She smiled pleasantly at the gathering. "Who's going to be the first to pack him?"
Naturally that's me, of course, Dick McCue thought sourly, sliding in the mud. I'm an athlete, so they figure I'm Superman or somebody. He missed his footing and nearly fell. They might just as well have carried him pickaback as on this door, wrenched out of the upper rooms.... From behind him Mickey Groff called: "Time for you to take over, Chesbro."
McCue relinquished his end of the improvised stretcher to Artie Chesbro. His arms felt wrenched out of their sockets, and they had covered five hundred yards, at the most.
The rain hadn't really stopped, not quite. There was still water to be wrung out of the scudding stratus, and it came down in little bursts of droplets. Polly Chesbro stumbled along beside the sick man, trying to keep the rain off him when it came, ready with a smile when his eyes jolted open and, for a moment, he stared wonderingly about him.
It was going to be a long trip. They had had to skirt around a sort of contour line instead of following the road. Polly wondered briefly if there would come a point where the road dipped down into the streaming water, and there wasn't any useful hill handy. She didn't know this road at all; had seen Hebertown only once or twice before last night; had only the vaguest impression of what the terrain might be like. For that matter, none of them knew much about the country they were hiking across. On this Day, her mind inscribed in a crabbed hand, our Party suffered the Loss of Its two Aboriginals, reposing our Destiny to the care of the Greatest Guide of All.
Mickey Groff was remembering the Ligurian coast of Italy. The American bombers had smashed it flat from Anzio to Genoa, and Groff had thought proudly, a little selfishly, that no such destruction could ever come to his own country. But this was as bad, at least as bad. They had come across few houses, but there were ominous objects sailing down stream that once had been houses and barns and all the other structures man builds and his enemies sweep away. He tried to reconstruct the terrain as it must have been before the flood, but there was a rightness about the broad sheets of water that made it impossible. They were there; they must always have been there. Why did people build their homes down near the water, anyhow? Was a burbling brook in the back yard worth having if suddenly, unpredictably, it could destroy your home?
He wondered if the War Department was able to look itself in the face that morning, remembering the careful charts the colonels had shown him that called for dispersal, concealment, removal of such essential industries as his own. Suppose, they had said gravely, New York should take a bomb; you'd be out of commission; you must move out of the city to where you can be safe, since the production of your shop is of great importance to the country's defense. And they had showed him the maps, marked "Secret," of the instrument plants in Connecticut, the explosives factories in the Delaware valley, the electronics laboratories along the Jersey streams.
Two-forty-eight, two-forty-nine, two-fifty. "All right, Dick," he told the golf pro, "you can take over for a while." He surrendered the back end of the stretcher and looked around.
"Wait a minute!" he ordered sharply. "What's that up there?"