The members on line stood motionless, looking upward toward the hangars. Chip and Dover caught at their arms and drew them forward. “Don’t stop,” they said. “Keep moving, please. There’s no danger. The plane is waiting. Touch and step on. Keep moving, please.” They herded the members past the scanner and onto the escalator and one was Jack—“Beautiful,” he said, gazing past Chip as he false-touched; and Ria, who looked as excited as she had the first time Chip had seen her; and Karl, looking awed and somber; and Buzz, smiling. Dover moved to the escalator after Buzz; Chip thrust a wrapped kit to him and turned to the other members on line, the last seven or eight, who stood looking toward the hangars. “Keep moving, please,” he said. “The plane is waiting for you. Sister!”
“There is no cause for alarm,” a woman’s voice loudspeakered. “There has been an accident in the hangars but everything is under control.”
Chip urged the members to the escalator. “Touch and step on,” he said. “The plane’s waiting.”
“Departing members, please resume your places in line,” the voice said. “Members who are boarding planes, continue to do so. There will be no interruption of service.”
Chip false-touched and stepped onto the escalator behind the last member. Riding upward with his wrapped kit under his arm, he glanced toward the hangars: the pillar was black and smudging; there was no more fire. He looked ahead again, at pale blue coveralls. “All personnel except forty-sevens and forty-nines, resume your assigned duties,” the woman’s voice said. “All personnel except forty-sevens and forty-nines, resume your assigned duties. Everything is under control.” Chip stepped into the plane and the door slid down behind him. “There will be no interruption of—” Members stood confusedly, looking at filled seats.
“There are extra passengers because of the holiday,” Chip said. “Go forward and ask members with children to double up. It can’t be helped.”
The members moved down the aisle, looking from one side of the plane to the other.
The five were sitting in the last row, next to the dispensers. Dover took his wrapped kit from the aisle seat and Chip sat down. Dover said, “Not bad.”
“We’re not up yet,” Chip said.
Voices filled the plane: members telling members about the explosion, spreading the news from row to row. The clock said 10:06 but the plane wasn’t moving.
The 10:06 became 10:07.
The six looked at one another, and looked forward, normally.
The plane moved; swung gently to the side and then pulled forward. It moved faster. The light dimmed and the TV screens flicked on.
They watched Christ’s Life and a years-old Family at Work. They drank tea and coke but couldn’t eat; there were no cakes on the plane, because of the hour, and though they had foil-wrapped rounds of cheese in their kits, they would have been seen eating them by the members who came to the dispensers. Chip and Dover sweated in their double coveralls. Karl kept dozing off, and Ria and Buzz on either side of him nudged him to keep him awake and watching.
The flight took forty minutes.
When the location sign said EUR00020, Chip and Dover got up from their seats and stood at the dispensers, pressing the buttons and letting tea and coke flow down the drains. The plane landed and rode and stopped, and members began filing off. After a few dozen had gone through the doorway nearby, Chip and Dover lifted the emptied containers from the dispensers, set them on the floor and raised their covers, and Buzz put a wrapped kit into each. Then Buzz, Karl, Ria, and Jack got up and the six went to the doorway. Chip, carrying a container against his chest, said, “Would you excuse us, please?” to an elderly member and went out. The others followed close behind him. Dover, carrying the other container, said to the member, “You’d better wait till I’m off the escalator,” and the member nodded, looking confused.
At the bottom of the escalator Chip leaned his wrist toward the scanner and then stood opposite it, blocking it from the members in the waiting room. Buzz, Karl, Ria, and Jack passed in front of him, false-touching, and Dover leaned against the scanner and nodded to the member waiting above.
The four went toward the waiting room, and Chip and Dover crossed the field to the portal and went through it into the depot area. Setting down the containers, they took the kits out of them and slipped between two rows of crates. They found a cleared space near the wall and took off the orange coveralls and pulled the toeguards from their sandals.
They left the depot area through the swing-door, their kits slung on their shoulders. The others were waiting around the scanner. They went out of the airport by twos—it was almost as crowded as the one in ’91770—and gathered again at the bike racks.
By noon they were north of ’00018. They ate their rounds of cheese between the bike path and the River of Freedom, in a valley flanked by mountains that rose to awesome snow-streaked heights. While they ate they looked at their maps. By nightfall, they calculated, they could be in parkland a few kilometers from the tunnel’s entrance.
A little after three o’clock, when they were nearing ’00013, Chip noticed an approaching cyclist, a girl in her early teens, who was looking at the faces of the northbound cyclists—his own as she passed him—with an expression of concern, of memberlike wanting-to-help. A moment later he saw another approaching cyclist looking at faces in the same slightly anxious way, an elderly woman with flowers in her basket. He smiled at her as she passed, then looked ahead. There was nothing out of the ordinary in the path and the road beside it; a few hundred meters ahead both path and road turned to the right and disappeared behind a power station.
He rode onto grass, stopped, and looking back, signaled to the others as they came along.
They pushed their bikes farther onto the grass. They were on the last stretch of parkland before the city: a span of grass, then picnic tables and a rising slope of trees.
“We’re never going to make it if we stop every half hour,” Ria said.
They sat down on the grass.
“I think they’re checking bracelets up ahead,” Chip said. Telecomps and red-crossed coveralls. I noticed two members coming this way who looked as if they were trying to spot the sick one. They had that how-can-I-help look.”
“Hate,” Buzz said.
Jack said, “Christ and Wei, Chip, if we’re going to start worrying about members’ facial expressions, we might as well just turn around and go home.”
Chip looked at him and said, “A bracelet check isn’t so unlikely, is it? Uni must know by now that the explosion at ’91770 was no accident, and it might have figured out exactly why it happened. This is the shortest route from ’020 to Uni—and we’re coming to the first sharp turn in about twelve kilometers.”
“All right, so they’re checking bracelets,” Jack said. “What the hate are we carrying guns for?”
“Yes!” Ria said.
Dover said, “If we shoot our way through we’ll have the whole bike path after us.”
“So we’ll drop a bomb behind us,” Jack said. “We’ve got to move fast, not sit on our asses as if we’re in a chess game. These dummies are half dead anyway; what difference does it make if we kill a few of them? We’re going to help all the rest, aren’t we?”
“The guns and bombs are for when we need them,” Chip said, “not for when we can avoid using them.” He turned to Dover. “Take a walk in the woods there,” he said. “See if you can get a look at what’s past the turn.”
“Right,” Dover said. He got up and crossed the grass, picked something up and brought it to a litter basket, and went in among the trees. His yellow coveralls became bits of yellow that vanished up the slope.