"Then she is your burden."
"Yes, my burden. I understand."
The Elder lashed out the order of the march, and the youngest clansmen
fanned out in front as scouts, a hundred yards apart, with those who
followed moving now in groups of two at intervals of five minutes,
dispersal against a fire-power far more deadly than the guns O'Hara
knew. The Elder stationed O'Hara and Nedra as the second of these
groups, so that their pace would be determined by the scouts out
front. In this order, and proceeding at a dog-trot, the party swiftly
descended the flank of the mountain toward the small valley intervening
before the next range.
They were soon down upon the valley's floor, moving steadily through
head-high grass broken now and then by densely wooded groves of aspen,
and by noon they were crossing the ice of a narrow stream, heading
toward a thicket. The Elder, pressing up from behind, now urged O'Hara
to increase his speed--the scouts, he warned, having crossed the
stream, were running for the lower slopes of the mountain across the
valley.
"They are almost beyond danger," he explained, "and you cannot blame
them. This is the point of risk, when they are not scouting carefully."
But Nedra needed no urging. They were climbing now, the grade curving
sharply upward, exhausting, the icy wind of December cutting into the
tissue of their lungs as if they were breathing acid. They reached
the first shaggy line of snow-clad conifers and were pausing there,
trying to determine where the route now led, when far ahead of them up
the slope, a great burst of sound came roaring and a thin column of
ocherish fuming matter shot up toward the sky, flattened at the top,
changed coloration rapidly toward mottled red, then seemed to sag,
drifting down toward the earth again.
Nedra seized O'Hara's hand.
Then down below them, just beyond the stream they'd crossed, another
blast of sound came simultaneously with that tortured, soaring column
of dark yellow matter, pustulant, and like a pustule bursting at the
top, fuming into a blackish red, the color of dried blood. Obscene,
O'Hara thought--it was obscene. A fire of filth.
Nedra was pulling at his arm. "Get down," she whispered. "Crawl--they
do not see well and if we stay down, going from rock to rock, it may be
that they'll miss us--"
"They?"
"It is the Degraded. Down below us in the valley."
O'Hara took out his .38, kneeling by Nedra and watching for movement
on the slope below. "Nedra," he whispered, "is that it, that fuming
matter--the atomic weapon?"
She did not answer. He reached out, touching her, and slowly turned.
She was staring straight ahead.
And standing there beside a mass of crumbled granite, gray like
the stone itself, his hulking body naked, neither clad nor furred,
incredibly long arms now swinging as his weak eyes focused under
bone-ridged brows, a man--though not a man--was raising in his ugly
hand a shining tubelike object.
"Fire now, O'Hara," Nedra was saying. "Make them destroy us. They
are around us now. They want to take us, not to kill. You see, that
one--and that--"
"Nedra, I want you to run. When I fire--"
"It is too late. Kill me, O'Hara."
"No, Nedra," he said, but he pressed the .38 against her side. "We can
always die, and if they try to separate us, I will do it. But it's you
they want--if they see I'll kill you, they'll spare both of us. Can you
tell him that?"
"She does not need to tell me that," said the Degraded. "You live while
she lives. Now, come--the Father waits for you in Washington."