here they are being cared for. The dead, both
theirs and ours, have been burned and their ashes buried."

"Do what I tell you!" Ken implored.

With bewilderment and fear on her face, Maria stood back from the bed
and looked at Ken's troubled face. Then quietly she stole from the room
and shut the door behind her.

* * * * *

He had been overworking himself for weeks, Dr. Adams was saying, and had
been living on a poor diet that would scarcely keep a medium-sized pup
going.

"Then you had a shock, the kind of shock that shakes a man to his very
roots. Now you're on your way up again."

Ken glanced about the room. It seemed normal now and there was only a
great emptiness within him to replace the frantic urgency he
remembered.

"What you're trying to say, Doc, is that I went off my rocker for a
while."

Dr. Adams smiled. "If you want to put it that way. However, you're fine
now."

Ken stared at the ceiling for a few moments. "Will you still say so if I
ask again about Tom Doyle?"

"What do you want to know?"

"Was he found?"

"No. Maria actually tried to find him for you. I'm afraid your Tom Doyle
was among the dead."

"I killed him."

"We killed a lot of them--and they killed a lot of our people."

"How did it end?" asked Ken. "I remember the darkness and just wandering
around the streets shooting, but I don't know what I hit or where I
went."

"That's the way it ended," said Dr. Adams. "House-to-house street
fighting, and we won. Don't ask me how. You were in a sector that was
cut off almost as soon as you entered it. Even where communication was
maintained things were nearly as chaotic.

"Johnson says it was just plain, dumb luck. Hilliard says he doesn't
think it really happened. Dr. Aylesworth calls it a miracle, a gift and
a blessing that shows we're meant to survive. Most of the rest of us are
willing to look at it his way."

"I could do something for Tom Doyle," Ken said finally. "He was a decent
guy. They all were, once. I could find his wife and children."

The doctor shook his head. "All who are left of that group of nomads are
going to die. We've got to let them die, just as we let the people in
Chicago and Berkeley and ten thousand other towns die. We have no more
power to save Tom Doyle's family than we had to save them."

"We're taking care of the nomad wounded! We could do as much for just
one woman and two kids!"

"We're helping the wounded unti