"I don't leave without one hell of a yell," Falk chuckled.
"And you don't leave without me either." Web faced the next door, the tension mounting. He could not get over the feeling that there had to be somebody aboard. At least there had to be bodies, certainly, because nothing had left the satellite. Forty-seven men had come up here. The bodies were probably all pretty close together. He stopped thinking about that because it only made it difficult to keep on looking. He opened the next door, and there was nobody there either.
He began to have an awful suspicion.
He went cautiously, stealthily, from room to room, made a full round of the doughnut. He never saw anybody. In some rooms there were a number of shoes on the floor, and clothes were strewn around haphazardly, the way men will do when they are living close together. Here was a pipe lying for no apparent reason in the middle of the floor. Here was a chessboard, laid out on a table with a game half completed. Everywhere there was a general sense of confusion, as if these men had suddenly dropped what they were doing and run away. The further he walked, the more he saw, the more fantastic it became. In one room he found four pairs of shoes sitting on the floor, four complete suits of clothes dropped over them exactly as if—
"Dundon!" he cried.
—as if the men in the clothes had ceased to exist.
III
Sometime during the night the door of the truck opened and another body was laid beside Ivy on the floor. Until then Ivy had believed that whatever was going to happen at the end of this ride would be reserved for her, and she thought she knew what that happening would be. With the addition of this new body, however, which was also a girl, Ivy was not so sure.
She was completely paralyzed and she could not move a finger. Beside her the other girl did not move either. But she, this other one, was also young and pretty, and Ivy began to think through her terror.