t was night. The city had been lost beyond the dead mounds of Earth that rolled away behind them, like a thousand ancient tombs. The ground car sat still on a crumbling road.
Looking up through the car's driving blister, they saw the stars sunk into the blue black ocean of space; saw the path of the Milky Way along which they had rushed, while they had been searching frantically for the place of salvation.
"If any one of the other couples had made it back," said Mary, "do you think they'd be with us?"
"I think they'd either be with us," he said, "or out in space again—or in prison."
She stared ahead along the beam of headlight that stabbed out into the night over the decaying road.
"How sorry are you," she said quietly, "coming with me?"
"All I know is, if I were out in space for long without you, I'd kill myself."
"Are we going to die out here, Michael?" she said, gesturing toward the wall of night that stood at the end of the headlight, "with the land?"
He turned from her, frowning, and drove the ground car forward, watching the headlights push back the darkness.
They followed the crumbling highway all night until light crept across the bald and cracked hills. The morning sun looked down upon the desolation ten feet above the horizon when the car stopped. They sat for a long time then, looking out upon the Earth's parched and inflamed skin. In the distance a wall of mountains rose like a great pile of bleached bones. Close ahead the rolling plains were motionless waves of dead Earth with a slight breeze stirring up little swirls of dust.