"Somebody's got to try. There isn't much time, I'm sure of it--"
"All right. Try it. But before you go, you've got a visitor. I think
you'd better talk to her."
* * * * *
The girl was waiting in his tent, sitting alone in the darkness. She
looked up into the flashlight beam, and there were wet streaks of dust
on her cheeks. "Matt? Is that you?" She stumbled to her feet. "Oh,
Matt--"
"Mary!" The big man stared at his wife, his eyes wide. "Mary, what are
you doing _here_? How did you get here, why did you come?" He took
her in his arms, held her tight as she pressed her face against his
chest, sobbing. Then suddenly he straightened up, held her out at arm's
length, staring into her large brown eyes. "Mary--the farm--"
She closed her eyes, tears streaming down her cheeks, and shook her
head miserably. "Gone. City people from San Diego--they came one night,
they took it--"
A numbness ran down his spine as he stared at her. "But Dad and
Johnny--"
"They never had a chance." She wiped her eyes with her sleeve, her
voice faltering. "It was a crowd of men, maybe ten of them, came across
the land about eight o'clock one night. They shot your Dad when he
walked out on the porch. Shot him through the head. Then they came
in the house and beat Johnny to death. Oh, Matt--it was horrible.
They shot the cow and cooked her over an open fire. You should have
seen them--they were starving, they were like wild men, calling us
land-grabbers and food-hoarders. I sneaked out the back way when they
weren't looking and ran down to the road to Escondido and found Harry
Davis. He and a bunch of the boys had stolen some gas and were planning
to drive over the mountains to join you here. They sent word around to
the other farmers, and then they brought me along--"
Matt stood numbly, staring at the girl's face. "Mary, you shouldn't
have come here, you should have gone to the folks in town--they would
have helped you, taken care of you--"
The girl whirled on him, her eyes pleading. "Oh, Matt, come away from
here, come out of this horrible fight and come home! What does it
matter if there's a Rocket out here--we can't eat Rockets, we need
food. The City folks are coming out in hordes. There was a man said
the water supply wasn't going to last to the north, that the cars were
lined up three deep from the coast clear out to Salt-Lake, bumper to
bumper, a week ago. They stole gasoline from the refineries, before
they blew them up. They're all heading east and north--oh, Matt, take
me home--"
He stood there in the dim light of the flashlight, and then knelt
down beside her, holding her against him. "I can't, Mary. Not yet,"
he said softly. "The world we knew before was crazy. This Rocket was
crazy--this being afraid of war, and fighting to out-do the rest of the
world was crazy, somehow--"
She stared at him. "But everybody knew that if we didn't get there
first, the others would. And there would have been a horrible war, the
end of everything--"
"Everyone was so busy being afraid of the war that they couldn't see
what was happening to the world around them. They didn't see that
something worse than a war could happen until it was too late. They
figured the oil would last another hundred years, and it only lasted
twenty. They thought they could go on like this forever--" He stared
blankly out at the darkness, his eyes hollow. "It was that Rocket that
did it. That's why we have to destroy it."
"Matt, if we don't go now we won't have any home left to go to. Those
people don't know how to farm, they'll kill all the animals, and strip
the trees and fields, and burn all the buildings--"
He shook his head, hardly able to put into words the bitterness in
his heart. "It won't do any good to go back, without destroying the
Rocket. It's the last remnant of the old world--standing out there--the
world that led us to _this_. It's poisonous, it's evil. There'll never
be recovery unless the ship is wiped out." He looked down into her
frightened eyes, rubbed her shoulders gently. "Don't be afraid. It
won't be long. I'm going out there tonight. I'm going to blow that
Rocket into a million pieces."
She clung to him like a child, shaking her head helplessly. "You will
be killed, I know you will be killed, _please_, Matt--Oh, if anything
happens to you, I--I won't know what to do, I can't let you go--"
"I've got to, Mary."