Kobol turned too, and his long face sank into a scowl. “Why aren’t these people at their jobs? Nobody’s been given permission to come up here except those...”

Lisa laid a land on his arm, silencing him. She saw that still more people were coming up on the powerlift, chatting, grinning to each other, pressing forward to make room for even more. They were dressed in their work fatigues, almost all of them, but the air was like a holiday excitement back on Earth.

“There must be at least a hundred of them,” Catherine Demain said, smiling happily.

“And more coming.”

“ATTENTION,” the loudspeakers in the ceiling blared, echoes reverberating along the rock walls. “THE TRANSFER SHIP HAS TOUCHED DOWN AT THE LANDING PAD...”

The growing crowd cheered, drowning out part of Blair’s message. Lisa held her hands to her ears; the noise of the crowd was painful as it rang through the cavern.

“...SHOULD BE AT THE AIRLOCK IN APPROXIMATELY FIVE MINUTES. MEDICAL TEAMS SHOULD BE AT THE AIRLOCK IN APPROXIMATELY FIVE MINUTES.”

The crowd was laughing and talking and surging forward now. Lisa felt herself pushed closer to the metal hatch; not that anyone touched her, but the emotional energy of the crowd had a vital force to it.

“Who the hell gave anyone permission to leave their jobs?” Kobol snarled, his voice rising. “We can’t have people meandering around like this!”

Catherine Demain laughed at him. “What are you going to do about it? They’re excited about Douglas bringing back survivors, I guess.”

Lisa watched the crowd. Almost every one of the settlement’s five hundred and some people seemed to have suddenly jammed into the cavern, filling up the big central aisle, spilling over into the narrower passages between stacks of crates. Even the children had come, to clamber over the lunar buggies that they were never allowed to touch.

They were happy. They were excited. They kept a respectful distance from the medical volunteers and the trio of leaders next to the hatch, but they had come to see Douglas’ return, to witness his rescue of a handful of people from Earth.

They want to see that Earth isn’t totally dead, Lisa realized. They’ve come to see survivors of the holocaust with their own eyes.

The crowd surged forward again, kids standing on tiptoes atop buggies and forklifts, an expectant crackle of excitement running through the cavern. Lisa suddenly felt cold, shiveringly cold. She turned and saw the airlock indicator light had turned from red to amber.

Everyone seemed to hold their breath. The big cavern went absolutely silent. The light finally flashed green and the massive metal door began to swing slowly open. Kobol stood as tense as a steel cable just before it snaps. Catherine Demain took an unconscious half-step toward the slowly opening hatch.

“Help them,” Lisa commanded. Two of the medical volunteers dropped the stretcher they were carrying and rushed to the hatch. They leaned their weight on it, swinging it fully open.

The first man out was one of the pilots, grinning broadly as he stepped through, searching the crowd with his eyes until a tiny blonde woman raced through the people standing in front and threw herself into his arms. A murmur ran through the cavern.

A younger man stepped out next. Lisa recognized him as one of the communications technicians. His coverall was stained with mud, his face was grimy. But he too had an enormous grin on his face, a smile of satisfaction, of relief, of accomplishment.

The crowd watched, hushed, as the survivors from Earth came out one by one, most of them supported by members of Douglas’ crew. The medical volunteers helped them onto stretchers and carried them toward the powerlift to the makeshift infirmary that had been prepared for them. The crowd melted back to make room for them.

They were awed into silence as the survivors were carried past. The people from Earthside were mostly men. They seemed weak, they looked thin, as though starved. There were no obvious burns or wounds on their raggedly-clothed bodies.

When the last of the survivors came out, Catherine Demain hurried after his stretcher. Lisa stood where she was. The crowd began to murmur again, to talk excitedly. The rest of the crew who had gone Earthside stepped through the airlock hatch, each of them wearing that same grin of victory. As each of them came into sight, the crowd cheered and applauded. The noise was growing, building, reverberating off the rock walls and ceiling. One by one, the men who had participated in the mission came out and were quickly surrounded by friends, family, lovers.

And then, last of all, came Douglas Morgan. His smile was not as broad as the others’. There was less of joy and relief in it, more of irony and doubt. But only Lisa saw this. The others simply roared their approval once they saw him, rushed to him cheering wildly and raised Douglas to their shoulders.

He looked genuinely surprised. Lisa saw that his eyes were tired, sleepless. His coverall was grimy and stained with what might have been blood along one sleeve.

But the crowd noticed none of this. All they knew was that Douglas had led the expedition to Earth, had brought back living survivors of the holocaust, had proved that they were not totally cut off from their mother world, had shown that the Earth was not entirely dead.

They paraded with him on their shoulders and cheered themselves hoarse. Their noise was absolutely head-splitting. But Lisa stayed where she was, her hands at her sides no matter how much she wanted to press them to her ears.

Almost as an afterthought, a pair of wildly laughing men grabbed her and hoisted her up onto their shoulders, then fought their way through the circling, howling, triumphant mob to march side-by-side with their pair holding Douglas aloft. He looked at her and grinned boyishly, almost guiltily. He shouted some words at her but Lisa could not hear them over the ceaseless animal roar of the mob.

Douglas laughed and shrugged his broad shoulders. Lisa knew, in an utterly unmistakable flash of insight, that her husband could lead these people wherever he chose to take them. They worshipped him. And she knew with equal certainty that he would throw it all away, that he did not want to be their leader, that he thought it all an absurd cosmic joke.

Then she looked back over her shoulder at Kobol, standing alone now back by the open airlock hatch, his face twisted with anger and envy, halfway between weeping and murder.

* * *

Dr. Robert Lord sat staring at the open refrigerator. There were only four lumps of what had once been food in it, but now they were green, slimy, shapeless blobs that dripped between the rungs of the refrigerator shelves. The stench made his stomach heave. The emergency power generator had run out of fuel four days earlier, and the food had quickly rotted.

Fungus, Lord thought. At least the simple life forms are still working.

His stomach pangs were so insistent that his hand started to reach out for the festering mess.

“No!” he said aloud. The sound startled him. He pulled his hand away, then grabbed the edge of the refrigerator door and slammed it shut. Slowly, weak with hunger and the fever that was sapping his strength, he made his way out of the observatory’s basement kitchen, up the spiral iron stairs that clanged as hollow as his stomach, and entered the big dome.

The telescope stood patiently, a massive monument to a dead civilization. With each step across the cement floor Lord’s boots echoed eerily through the vast, sepulchral dome. He had always thought of the astronomical observatory as a sacred place. Now it was truly a tomb. He was the only one left alive in it. Two days after the sky had burned, a wild, frenzied mob from the town had sacked the observatory, killing everyone they could find in their madness and hatred for scientists.

“It’s their fault!” the mob screamed as they attacked the handful of men and women in the observatory.

Lord had fled to the film vault and locked himself in without waiting to see if any of the others could reach its safety after him. The vault was almost soundproof, but some of the tortured shrieks of his colleagues and students seeped through, burning themselves into his mind. He waited two days before he dared to come out, weak from hunger, filthy from his own excrement. They were all dead. The pert little Robertson girl had made it almost to the door of the vault before they found her, stripped her, and raped her to death.

Lord knew he should have buried them, but he did not have the strength. Now, as he tottered across the observatory’s main dome, smudged here and there by fires that the mob had started, there was no one to talk to, to confess to, except himself.

“It was a solar disturbance,” he said to the empty, silent dome. His voice quavered and echoed in the accusing shadows. “Maybe a mild nova. My paper on the fluctuations of the intrinsic solar magnetic field... it’ll never be published now. There’s nobody left to read it.”

He sank to his knees, buried his face in his hands, and cried until he collapsed exhausted on the cold cement floor.

For weeks he had patiently sat at the observatory’s solar-powered radio, calling to other astronomical observatories around the world. When none answered, he swept the frequency dial from one end to another, searching for sounds of life.

He heard voices. There were people out there. But the tales they told made his blood freeze. Cities blasted into radioactive pits. Disease ravaging the countryside. Maddened bands of looters prowling the land, worse than animals, killing for the insane joy of it, raping and torturing and enslaving anyone they found.

Lord shuddered, remembering their voices, pleading, angry, bitter, sick, frightened. He still heard them sometimes, and not always in his dreams.

One woman, a psychology professor at Utah State, actually engaged him in a pleasant conversation over several days, reporting clinically on the devastation of Salt Lake City, the enormous levels of radiation that blanketed the state thanks to the heavy megatonnage that had been targeted for the mobile missile sites along the Nevada border. The wrath of the Lord, she had called it, not knowing his name.

On her last day she told him with mounting excitement in her voice as she watched a group of young men nosing around the wrecked campus. Her excitement turned to disgust as they set buildings on fire and finally broke into the room she was in. She left the radio on as the marauders kicked down her door and poured into the room. Lord could still her screams whenever he tried to sleep.

Her screams awoke him.

He was lying on the cold cement floor of the observatory, exhausted and stiff. And starving. He could not tell how much of his weakness was due to the fever that raged through him, how much the fever was due to his hunger. Every muscle in his frail body ached hideously. It was dark now inside the dome. Night had fallen.

Slowly, painfully, he pulled himself to his feet and tottered outside to the balcony ringing the observatory dome. In the shadows of night, the forest was as dark and mysteriously alive as ever. The warm breeze rustled the leafy boughs the way it always did. Insects buzzed and chirped. Frogs sang their peeping song.

“It’s only the men who have disappeared,” Lord whispered to himself. “Life goes on without us.”