“Good enough.” Morgan had certainly called the old man something else, something that Joe could not now recall. Well, he certainly wasn’t going to push the question. If any reason other than gratitude were needed, he could well believe that there had been a grain of truth in Morgan’s warning.
They were now gaining slightly on the enemy.
“You are doing excellently,” the old man complimented Joe. He turned to Kate. “And you.”
“I feel fine,” Kate answered. “I wonder a little myself at how good I feel.”
“This fortunate reserve of strength is doubtless a residual benefit of your recent life as a, shall we say, non- breathing human. When the life of your attacker who walks ahead of us is ended, weakness may come upon you temporarily. But then it should be about time for all of us to rest, hey?”
“Is it certain that I’m going to—to stay—this way?”
“It has been my experience that miracles do not reverse themselves. You will remain a breather. As long as that is what you truly want.”
The pursuit emerged abruptly from between buildings onto Michigan Boulevard, as wide as some city blocks were long. Joe had never counted its traffic lanes, but all of them were completely buried now. Here and there cars, trucks, buses were entombed too. There was as yet no sign of snowplow resurrection. On every lamppost were festoons promoting Christmas commerce. The Boulevard was kept free by law from projecting signs of any kind, and the lines of its varied buildings stretched dreamlike to right and left, framing a cathedral aisle of clear snow.
There came a raucous buzz from somewhere, on ground level, nearby, getting closer fast.
Joe was first to identify the sound, and the first to react. Spear ready, he floundered out into the deep snow near the middle of the boulevard, prepared to defend his position there. He called out for help, and Kate and the old man were right behind him.
The snowmobile snarled round a corner behind Joe, and turned speedily in his general direction. Facing Poach and Morgan with his spear leveled, he heard it pass a few yards behind him, going north. Morgan snarled at Joe, but her chance of intercepting and seizing a conveyance had been blocked. There were two people on the vehicle, and one called out something cheery on seeing folk in evening dress out for an early morning romp. The words were lost in the engine noise, and shortly the engine itself was fading in the distance.
After a long pause, Morgan turned silently toward the east side of the street, and once there headed north. Poach kept with her, stumbling more noticeably now. Joe wondered if he might be faking greater injury than he felt.
Above the city’s lights the sky was changing subtly and at intersections Joe could see the sky to the east, above the lake; there it was no longer dark so much as blank. He looked at his wrist watch, but what he saw conveyed no meaning to his worn mind.
Stoplights blinked out an elaborate ritual, timing nothing.
“Do you think they’ll go into a building?” Kate suddenly wondered aloud.
The old man shrugged. “We could follow. They do not really want to seek a general involvement of the breathing world, any more than I do. That would be ultimately bad for all of us. Our branch of the human race has the habit and tradition of settling its own affairs.”
“I just thought,” said Kate, “If they keep going east much farther—”
“Yes?”
“They’ll wind up out on the ice. On the lake. That’s considered very dangerous. When people do that the police sometimes bring out a helicopter and pick them up, right Joe?”
“Ah.”
“Fortunately,” said Joe, puffing steam, “all the copters in the city are going to be very busy today doing other jobs.”
And still Morgan led them north. Going north would also, in time, bring them to the curving shore. Ahead, the gray canyon of buildings in which they moved came to an abrupt end. There, at Oak Street, the Boulevard melded with the Outer Drive and with a delta of lesser arteries. There the park began, and the beach. And, inland, the rank of tall apartment buildings in one of which Craig Walworth lived. “It’s just hit me,” Joe announced. “They’re trying to get to Walworth’s place.”
Corday nodded. “That seems quite probable.”
“You won’t be able to get in there to get at them. If I’m beginning to understand how these things work?”
“Your new understanding is in general correct, I think.” The thin lips smiled faintly. “But I was asked into that apartment a few hours ago.”
“Oh.”
And now they were at Oak Street. The white-shrouded curve of the Drive, for once as silent as a country lane, stretched away to the north under the streetlamps and the altering sky, strewn with abandoned vehicles. The wind off the lake, now dying, had ridged the Drive with snowdrifts. But unlike the Boulevard it was already scrawled with rutted tracks where something had managed to crawl through. The sound of diesels was again a little louder now, and Joe thought he could see a yellow snow-mover laboring far to the north.
Morgan and Poach still headed north, now crossing blank white that had been parkway. East of them lay snow-covered beach, and then a fantasy of ice. Beyond that, more than a hundred yards away, the almost invincibly open water of the lake was leadenly visible under the changing eastern sky.
When she had gone another block north, Morgan came to an abrupt stop. She stood there looked ahead and inland, to where apartment buildings rose above barren trees. Joe realized that Walworth’s building had just come into full view. One window of it, about twenty stories up, was leaking interior light of a different tone than the light from other windows near it. In a moment he realized that the glass of that window must be gone—those windows were not made for ordinary opening. Looking at the ground below it now, Joe could make out human figures, beaming flashlights at one another and on an object lying in the snow. Some of the tiny figures were wearing caps and jackets of police blue. A black face showed between an orange ski cap and a brown civilian coat. Joe had seen that cap before; at this distance Charley Snider’s features were unrecognizable, but fortunately distance worked both ways. An olive-drab halftrack with a red cross on its side, something borrowed from the armory, stood by with its headlights helping to illuminate the scene.
Morgan and Poach were standing still in conference. Now the giant raised an arm to point eastward at the approaching dawn. The desert of water and ice in that direction was becoming gradually more visible. The pale, still sunless sky above it was generally clear. Now the two turned and walked in that direction, not looking back.
At once the old man moved to follow, almost at a trot. Joe and Kate were gasping with the effort of staying at his heels. Joe foundered across a snow fence, only the top two inches of its ineffectual slats showing above curved powder.
Beyond the snow fence, forty yards of unbroken white ended in a jumble of foot-thick ice slabs, broken up and cast ashore by yesterday’s or last night’s powerful east winds. As Joe drew near the wilderness of ice its jagged horizon reached higher than his head. Above the ice beautiful streaks of pink were being born in the southeast sky.
First Morgan and then Poach vanished, this time in something like a normal human way, climbing into the cold maze of broken ice. Corday paused for an instant in his pursuit to ask: “Will it be possible for them to find a boat of any kind?”
“Not here. Not in the winter.” Legs laboring, lungs pumping on frozen air, Joe labored after Corday’s effortless, snow-plowing sprint, holding his spear at the ready, like a slow pole-vaulter, thanking God he had at least found gloves in his jacket pockets.
Following Corday’s gestures, his allies spread out to his left and right, then followed his advance into the ice field. Joe had the worst of it, handicapped with the spear when two hands as well as two feet seemed hardly enough for clambering among the jumbled, slippery slabs.
Trying to keep Corday’s head at least intermittently in sight, Joe advanced as best he could. The sky was light enough now to let him see what he was doing, but still the going was very awkward and treacherous. Moving silently was impossible, at least for Joe.
In a minute or so the whole city behind him was out of sight. Here it was as silent as Alaska, except for the sounds of his own progress. And, somewhere that could not be very far away, a gentle lapping of water against ice or rock or sand.
Joe lost Corday for a little while. Then, dragging himself up into a saddle between two cakes, he was relieved
