Three exhausting trips later, he sat among the bodies of his friends, listening with joy to their returning quiver of breath and life. Zina was the first to open her eyes. She seemed startled to find she was no longer on the slab, and then joyous when her glance fell upon his eager face. "We've done it!" she sighed. "We came through!" She tried to sit up, then lay down heavily. "Rik--I'm so weak...." "We need food, all of us," he said. "I'm weak myself." He arose from his crouch at her side and stared down the tunnel to the outer world. "I don't know what it's like out there," he said. "There may be no food at all. If the War was as devastating as predicted, it may be barren rock, burning sun and overall death." "How long--?" Zina began, and then her eyes fell upon the time-rotted hulk of the pump and she stopped, her face going pale. "As long as that!" she whispered. "Oh, Rik! Do you think--?" "I'll know when I've looked," he said. Their eyes met for a long, silent moment, then he turned and started up the tunnel. Three hundred strides brought him to the barrier, the thinly perforated shield of rock that had been left intact to hide the location of the vaults from their enemies. Rik put his shoulder to the shell. It cracked and fell away as he'd thought it would, with weather and erosion having weakened it for centuries. Bright yellow moonlight lay all about the land outside. Incredibly fine sand was everywhere, but a smell of fresh water and green growing things was mingled with the night air. The region had not been desert when the vaults were constructed. The War had left its mark of devastation here, Rik saw, looking in vain for a trace of the magnificent towered city that had once been just beyond this spot. He shook off his dismay and set himself to the task for which he'd emerged. The animals had to be alive, yet, or they were doomed. He'd always regretted the haste in their preparations that had precluded preparing survival vaults for the food animals. The best they'd been able to do, before the Day of Devastation, was herd the stupid beasts into caves and pile the entrances with loose rock, hoping the animals would dig themselves out only after the worst fury of the War had passed.... Rik threw off the bitter memory, abruptly, as his ears detected a tiny buzz of sound. He dropped to the ground and lay still, watching to see what sort of beast would appear. It sounded larger than the animals he remembered. "I must be near a waterhole," he reasoned. "There's a pathway here, made by many animals passing this way...." he mused, studying the narrow, flattened track that he'd spotted in the night-chilled sand. Then he saw something coming slowly up the trail, a thing much larger than the animals he remembered.