"Find Kendrick," said Fairlie promptly.
"You think his disappearance that important?"
"I know it is." Fairlie strode up and down the office, his physical energy too restless to be still. "Listen, Wales. It's the fact that Kendrick, who first predicted the catastrophe, hasn't himself left Earth that's deepening all these doubts. If we could find Kendrick and show people how he's going to Mars, it would discredit all this talk that his prediction was a mistake, and that he knows it."
"You've already tried to find him?"
Fairlie nodded. "I've had the world combed for him. I wish I could guess what happened to him. If we could only find his sister, even, it might lead to him."
Yes, Wales thought. Martha and Lee Kendrick had always been close. And now they had vanished together.
He told Fairlie what had happened to him in the Jersey City. Neither Fairlie nor the others seemed much surprised.
"Yes. Things are bad in some of the evacuated regions. You see, once we get all the listed inhabitants out, we can't go back to those places. We haven't the time to keep going over them. So others—the ones who don't want to go—can move into the empty towns and take over."
"Why don't they want to go?" Wales studied the other's face as he asked the question. "Five years ago, everyone believed in the crash, in the coming of Doomsday. Now people here are skeptical. You say that Kendrick might convince them. But what made them skeptical, in the first place?"
Fairlie said, "I don't know, not for sure. But I can tell you what I think."