alone. The whole camp could not stop them if they panicked.
Someone at the back of the crowd opened the door to the dome, and of a sudden
there was a murmur of voices, a backflow into the dome, someone shouting that
they would need blankets, that they would need all the cylinders, a woman
wailing that she could not walk. He stood there while all of Q deserted him into
the dome, turned on the slope and looked across to the other domes, where men
and women were coming from the residents’ domes in businesslike haste, carrying
blankets and other items, a general flow down to the trough of the hills, where
motors whined and headlamps showed. They had the trucks ready. He started down
there, faster and faster, walked into the chaos that swirled about the vehicles.
They were putting on the field dome and some spare plastic; a staffer showed him
a checklist as businesslike as if they were loading for a supply trip. Some
people were trying to put their personal loads on the trucks and staff was
arguing with them, and Q was arriving, some of them carrying more than they
ought on Downbelow.
“Trucks are for essential materials,” Emilio shouted. “All able-bodied walk;
anyone too old or too sick can perch on the baggage, and any room left, you can
put heavy items on… but you share loads, hear? No one walks light. Who can’t
walk?”
There were shouts from some of the Q folk who had caught up, and they put
forward some of the frailer children, some of the old ones. They yelled that
there were some still coming, shouts with a tone of panic.
“Easy! We’ll get them all on. We’ll not be going fast. A kilometer down the
road, forest starts, and there’re no armored troops likely to hike into it after
us.”
Miliko reached him. He felt her hand on his arm and put his arm about her,
hugged her to him. He remained slightly numb; a man had a right to be when his
world ended. They were prisoners up there on station. Or dead. He began to think
of that possibility too, forcing himself to deal with it. He felt sick at the
stomach, shaking with an anger which he kept in that numb place, away from his
thinking process. He wanted to strike out at someone… and there was no one at
hand.
They got the com unit on. Ernst supervised the loading of it onto the truckbed,
and between emergency power and portable generator they had that for
information… if any came.
Last of all, the people who would ride, and room enough for bedrolls and sacks,
a protective nest. People moved at a run, panting, but there seemed less panic;
two hours yet till dawn. The lights were still on, on stored power, the domes
still glowing yellow. But there was a sound missing, in all the noise of the
crawler engines. The compressors were silent. The pulse was gone.
“Move them out,” he shouted when there seemed order, and the vehicles started
up, began to grind their patient way along the road.
They fell in behind, a column shaping itself to the road as it began to parallel
the river. They passed the mill and entered the forest, where hills and trees
closed on the right hand of the night-bound landscape. The whole progress had a
feeling of unreality, the trucks’ headlamps shining on the reeds and the grass
tops and the hillside and the trunks of trees, with the silhouettes of humans
trudging along, the hiss and pop of breathers in curious unison, amid the
grinding of the engines. There were no complaints, that was the thing most
strange, no objections, as if a madness had seized them all and they agreed on
this. They had had a taste of Mazian’s governance.
The grass moved beside the road, a serpentine line in the waist-high reeds.
Leaves moved among the bushes beside the road hillward. Miliko pointed to one
such disturbance, and others had seen it, pointing and murmuring in
apprehension.
Emilio’s heart lifted. He reached for Miliko’s hand and pressed it, left her and