He turned, and she held Sybil Jefferson’s eye under his nose. He sucked in his breath. When he put his hand out to take the eye, she closed her fingers over it and put it in her pocket.
Bunker pushed the file box. “I can’t open this. It must be important.” He gave the box a savage kick.
Paula took the cigarette lighter off the desk and knelt by the pile of papers and film on the floor. “They killed her.” She held the flame to the edge of a photograph.
“That’s your diagnosis, is it?” He punched the call button on the vertical several times with his thumb.
“You need a key for that, too.”
The flames caught and ran over the heap of papers. The holographs burned better than anything else, and she took one by the corner and torched the rest. Bunker was pushing and rocking the waist-high round file cabinet.
“I have an idea. Help me.”
She helped him push the box up onto two legs. It fell over onto its side and he caught it before it toppled onto its back.
“Now.”
The door of the vertical slid open easily, exposing the empty shaft. They propped open the door with a chair and pushed and groaned and heaved at the file box until it rolled like a wheel between the wall and the desk toward the vertical. Paula’s fire was beginning to light the carpet. She rushed around ahead of the file, pushed the chair through into the shaft, and held the door open, and Bunker guided the rolling file through the gap. It crashed below. Bunker leaned after it. He braced the door open.
“Look what happened.”
She put her head over his shoulder out into the shaft. The file had broken into the car parked in the basement of the shaft. Bunker stretched his arm toward the back wall and caught a heavy cable hanging down from the darkness above. He yanked hard on it to test it. The fire leaped crackling in a burst toward the ceiling. Paula wrinkled her nose at the smoke. Bunker swung himself into the shaft, clinging to the cable, and climbed down hand over hand.
An alarm bell in the ceiling clanged. Bunker was scrambling through the hole torn in the roof down into the vertical car, Paula wrapped her hands around the cable. Using her leg around the cable to brake herself, she slid down after him.
Voices sounded in the room she had just left. She jumped down into the vertical car. The floor was covered with loose film. Her feet slipped out from under her and she landed on her backside.
“Hurry up. I can’t see.”
She went after Bunker out the car’s usual door, into a vast darkened room. She could tell by the sound his voice made that it was large but not empty, and she smelled dust and cardboard and guessed it was a storage basement. Now, about twenty feet away, she made out a faint gray oblong. A window. She grabbed Bunker by the sleeve and towed him through the room toward it. They met a wall of boxes and climbed over them. Two or three alarm bells were ringing insistently overhead. She put her hand out and touched the wall. The window was an arm’s length over her head. She felt over it for a latch. Bunker put his arms around her legs and boosted her up so high a spiderweb draped itself over her face. She found the latch and the window swung open. They crawled out to the cool open air.
“Put that thing away.”
She cupped her other hand over the false eye. “I keep thinking we ought to do something with it.”
They were walking toward the west wall of the dome. All the trees in the park had been cut down, and the ground was cluttered with stumps. It was like a wasteland. No birds sang and all the animals were gone. She sat on the edge of a gulley and slid down the bank. A cascade of dirt and stones followed her to its foot.
The Martians would probably find out almost immediately that they were gone. Sooner or later Cam’s police would catch them again. She thought of Jefferson, who had been caught, and drew her left hand out of her pocket. Opening her fingers, she looked down at the false eye.
“Here.” Bunker snatched it out of her hand. His arm cocked back and he flung the thing off into the dark, out of the gulley.
“What did you do that for?”
He went off at a fast walk along the floor of the gulley. An air car droned across the dome over her head. Red lights flashed in the sky. At the end of the gulley was a house built back into the hillside. A row of garbage bins flanked it. As soon as she and Bunker approached, a dog began to bark inside the house. The garbage bins were head-high. She climbed up onto the edge of the first one and dug out a moldering sack full of squeezed oranges and coffee grounds.
“Where did you get that key?” she asked Bunker.
He leaned over the edge of the bin and groped around in the heap of garbage. “I made it. They gave me a keyboard.”
She turned half an orange inside out, ate off the pulp, and threw the hull back into the bin. “To write letters? Did you write their correspondence? You don’t know the language very well. What was this exchange about?”
“The Styths have two pilots Hanse thinks he needs. He offered them money but they aren’t having any.”
“Who mentioned me?” The dog was barking steadily in the house. She found a heel of soggy bread and bolted it down.
“Nobody in my hearing. The Styths said they wouldn’t take money but they might consider meat. Their term. And henceforth in this matter Hanse could communicate in the Common Speech. That was the last I heard.” He jumped down and went to the next bin. “Here. You can use this.” He dragged something large out of the bin: a heavy coat, missing one sleeve.
They ate until they were satisfied and went on. Without trees, the land looked strange, flat, naked, vulnerable. Bunker led her along at a fast walk. There was no wind and the air smelled dry, dusty, and bitter. They came to a building scooped hollow like a grave. The below-ground floors had been bombed out.
“Well,” Bunker said, “so much for that.” He sat down heavily on the ground.
Paula went to the edge of the pit. She guessed he had lived here. The destroyed building gaped below her. She sat down next to Bunker and put her arm awkwardly around his shoulders, and he raised his head.
“What are you doing?”
“Don’t you find it comforting?”
He snorted up a laugh. “Junior, comfort maketh the mind dull.”
Day was coming. The eastern wall of the dome shone with fresh light. Her arm hung around his neck. He resisted; he would not rest on her. She took her arm away and buried her hands in her lap.
They sheltered in the ruins, in a forest of melted plastic drippings. She woke with the sunlight shining in her face. Bunker lay beside her. He had her shirt open down the front; his hand cupped her breast. She put her arms out to him.
“That was nice,” he said, after. “I kept telling myself the first thing I’d do when I escaped was get laid.”
Paula picked black chunks of grit off her clothes and out of her hair. “Do you want to stay together?”
“I hadn’t thought about it. Do you?”
She sat up, spreading out the coat he had found in the bin. It was stained and torn, a long heavily lined man’s coat with a notched collar. “For a while, at least. Until we find out what’s going on here.”
He stood to pull on his pants. His body was thin and bony, his chest sprinkled with crisp hair, graying like the hair on his head. “All right,” he said. “Let’s go.”
By daylight the whole dome seemed changed. Nothing was left of the wood but the stumps of trees. She could see from the ridge near the old campus all the way across the lake to the yellow hills south of the water. Everything looked much smaller. Many of the buildings had been blown up and packs of dogs drifted around the middle and south of the dome. The only birds she saw were crows.
Tony Andrea’s building was still lived in. She left Bunker digging through a trash can at the edge of the meadow and went cautiously in the side door. There was a big poster on the wall at the foot of the stairs reading: WORK IS LIFE. The floor was dirty and black handprints marked the walls around the doorways. She knocked on Tony’s door.
