She seemed surprised by his excitement. "Why, Jay, they're fanatics, a superstitious movement that started long before evacuation was carried out here. People whose minds became unhinged by the coming of Doomsday. They preached, down in the Diamond, I heard them, terrible ravings that Doomsday was sent us for our sins, that only sacrifice and atonement of lives and treasures would save the world. Then, when evacuation went on, here, all the Brotherhood hid in the country so they wouldn't have to go."
"And they're here now?" he exclaimed.
Martha shuddered. "Not here. It's the one thing I've feared most these last weeks, that they'd burn Castletown."
"Burn Castletown? Good God—why?"
Martha looked at him. "Jay, they're burning the empty cities, one by one. A sacrifice. An atonement. I'm afraid Sharon was burned two nights ago—the glow in the sky seemed to come from there. And I've seen other fire-glows in the south—"
Wales, with a sudden cold feeling, remembered the blackened desolation of Brighton Falls. Then it had been no accident? Then it had been deliberate, a purposeful thing, a sacrifice—
He suddenly saw Earth as it was. A nearly-empty planet reeling toward crazy anarchy. In New York, where there was still law and order and you could see the rocket-fleets of the Marslift coming and going methodically in the sky, it had still seemed like a civilized world. But out here in the black, blind evacuated regions was deepening chaos, with law gone and all the most atavistic passions of humanity let loose. With the ignorant and mad who refused to leave battling for the possession of deserted cities, or setting the torch to unpeopled towns in superstitious sacrifice....
He asked Martha, "Did Lee think that the Brotherhood of Atonement was behind the plot to trap people into staying on Earth?"
That seemed to startle her. "He didn't say so. But could they be the ones? Mad people like that—?"
"It would take a fanatic to perpetrate a horror like getting people trapped in Doomsday," Wales said. "But let it pass, for the moment. I want to know what happened to Lee."