It didn’t seem possible that she could have done what she did, until I recalled that she carried the stretcher only after Dad had rigged the rope yokes. Molly is all right.
They chased me out and I high-tailed it back to the Receiving Station and ran into Sergei almost at once. He hailed me and I went over to him. He had a pencil and a list and a number of the older fellows were gathered around him. “What’s up?” I said.
“Just the guy I’m looking for,” he said. “I had you down for dead. Disaster party—are you in?”
I was in, all right. The parties were made up of older Scouts, sixteen and up, and the younger men, We were sent out on the town’s tractors, one to each road, and we worked in teams of two. I spotted Hank Jones as we were loading and they let us make up a team.
It was grim work. For equipment we had shovels and lists—lists of who lived on which farm. Sometimes a name would have a notation “known to be alive,” but more often not. A team would be dropped off with the lists for three or four farms and the tractor would go on, to pick them up on the return trip.
Our job was to settle the doubt about those other names and—theoretically—to rescue anyone still alive.
We didn’t find anyone alive.
The lucky ones had been killed in the quake; the unlucky ones had waited too long and didn’t make it into town. Some we found on the road; they had tried to make it but had started too late. The worst of all were those whose houses hadn’t fallen and had tried to stick it out. Hank and I found one couple just sitting, arms around each other. They were hard as rock.
When we found one, we would try to identify it on the list, then cover it up with snow, several feet deep, so it would keep for a while after it started to thaw.
When we settled with the people at a farm, we rummaged around and found all the livestock we could and carried or dragged their carcasses down to the road, to be toted into town on the tractor and slapped into deep freeze. It seemed a dirty job to do, robbing the dead, but, as Hank pointed out, we would all be getting a little hungry by and by.
Hank bothered me a little; he was merry about the whole thing. I guess it was better to laugh about it, in the long run, and after a while he had me doing it. It was just too big to soak up all at once and you didn’t dare let it get you.
But I should have caught on when we came to his own place. “We can skip it,” he said, and checked off the list.
“Hadn’t we better check for livestock?” I said.
“Nope. We’re running short of time. Let’s move on to the Millers’ place.”
“Did they get out?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t see any of them in town.”
The Millers hadn’t gotten out; we barely had time to take care of them before the tractor picked us up. It was a week later that I found out that both of Hank’s parents had been killed in the quake. He had taken time to drag them out and put them into their ice cellar before he had headed for town.
Like myself, Hank had been outside when it hit, still looking at the line up. The fact that the big shock had occurred right after the line up had kept a lot of people from being killed in their beds—but they say that the line up caused the quake, triggered it, that is, with tidal strains, so I guess it sort of evens up. Of course, the line up didn’t actually make the quake; it had been building up to it ever since the beginning of the atmosphere project. Gravity’s books have got to balance.
The colony had had thirty-seven thousand people when the quake hit. The census when we finished it showed less than thirteen thousand. Besides that we had lost every crop, all or almost all the livestock. As Hank said, we’d all be a little hungry by and by.