It took several hands. Mackenzie had to help. Jay kept scowling at him, the air whistling expressively through his nose.

They sawed through Shirley’s hair, plaited the strands and made their twine. It took a great deal of time; it left Shirley with a ragamuffin thatch.

She ran her hands experimentally through the tomboy remains that tufted her scalp. Then she turned her face away from them. “For Whom the Bell Tolls.”

Mackenzie doubted it would be given time ever to grow back.

Jay said, “I guess we’ll have to palpate Earle’s leg.”

It had to be pulled and twisted to set the bone in place. Mackenzie was the heaviest of them and practicality required that he be the one to hold Earle down.

He crouched above Earle’s head and pinned down both biceps. Then the high ring of Earle’s scream stabbed through his skull and he almost lost his grip when Earle convulsed.

“Okay Earle. Gentle down. It’s over.”

“Dear sweet Jesus help me.” Earle’s voice broke.

With braided ropes of human hair they tied the splints in place. If the swelling began to go down they’d have to retie it; Mackenzie cautioned them to tie bow knots.

Finally Shirley collapsed back against the wall of the pit. “It’ll have to do.”

Sweat stood beaded on Earle’s flaccid skin. The last twinge of acute pain faded across his face. His earsplitting outcry still seemed to echo.

Jay removed something from his ear and examined it. “All this high-priced medical talent and that’s the best we can do.”

“It should heal as straight as it ever was,” Shirley said.

They lifted Earle from the pit and took him down the slope and scooped an earth bed for him in the lee of one of the manzanitas. At least it would cut some of the wind.

Dusk waned; darkness condensed. Decisions needed taking. A score of things needed doing. But Mackenzie had sunk into a constraining ennui and he stood listless.

Shirley’s furious scowl: with her hair cropped she had a pouting-child look: she gave both of them sour up-from-under looks. Jay crabbed his way closer to her as if her public nakedness still embarrassed him. Parched and famished and abraded to raw sores, Mackenzie had no carnal drives left and would have been astonished if Shirley had indicated anything like passion toward him but Jay was going through reflex motions and possibly that was because it was a peg of reality to cling to.

Mackenzie roused himself fretfully. “I hope you had some sleep during the day. We’ve got a lot to do. We don’t need to have me deliver a theatrical harangue, do we?”

“What’s on your mind?”

“We can’t keep thinking in stopgap terms an hour at a time. We’re going to be here a while—we’ve got to plan it out.”

“How long can we stay here and live, Mackenzie?”

“Earle can’t be moved any distance.”

Earle spoke with drunken thickness. “Leave me. If there’s a chance you can get out—”

“Shut up, Earle.” He wished there were some way to avert Earle from feeding in the trough of his guilt: things were bad enough without having to dissuade Earle from martyrdom at every turning.

“We’ll get out in time,” Mackenzie said. “We’ll need clothes on our backs—shoes on our feet.”

There was a burst of inverted laughter from Jay. “Where’s the department store out here? I must have missed it on the way in.”

“You’ve got to stop fighting me.” Mackenzie’s head ached. He fought to concentrate. “This isn’t dead ground. Things live in it. Animals, birds, plants. We’ve got to be predators, that’s all.”

“We’re plastic people from a transistorized civilization two thousand years removed from all this,” Jay said with stubborn cynicism. “I don’t see how we can wipe that out overnight.”

Shirley began to speak but Mackenzie held up a restraining hand. Jay’s last words rattled around in his head—something vitally important: he reached for it, chased it around his mind. An answer was there—he had to find it. The same answer that had eluded him all through the day. What?

Plastic.… Then he had it and he bolted to his feet.

Jay’s head rocked back. He stared at Mackenzie in sudden terror.

Mackenzie was turning, searching the slope, reconstructing last night’s scene. The truck had been—there. He walked toward it as swiftly as he could. Something jabbed his heel and he almost turned his ankle; it made him stop and proceed more cautiously—all they needed was another cripple.

Jay limped after him. “What is it, man?”

“That blessed beautiful plastic God damn raincoat.”

12

It wasn’t where he remembered it falling. Something heavy sank through his throat—a hollow sensation of abject fright.

He went down on his knees and searched. “Help me find it—it’s got to be right around here.”

“What are we looking for?”

“Little rectangle of clear plastic. Folded up. Maybe eight inches by four inches.”

“What good would that do us?”

He made no answer; he swiveled desperately on his knees, pawed at the ground, searched the pale silver earth in starlight. So clearly last night he’d seen Duggai’s scheme; he’d kicked the raincoat out of the truck knowing it could make the vital difference—then forgotten it perversely in the tangle of fears.

He groped, widening the furious search. Had Duggai found it, tossed it back into the truck? But Mackenzie had been watching him for just that—hadn’t seen Duggai stoop to pick anything up. Then where had the God damn thing gone?

“This what we’re looking for?”

Jay was thirty feet away. Mackenzie gawked at him, got his feet under him, crossed the slope lifting his feet as if from a white-hot surface. “Wind must have blown it around.”

“I don’t see what good it’ll do—it won’t even keep the sun off anybody.”

Mackenzie unfolded the packet. The plastic smelled musty. He stretched it out. Through it he could see the stars.

“Thank God.”

“Mackenzie, I swear to God I’m going to—”

“Come on.” He moved away muttering: “Duggai’s watching us of course. We’ve got to pick a spot he can’t see. If he knew what we were up to he’d come down here one fine noon and cut it to ribbons. We need a hollow—maybe some brush to screen it from him.”

Jay stopped behind him. “You’re going around the bend, Mackenzie. You’re babbling. Incipient paranoia.”

“Come on, damn you—over here, this’ll do.”

It was a dry ravine with irregular V sides not more than three feet deep at the center but it made an S-bend here and clumps of catclaw stood on either bank. You couldn’t see the bottom if you weren’t standing directly above it.

Jay approached with wary stealth. Mackenzie climbed down into the ravine. “Give me a hand. We’ve got to dig.”

“Again?” But Jay came painfully down the sloping bank and waited for instruction.

They scooped a bowl in the bottom of the ravine. Mackenzie used the unfolded raincoat as a pattern: they made the bowl a few inches smaller in diameter than the plastic.

The bowl sloped down to a bottom about two feet deep where Mackenzie carefully built up a large cup of earth, molding it like a piece of pottery. He cut half a sleeve off the raincoat, slit it open and used it for a liner in the cup. It had a capacity of perhaps three quarts—more than enough. The plastic liner ought to prevent anything from seeping into the ground.

The cool subsoil was slightly damp to the touch. That would be enough moisture to start the action; later it would have to be fed with earth and succulents.

Jay followed his instructions as if mesmerized. His initiative was pretty much gone. He didn’t ask questions and Mackenzie perversely volunteered nothing, withholding knowledge because mystery cemented his power. There was still the possibility of mutiny—Jay’s tractability of the moment might not last.