Nelsen could have tried to reach an escape-exit into open space, but he helped with the injured while he waited for more impacts to come. There was another series of deflecting flashes from the defense batteries. Two more domes vanished... Then—somehow—nothing more. Evidently some of the attackers had been only half hearted, this time. Reprieve...
Almost four hundred people were dead. It could have been the whole Town. Then spreading disaster. All Nelsen's friends were okay. The Posts called in—okay, too. Nelsen waited three days. He wanted to help defend, if the attack was renewed. But now the U.N.S.F. was concentrating in the vicinity. For a while, things would be quiet, Out Here. Just the same, he [p. 119] felt kind of fed up. He felt as if the end of everything he knew had crept inevitably a little closer.
He beamed Mars—the Survey Station. He contacted Nance. He had known that she should have arrived already. He was relieved. He knew what the region between here and there could be like when there was trouble.
"It's me—Frank Nelsen—Nance," he said into his helmet-phone, as he stood beyond the outskirts of the Town, on the barren, glittering surface of Pallas. "I'm still wearing the sweater. Stay where you are. I've never been on Mars, either. But I'll be there, soon..."
His old uncertainties about talking to her evaporated now that he was doing it.
"For Pete's sake—Frank!" he heard her laugh happily, still sounding like the neighbor kid. "Gosh, it's good to hear you!"
He left for Post One, soon after that. Nowadays, it was almost a miniature of the ever more magnificent—if insecure—Pallastown. He kept thinking angrily of Art Kuzak, getting a little overstuffed, it seemed. The hunkie kid, the ex-football player who had become a big commercial and industrial baron of the Belt. Easy living. Cuties around. And poor twin Joe—just another stooge...
Nelsen went into the office, his fists clenched overdramatically. "I'm taking a leave, Art—maybe a long one," he said.
Art Kuzak stared at him. "You damned, independent bums—you, too, Nelsen!" he began to growl. But when he saw Nelsen's jaw harden, he got the point, and grinned, instead. "Okay, Frank. Nobody's indispensible. I might do the same when you come back—who knows...?"
Frank Nelsen joined a KRNH bubb convoy—Earthbound, but also passing fairly close to Mars—within a few hours.