s side.

It took me back to old times--all but the unmilitary color. Amy led me
to the MG and pointed.

"Sit," she said.

I sat. She got in the other side and we were off.

It was a little uncomfortable on account of I wasn't just sure whether
I ought to apologize for making her take her clothes off. And then she
tramped on the gas of that little car and I didn't think much about
being embarrassed or about her black lace lingerie. I was only
thinking about one thing--how to stay alive long enough to get out of
that car.

IV

See, what we really wanted was an ocean liner.

The rest of us probably would have been happy enough to stay in Lehigh
County, but Arthur was getting restless.

He was a terrible responsibility, in a way. I suppose there were a
hundred thousand people or so left in the country, and not more than
forty or fifty of them were like Arthur--I mean if you want to call a
man in a prosthetic tank a "person." But we all did. We'd got pretty
used to him. We'd shipped together in the war--and survived together,
as a few of the actual fighters did, those who were lucky enough to be
underwater or high in the air when the ICBMs landed--and as few
civilians did.

I mean there wasn't much chance for surviving, for anybody who
happened to be breathing the open air when it happened. I mean you can
do just so much about making a "clean" H-bomb, and if you cut out the
long-life fission products, the short-life ones get pretty deadly.

Anyway, there wasn't much damage, except of course that everybody was
dead. All the surface vessels lost their crews. All the population of
the cities were gone. And so then, when Arthur slipped on the
gangplank coming into Newport News and broke his fool neck, why, we
had the whole staff of the _Sea Sprite_ to work on him. I mean what
else did the surgeons have to do?

Of course, that was a long time ago.

But we'd stayed together. We headed for the farm country around
Allentown, Pennsylvania, because Arthur and Vern Engdahl claimed to
know it pretty well. I think maybe they had some hope of finding
family or friends, but naturally there wasn't any of that. And when
you got into the inland towns, there hadn't been much of an attempt to
clean them up. At least the big cities and the ports had been gone
over, in some spots anyway, by burial squads. Although when we finally
decided to move out and went to Philadelphia--

Well, let's be fair; there had been fighting