Chip raised the binoculars—to Ria’s bent back and Jack’s ahead of her. They pedaled rapidly in depthless flatness, seeming to get no farther away. A glittering mist appeared, partly obscuring them.
Above, a hovering member downpointed a cylinder gushing thick white gas.
“He’s got them!” Dover said.
Ria stood astride her bike; Jack looked over his shoulder at her.
“Ria, not Jack,” Chip said.
Jack stopped and turned with his gun aimed upward. It jerked, and jerked again.
The member in the air went limp (crack and crack, the shots sounded), the white-gushing cylinder falling from his hand.
Members fleeing the bridge bicycled in both directions, ran wide-eyed on the flanking walkways.
Ria sat by her bike. She turned her head, and her face was moist and glittering. She looked troubled. Red-crossed coveralls blurred over her.
Jack stared, holding his gun, and his mouth opened big and round, closed and opened again in glittering mist. (“Ria!” Chip heard, small and far away.) Jack raised his gun (“Ria!”) and fired, fired, fired.
Another member in the air (crack, crack, crack) went limp and dropped his cylinder. Red spattered on the walkway below him, and more red.
Chip lowered the binoculars.
“Your gas mask!” Buzz said. He had binoculars too.
Dover was lying with his face in his arms.
Chip sat up and looked with only his eyes: at the narrow emptied bridge with a faraway cyclist in pale blue wobbling down the middle of it and a member in the air following him at a distance; at the two dead or dying members, turning slowly in the air, drifting; at the red-cross-coveralled members, walking now in a bridge-wide line, and one of them helping a member in yellow by a fallen bike, taking her about the shoulders and leading her back toward the plaza.
The cyclist stopped and looked back toward the red-cross-coveralled members, then turned and bent forward over the front of his bike. The member in the air flew quickly closer and pointed his arm; a thick white feather grew from it and brushed the cyclist.
Chip raised the binoculars.
Jack, gray-snouted in his gas mask, leaned to his left in glittering mist and put a bomb on the bridge. Then he pedaled, skidded, sideslipped, and fell. He raised himself on one arm with the bike lying between his legs. His kit, spilled from the bike’s basket, lay by the bomb.
“Oh Christ and Wei,” Buzz said.
Chip took down the binoculars, looked at the bridge, and then wound the binoculars’ neckstrap tightly around their middle.
“How many?” Dover asked, looking at him.
Chip said, “Three.”
The explosion was bright, loud, and long. Chip watched Ria, walking from the bridge with the red-cross-coveralled member leading her. She didn’t turn around.
Dover, up on his knees and looking, turned to Chip.
“His whole kit,” Chip said. “He was sitting next to it.” He put the binoculars into his kit and closed it. “We’ve got to get out of here,” he said. “Put them away, Buzz. Come on.”
He meant not to look, but before they left the incline he did.
The middle of the bridge was black and rubbled, and its sides were burst outward. A bicycle wheel lay outside the blackened area, and there were other smaller things toward which the red-cross-coveralled members slowly moved. Pieces of pale blue were on the bridge and floating on the river.
They went back to Karl and told him what had happened, and the four of them got on their bikes and rode south for a few kilometers and went into parkland. They found a stream and drank from it and washed.
“And now we turn back?” Dover said.
“No,” Chip said, “not all of us.”
They looked at him.
“I said that we would,” he said, “because if anyone got caught, I wanted him to believe it, and say it when he was questioned. The way Ria’s probably saying it right now.” He took a cigarette that they were passing around—despite the risk of the smoke smell traveling—and drew on it and passed it to Buzz. “One of us is going to go back,” he said. “At least I hope only one will go—to set off a bomb or two between here and the coast and take a boat, to make it look as if we’ve stuck to the plan. The rest of us will hide in parkland, work our way closer to ’001, and go for the tunnel in two weeks or so.”
“Good,” Dover said, and Buzz said, “I never thought it made sense to give up so easily.”
“Will three of us be enough?” Karl asked.
“We won’t know till we try,” Chip said. “Would six have been enough? Maybe it can be done by one, and maybe it can’t be done by a dozen. But after coming this far, I fighting well mean to find out.”
“I’m with you; I was just asking,” Karl said. Buzz said, “I’m with you too,” and Dover said, “So am I.”
“Good,” Chip said. “Three stand a better chance than one, that I do know. Karl, you’re the one who goes back.”
Karl looked at him. “Why me?” he asked.
“Because you’re forty-three,” Chip said. “I’m sorry, brother, but I can’t think of any other basis for deciding.”
“Chip,” Buzz said, “I think I’d better tell you: my leg has been hurting me for the past few hours. I can make it back or I can go on, but—well, I thought you ought to know.”
Karl gave Chip the cigarette. It was down to a couple of centimeters; he snuffed it into the ground. “All right, Buzz, you’d better be the one,” he said. “Shave first. We’d all better shave, in case we run into anyone.”
They shaved, and then Chip and Buzz worked out a route for Buzz to the nearest part of the coast, about three hundred kilometers away. He would set off a bomb at the airport at ’00015 and another when he was near the sea. He kept two extra in case he needed them and gave his others to Chip. “With luck you’ll be on a boat by tomorrow night,” Chip said. “Make sure there’s nobody counting heads when you take it. Tell Julia, and Lilac too, that we’ll be hiding for at least two weeks, maybe longer.”
Buzz shook hands with all of them, wished them luck, and took his bike and left.
“We’ll stay right here for a while and take turns getting some sleep,” Chip said. “Tonight we’ll go into the city for cakes and cuvs.”
“Cakes,” Karl said, and Dover said, “It’s going to be a long two weeks.”
“No it isn’t,” Chip said. “That was in case he gets caught. We’re going to do it in four or five days.”
“Christ and Wei,” Karl said, smiling, “you’re really being cagey.”
3
THEY STAYED where they were for two days—slept and ate and shaved and practiced fighting, played children’s word games, talked about democratic government and sex and the pygmies of the equatorial forests—and on the third day, Sunday, they bicycled north. Outside of ’00013 they stopped and went up onto the incline overlooking the plaza and the bridge. The bridge was partly repaired and closed off by barriers. Lines of cyclists crossed the plaza in both directions; there were no doctors, no scanners, no copter, no cars. Where the copter had been, there was a rectangle of fresh pink paving.
Early in the afternoon they passed ‘001 and glimpsed at a distance Uni’s white dome beside the Lake of Universal Brotherhood. They went into the parkland beyond the city.
The following evening, at dusk, with their bikes hidden in a branch-covered hollow and their kits on their shoulders, they passed a scanner at the parkland’s farther border and went out onto the grassy slopes that approached Mount Love. They walked briskly, in shoes and green coveralls, with binoculars and gas masks hung about their necks. They held their guns, but as the darkness grew deeper and the slope more rocky and irregular, they pocketed them. Now and then they paused, and Chip put a hand-covered flashlight to his compass.