ome.

[Illustration]

Outside the dome there was rock. Rock only, twisted and convoluted and
thrusting and gigantic like monoliths of a race of giants. Rock alone
under the awesome gray sky. Steaming rock, for some of the terrestrial
waters were still trapped at great depths. And the sea far off,
booming against rocky headlands, hissing tidally and slowly, in an
age-long process, pulverizing the rock. The sea far off, a clean sea,
not sea-smelling sea, a sea whose waters must evaporate countless
times and be borne up over the naked rocks in vapor and clouds and
come down in pelting, endless rain and rush across the rock, frothing
and steaming--a sea which must do this countless times in the eons to
come, and would do it, to bring salinity to its own waters.

"It kind of scares the hell out of you, doesn't it?" Adam Slade said.
He was a big man with a thick neck and heavy, sleepy-looking eyes and
a blue beard-shadow on his stubborn jaw. He said those words as he
climbed out of the prison tank with Marcia Lawrence. The tank's metal
was still warm from over-heated travel.

"I didn't think anything would scare you," Marcia Lawrence said. She
had conquered her initial terror in the five hours of clanking tank
flight from the prison. They had come a great many miles from the
prison dome, paralleling the edge of the saltless sea and then
finally, when their fuel was almost gone, clanking and rattling down
toward the sea. She was a newspaperwoman, that above all now. She must
not be afraid. She had a story here. A story.

"Get moving," Adam Slade said. "I got nothing against you, lady," he
told her for the tenth time. "But you try anything, you're dead. You
get that? I got nothing to lose. One time is all they can kill me. But
first they got to find me, but they won't be able to take me as long
as you're here. Just stay meek and you'll stay alive."

"How long do you think you can hold out?" Marcia Lawrence asked
practically. They had begun to walk away from the now useless tank.
Adam Slade was carrying the dead guard's M-gun in the crook of his
bent left arm and walking with long, easy, ground-consuming strides.
Marcia almost had to run to keep up with him as they went down a
stretch of slightly sloping black rock toward the steaming, hissing,
pounding, roaring, exploding surf.

Slade smiled. "Plenty of water," he said.

"But no food, Mr. Slade. There is absolutely no food on earth now and
no possible way of getting f