"She's well, and you'll see her soon. Now lie quietly. You've been a
very sick man."
Peter sank back in the bed. The room was coming into focus. He looked
around him slowly. He felt very weak, but perfectly lucid.
"Yes...." he said. "How long have I been here, Doctor?"
The man hesitated, looked at him intently. "Three months," he said. He
turned and gave low-voiced instructions to a nurse, and then went away.
Peter's head began spinning just a little. Glass clinked from a metal
stand near his head; the nurse bent over him with a glass half full of
milky fluid. It tasted awful, but she made him drink it all.
In a moment he began to relax, and the room got fuzzy again. Just
before he drifted off, he said sleepily, "You can't--fool me. It's been
_more_--than three--months."
He was right. All the nurses, and even Dr. Arnold, were evasive, but he
kept asking them why he couldn't see Lorelei, and finally he wormed it
out of them. It had been nine and a half months, not three, and he'd
been in a coma all that time. Lorelei, it seemed, had recovered much
sooner.
"She was only suffering from ordinary shock," Arnold explained.
"Seeing that assistant of hers--it was enough to knock anybody out,
especially a woman. But you stood actual mental contact with _them_
for approximately five minutes. Yes, we know--you talked a lot. It's a
miracle you're alive, and rational."
"But where is she?" Peter complained. "You still haven't explained why
I haven't been able to see her."
Arnold frowned. "All right," he said. "I guess you're strong enough to
take it. She's underground, with the rest of the women and children,
and a good two-thirds of the male population. That's where you'll go,
as soon as you're well enough to be moved. We started digging in six
months ago."
"But why?" Peter whispered.
Arnold's strong jaw knotted. "We're hiding," he said. "Everything else
has failed."
Peter couldn't think of anything to say. Dr. Arnold's voice went on
after a moment, musingly. "We're burrowing into the earth, like worms.
It didn't take us long to find out we couldn't kill them. They didn't
even take any notice of our attempts to do so, except once. That was
when a squadron of the Police caught about fifty of them together at
one time, and attacked with flame guns and a new secret weapon. It
didn't hurt them, but it annoyed them. It was the first time they'd
been annoyed, I think. They blew up half a state, and it's still
smoldering."
"And since then?" Peter asked huskily.
"Since then, we've been burrowing. All the big cities.... It would be
an impossible task if we tried to include all the thinly-populated
areas, of course, but it doesn't matter. By the time we excavate
enough to take care of a quarter of the earth's population, the other
three-quarters will be dead, or worse."
"I wonder," Peter said shakily, "if I am strong enough to take it."
Arnold laughed harshly. "You are. You've got to be. You're part of our
last hope, you see."
"Our last hope?"
"Yes. You're a scientist."
"I see," said Peter. And for the first time, he thought of the
_Citadel_. No plan leaped full-born into his mind, but, _maybe_, he
thought, _there's a chance_....
* * * * *
It wasn't very big, the thing that had been his shining dream. It lay
there in its rough cradle, a globe of raw dura-steel not more than
five hundred meters in diameter, where the _Citadel_ was to have been a
thousand. It wouldn't house a hundred scientists, eagerly delving into
the hinterland of research. The huge compartments weren't filled with
the latest equipment for chemical and physical experiment; instead,
there was compressed oxygen there, and concentrated food, enough to
last a lifetime.
It was a new world, all by itself; or else it was a tomb. And there was
one other change, one that you couldn't see from the outside. The solid
meters of lead in its outer skin, the shielding to keep out cosmic
rays, were gone.
A man had just finished engraving the final stroke on its nameplate, to
the left of the airlock--_The Avenger_. He stepped away now, and joined
the group a little distance away, silently waiting.