"But Mercedes?"
"She's gone! We can't help Mercedes now. The others! Hurry!"
They ran through the doorway back across the carpeted foyer, halting at the street.
Four little mounds of clothes met their eyes.
Saxon could feel his stomach knot inside himself. He felt the clothes. They were still warm from contact with the men's bodies. He stirred the brief red kilt that Clo-Javel had been wearing, saw with a macabre flash of humor that where Mercedes' underthings had been eminently practical, Clo-Javel didn't wear any at all.
Ileth suppressed a scream. "The helicopter! Look! It's gone, too!" Saxon glanced up in consternation.
The square was empty. The twin suns riding high in the sky beat down on bare plastic blocks where the helicopter had stood.
"We're hiking back to the ship—now," Saxon said to the frightened girl.
"But it's twenty-five kilometers."
"So it's twenty-five kilometers. We can average four an hour or better. That's six hours. How many more hours of daylight have we?"