‘You two guys better get started,’ Maury said. ‘I’ll stay here in the apartment, if it’s okay with you. It appears to be reasonably safe here, all things considered.’ He seated his weary, overstuffed body on the couch, managed to cross his legs, got out a Dutch Masters cigar and lit up.
‘Maybe I’ll see you again, one of these days,’ Chic said to him, awkwardly. He did not know exactly how to make the break, to leave.
‘Maybe so,’ Maury grunted. ‘Anyhow, drop me a line from Mars.’ He picked up a magazine from the coffee table and leafed through it, his attention turned to it.
‘What are we going to do on Mars to stay alive?’ Chic asked Julie. ‘Farm? Or had you thought about that?’
‘Farm,’ she said, ‘Claim a piece of good land get started irrigating it. I have relatives there. They’ll help us get started.’ She picked up one of the suitcases; Chic took it away from her and then hoisted the other.
‘So long,’ Maury said, in a contrived, overly-light tone. ‘I wish you two luck scratching around in that red, dusty soil.’
‘Good luck to you, too,’ Chic said. I wonder who’ll need it the most, he wondered. You here on Earth or us on Mars.
‘Maybe I’ll send you a couple of sims,’ Maury said, ‘to keep you company. When this all blows over.’ Puffing on his cigar, he watched the two of them go.
The blaring music had arrived once more now, and some of the hunched, massive-jawed chuppers had resumed their shuffling dancing. Nat Flieger turned away from the TV set.
‘I think we’ve got enough on the Ampek,’ he said to Molly. ‘We can start back to the Kongrosians’ house. We’re through, finally.’
Molly said sombrely, ‘Maybe we’re through everywhere, Nat. You know, just because we’ve been the dominant species for a few tens of thousands of years it doesn’t ensure that — ‘
‘I know,’ Nat said to her. ‘I saw their faces, too.’ He led her back to where they had left the Ampek F-a2. Jim Planck followed and the three of them stood together, by the portable recording apparatus. ‘Well?’ Nat said. ‘Shall we start back? Is it really over? ‘It’s over, Jim Planck said, nodding.
‘But I think,’ Molly said, ‘we should stay here in the Jenner area until the fighting lets up. It wouldn’t be safe to try to fly back down below to Tijuana right now. If Beth Kongrosian will let us stay, let’s stay. Right there in the house.’
‘All right,’ Nat said. He agreed with her. Completely.
Jim Planck said abruptly, ‘Look. There’s a woman coming over here towards us. Not a chupper but a — you know, what we are, the same as us.’
The woman, slender and young, with short-cropped hair, wearing blue-cotton trousers and moccasins and a white shirt, threaded her way through the shuffling gangs of chuppers.
I know her, Nat said to himself. I’ve seen her a million times. He knew her and yet he did not; it was terribly strange. So incredibly damn pretty, he thought. Almost grotesquely, unnaturally beautiful. How many women that attractive do I know? None. No one in our world, in our lives, is that attractive except … Except Nicole Thibodeaux.
‘Are you Mr Flieger?’ she called, coming up close to him, then, gazing up into his face; she was very small, he discovered. That had not been apparent over the TV transmissions. In fact he had always thought of Nicole Thibodeaux as looming large, even ominous; it was a distinct shock to find her otherwise. He could not exactly understand it.
‘Yes,’ he said.
Nicole said, ‘Richard Kongrosian put me here and I want to get back where I belong. Can you take me out of here in your auto-cab?’
‘Sure,’ Nat said, nodding. ‘Anything.’
None of the chuppers paid any attention to her; they seemed neither to know nor care who she was. Jim Planck and Molly, however, gaped in mute disbelief.
‘When are you leaving?’ Nicole asked.
‘Well,’ Nat said, ‘we were going to stay. Because of the fighting. It seemed safer here.’
‘No,’ Nicole insisted, at once. ‘You have to go back; you have to do your part. Do you want them to win?’
‘I don’t even know who you’re talking about,’ Nat said. ‘I can’t make out exactly what’s going on, what the issues are or who’s fighting whom. Do you know? Maybe you can tell me.’ But I doubt it, he thought. I doubt if you can turn it into something sensible for me — or for anyone else. Because it is just not sensible.
Nicole said, ‘What would it require to get you to take me back or at least out of here?’
Shrugging, Nat said, ‘Nothing.’ All at once he had made up his mind; he saw things clearly. ‘Because I won’t do it. I’m sorry. We’re going to wait this out, this event that’s going on. I don’t know how Kongrosian managed to put you here, but maybe he’s right; maybe this is the best place to be, for you and for us. For a long time to come.’ He smiled at her. Nicole did not smile back.
‘Damn you,’ Nicole said.
He continued to smile.
‘Please,’ she said. ‘Help me. You were going to; you started to.’
Speaking up huskily. Jim Planck said, ‘Maybe he is helping you, Mrs Thibodeaux. By doing this, by keeping you here.’
‘I think Nat’s right, too,’ Molly said. ‘I’m sure it’s unsafe for you at the White House right now.’
Nicole looked around fiercely at the three of them. Then, resignedly, she sighed. ‘What a place to be stuck in. Damn that Richard Kongrosian, too; it’s basically his fault. What are these creatures?’ She gestured at the shuffling line of adult chuppers and the small, neo-chupper children who lined both sides of the great dusty, wooden hall.
‘I’m not quite certain,’ Nat said. ‘Relatives of ours, you could say. Progeny, very possibly.’
‘Forefathers,’ Jim Planck said, correcting him.
Nat said, ‘Time will tell which it is.’
Lighting a cigarillo, Nicole said vigorously, ‘I don’t like them; I’ll feel a lot happier when we get back to the house. They make me just dreadfully uncomfortable.’
‘They should,’ Nat said. Certainly he shared her extreme reaction.
Around the four of them the chuppers danced their monotonous dance, paying no attention to the four human beings.
‘I think, however,’ Jim Planck said thoughtfully, ‘we’re going to have to get accustomed to them.’