He heard the hurrying footsteps behind him and there was an urgency about them that made him swing around.
«Peter!» Mary cried out. «Peter, I thought I recognized you. I was hurrying to catch you.»
He stood and looked at her as if he did not quite believe it was she whom he saw.
«Where have you been?» she asked.
«Hospital,» Peter said. «I ran away from them. But you …»
«We were evacuated, Peter. They came and told us that we had to leave. Some of us are at a camp down at the other end of the park. Pa is carrying on something awful and I can’t blame him—having to leave right in the middle of haying and with the small grain almost ready to be cut.»
She tilted back her head and looked into his face.
«You look all worn out,» she said. «Is it worse again?»
«It?» he asked, then realized that the neighbors must have known—that the reason for his coming to the farm must have been general knowledge, for there were no such things as secrets in a farming neighborhood.
«I’m sorry, Peter,» Mary said. «Terribly sorry. I shouldn’t have …»
«It’s all right,» said Peter. «Because it’s gone now, Mary. I haven’t got it any more. I don’t know how or why, but I’ve gotten rid of it in some way.»
«The hospital?» she suggested.
«The hospital had nothing to do with it. It had cleared up before I went there. They just found out at the hospital, that is all.»
«Maybe the diagnosis was wrong.»
He shook his head. «It wasn’t wrong, Mary.»
Still, how could he be sure? How could he, or the medical world, say positively that it had been malignant cells and not something else—some strange parasite to which he had played the unsuspecting host?
«You said you ran away,» she reminded him.
«They’ll be looking for me, Mary. The colonel and the major. They think I had something to do with the machine I found. They think I might have made it. They took me to the hospital to find out if I was human.»
«Of all the silly things!»
«I’ve got to get back to the farm,» he said. «I simply have to get back there.»
«You can’t,» she told him. «There are soldiers everywhere.»
«I’ll crawl on my belly in the ditches, if I have to. Travel at night. Sneak through the lines. Fight if I’m discovered and they try to prevent me. There is no alternative. I have to make a try.»
«You’re ill,» she said, anxiously staring at his face.
He grinned at her. «Not ill. Just hungry.»
«Come on then.» She took his arm.
He held back. «Not to the camp. I can’t have someone seeing me. In just a little while, I’ll be a hunted man—if I’m not one already.»
«A restaurant, of course.»
«They took my wallet, Mary. I haven’t any money.»
«I have shopping money.»
«No,» he said. «I’ll get along. There’s nothing that can beat me now.»
«You really mean that, don’t you?»
«It just occurred to me,» Peter admitted, confused and yet somehow sure that what he had said was not reckless bravado, but a blunt fact.
«You’re going back?»
«I have to, Mary.»
«And you think you have a chance?»
He nodded.
«Peter,» she began hesitantly.
«Yes?»
«How much bother would I be?»
«You? How do you mean? A bother in what way?»
«If I went along.»
«But you can’t. There’s no reason for you to.»
She lifted her chin just a little. «There is a reason, Peter. Almost as if I were being called there. Like a bell ringing in my head—a school bell calling in the children …»
«Mary,» he said, «that perfume bottle—there was a certain symbol on it, wasn’t there?»
«Carved in the glass,» she told him. «The same symbol, Peter, that was carved into the jade.»
And the same symbol, he thought, that had been on the letterheads.
«Come on,» he decided suddenly. «You won’t be any bother.»
«We’ll eat first,» she said. «We can use the shopping money.»
They walked down the path, hand in hand, like two teen-age sweethearts.
«We have lots of time,» said Peter. «We can’t start for home till dark.»
They ate at a small restaurant on an obscure street and after that went grocery shopping. They bought a loaf of bread and two rings of bologna and a slab of cheese, which took all of Mary’s money, and for the change the grocer sold them an empty bottle in which to carry water. It would serve as a canteen.
They walked to the edge of the city and out through the suburbs and into the open country, not traveling fast, for there was no point in trying to go too far before night set in.
They found a stream and sat beside it, for all the world like a couple on a picnic. Mary took off her shoes and dabbled her feet in the water and the two of them felt disproportionately happy.
Night came and they started out. There was no Moon, but the sky was ablaze with stars. Although they took some tumbles and at other times wondered where they were, they kept moving on, staying off the roads, walking through the fields and pastures, skirting the farmhouses to avoid barking dogs.
It was shortly after midnight that they saw the first of the campfires and swung wide around them. From the top of a ridge, they looked down upon the camp and saw the outlines of tents and the dull shapes of the canvas-covered trucks. And, later on, they almost stumbled into an artillery outfit, but got safely away without encountering the sentries who were certain to be stationed around the perimeter of the bivouac.
Now they knew that they were inside the evacuated area, that they were moving through the outer ring of soldiers and guns which hemmed in the building.
They moved more cautiously and made slower time. When the first false light of dawn came into the east, they holed up in a dense plum thicket in the corner of a pasture.
«I’m tired,» sighed Mary. «I wasn’t tired all night or, if I was, I didn’t know it—but now that we’ve stopped, I feel exhausted.»
«We’ll eat and sleep,» Peter said.
«Sleep comes first. I’m too tired to eat.»
Peter left her and crawled through a thicket to its edge.
In the growing light of morning stood the Building, a great blue-misted mass that reared above the horizon like a blunted finger pointing at the sky.
«Mary!» Peter whispered. «Mary, there it is!»
He heard her crawling through the thicket to his side.
«Peter, it’s a long way off.»
«Yes, I know it is. But we are going there.»
They crouched there watching it.
«I can’t see the bomb,» said Mary. «The bomb that’s hanging over it.»
«It’s too far off to see.»
«Why is it us? Why are we the ones who are going back? Why are we the only ones who are not afraid?»
«I don’t know,» said Peter, frowning puzzledly. «No actual reason, that is. I’m going back because I want to—no, because I have to. You see, it was the place I chose. The dying place. Like the elephants crawling off to die where all other elephants die.»
«But you’re all right now, Peter.»
«That makes no difference—or it doesn’t seem to. It was where I found peace and an understanding.»
«And there were the symbols, Peter. The symbols on the bottle and the jade.»
«Let’s go back,» he said. «Someone will spot us here.»
«Our gifts were the only ones that had the symbols,» Mary persisted. «None of the others had any of them. I asked around. There were no symbols at all on the other gifts.»
«There’s no time to wonder about that. Come on.»
They crawled back to the center of the thicket.