The groundcar was enclosed, with room for a driver and the three from the Med Ship. But armed men festooned themselves about its exterior and it went bumping and rolling to the massive ground-layer girders of the grid. It rolled out under them and onto a paved highway. It picked up speed.
There were buildings on either side of the road, but few showed lights. This was night, and the men at the landing-grid had set a pattern of hunger, so that the silence and the dark buildings did not seem a sign of tranquility and sleep, but of exhaustion and despair.
The highway lamps were few, by comparison with other inhabited worlds, and the groundcar needed lights of its own to guide its driver over a paved surface that needed repair. By those moving lights other depressing things could be seen: untidiness, buildings not kept up to perfection, evidences of apathy, the road, which hadn't been cleaned lately, litter here and there.
Even the fact that there were no stars added to the feeling of wretchedness and gloom and, ultimately, of hunger.
Maril spoke nervously to the driver.
"The famine isn't any better?"
He moved his head in negation, but did not speak. There was a splotch of blue pigment at the back of his neck. It extended upward into his hair.
"I left two years ago," said Maril. "It was just beginning then. Rationing hadn't started."
The driver said evenly, "There's rationing now!"
The car went on and on. A vast open space appeared ahead. Lights about its perimeter seemed few and pale.