”
“Oh. I didn’t recognize the mood.”
“They won’t get away. The Styths will get them if the Martians miss them. Why should they even bother?”
“Oh, junior, come on.”
“What do you mean, come on?” Her throat felt tight.
“I mean you’re a little old to be searching for the meaning of life.”
Rebuked, she lay still, her head on her arm, and watched while he crooked his arm up over his head and felt for the cup and dipped himself up some of the water. He did not drink it, but rinsed his mouth with it and spat it out.
“There must be something,” she said.
He made a sound like a laugh. She thought his eyes were closed.
“Why did you join the Committee?” she asked. “If not to help.”
“I like to watch people.”
“A spectator? You make a pretty lively audience.”
“Not an audience,” he said. “A witness.”