Wales turned and started up the street from the river. He'd been given a mission and he had to carry it out. Not only for the sake of all those ignorant ones who might be trapped on a doomed world, but also for the sake of his friends. Something had happened to Lee and Martha Kendrick, and he had to find them.
He went through the Northside district until, beyond the old Planetarium, he found a big garage. There were plenty of cars in it. In ten minutes, Wales was driving north.
He kept his lights off, and his speed down. He looked back often. No one followed him now.
"Whoever was trailing me," he thought, "will be a while discovering that I'm not still with Lanterman."
Again, he wondered who the secret trailers were. They hadn't tried to overtake him. They had just followed him. Was it someone who also wanted to find Kendrick? And for what reason?
He thought of the Brotherhood of Atonement that was still only a name to him, and felt a chill.
It was fifty miles to Castletown, and he dared not drive too fast without lights lest he run suddenly upon a block in the road. But after a while the moon rose and Wales was able to push the car a little faster.
The countryside dreamed in the moonlight. It was only in towns that the awful emptiness of the world crushed you down. Out here between fields and hills, things were as they had always been, and it did indeed seem mad folly for men to quit their planet. It was small wonder that some of them refused to do so.
Everything you saw, Wales thought, wrung your heart with a feeling of futility. That little white house with the picket fence that he swept past so swiftly—someone had labored hard to build that fence, to plant the flowers, to coddle a green lawn into being. And it had all been for nothing, the little houses, the mighty cities, all the care and toil and planning of centuries for nothing....
He would not let himself get into that frame of mind. It had not been for nothing. Out of it all, man had won for himself the knowledge that was now saving him. The cities that now seemed so futile had built the rocket-fleets that for years had been taking the millions out to Mars. They had built the atomic power-plants, the great electronic food-and-water synthesizers, that would make life on Mars possible for all Earth's folk. No, man's past was not a failure, but a success.