There was nothing he could do for her until he got the pump working again....
Rik pushed away from the slab on which Zina lay, and went through the archway into the next chamber. Here another fifty of the group lay on their slabs, not so much as a muscle twitch betraying the fact that they were all quite alive. It seemed only a few hours since he had lain down on his slab in the other room and gotten his injection, but he could not, for a dizzy moment, recall in which direction the pump lay. His mind seemed to be plumbing dust-covered depths to dredge out his memories, one by one.
He suddenly remembered the War. The war that had driven the group to build this place, to try and safeguard a handful from the holocaust that would set fire to the surface of the world and turn the seas to steam. Was it possible the war had passed? Or had it ever come!
There was no way to know without going outside—Wait! There was! Rik thought hard, trying to get his sense of direction back. The atom-powered clock that marked off months instead of minutes was in the central vault, where the elders slept. The other nine vaults ringed that one, he recalled, veering at right angles to his first direction, which would have taken him on a circular tour of the nine vaults and back to his starting place again.
The archway to the vault of the elders was unaccountably blocked, and Rik realized suddenly that part of the ceiling there had fallen, carried by some fault in the granite of the mountain itself. But that was impossible! The elders had selected this site on the basis of the rigidity of the rocky strata that made it up. A fault could not have occurred for more years than Rik's own lifetime—
Or had that many years passed already?
There was no way of knowing; not until he had examined the clock. Rik moved away from the blockade and made his way into the next vault, and the next, finally finding an archway in the sixth vault from his own where the rock had not completely sealed the way into the elders' vault.
Here he had expected to find the air fresher, already having theorized that the staleness elsewhere was due to the poor circulation occasioned by the blockaded central vault. But in fact the air there was even worse, and laden with an odor that made Rik suddenly afraid to see its source.
Still, he was the first to awake. It was up to him to try and save himself and the others. Rik made an effort of will, and then squeezed through the narrow orifice into the main chamber. He looked once toward the slabs holding the bodies of the elders, then quickly away. It was true. All were in advanced stages of corruption already.