It was, Wales knew, the best chance he'd be likely to get to escape from this band. He let himself drop behind the rest of Milton's men as they ran down Ninth Street. Then, passing the mouth of an alley, he dodged into it and ran alone in darkness, cutting south to Sixth.
Wales stretched his legs toward the levee. The bridges were impassable to him, and the skiffs were his only chance. He made sure of oars in one of them, then pushed it out onto the dark river.
From northward, from the bridges, came the sound of firing. But as Wales rowed, the shots straggled into silence.
He guessed that the fighting was over and that Sam Lanterman was master of Pittsburgh.
When Wales finally stood on the dark northern shore and looked back, he saw a scattered twinkling of little lights moving amid the towering black structures that once had been a city.
He suddenly found that he was shaking, from reaction and despair.
"Can anyone—anything—save people like that?"
To Wales, it suddenly all seemed hopeless—the mission on which he'd come back to Earth. Hopeless, to think that the ignorant, the short-sighted, the fearful, could ever be induced to leave Earth in time.
He looked up at the star-decked sky. Out there in the void, the massive asteroid that spelled world's end was swinging ever forward on the orbit that in four months would end in planetary collision. You couldn't see it, though. And that was the trouble. People like these, influenced by someone's secret propaganda, wouldn't believe it until Kendrick's World loomed dreadful in the heavens. And then it would be too late....