"They never had a chance." She wiped her eyes with her sleeve, her voice faltering. "It was a crowd of men, maybe ten of them, came across the land about eight o'clock one night. They shot your Dad when he walked out on the porch. Shot him through the head. Then they came in the house and beat Johnny to death. Oh, Matt--it was horrible. They shot the cow and cooked her over an open fire. You should have seen them--they were starving, they were like wild men, calling us land-grabbers and food-hoarders. I sneaked out the back way when they weren't looking and ran down to the road to Escondido and found Harry Davis. He and a bunch of the boys had stolen some gas and were planning to drive over the mountains to join you here. They sent word around to the other farmers, and then they brought me along--" Matt stood numbly, staring at the girl's face. "Mary, you shouldn't have come here, you should have gone to the folks in town--they would have helped you, taken care of you--" The girl whirled on him, her eyes pleading. "Oh, Matt, come away from here, come out of this horrible fight and come home! What does it matter if there's a Rocket out here--we can't eat Rockets, we need food. The City folks are coming out in hordes. There was a man said the water supply wasn't going to last to the north, that the cars were lined up three deep from the coast clear out to Salt-Lake, bumper to bumper, a week ago. They stole gasoline from the refineries, before they blew them up. They're all heading east and north--oh, Matt, take me home--" He stood there in the dim light of the flashlight, and then knelt down beside her, holding her against him. "I can't, Mary. Not yet," he said softly. "The world we knew before was crazy. This Rocket was crazy--this being afraid of war, and fighting to out-do the rest of the world was crazy, somehow--" She stared at him. "But everybody knew that if we didn't get there first, the others would. And there would have been a horrible war, the end of everything--" "Everyone was so busy being afraid of the war that they couldn't see what was happening to the world around them. They didn't see that something worse than a war could happen until it was too late. They figured the oil would last another hundred years, and it only lasted twenty. They thought they could go on like this forever--" He stared blankly out at the darkness, his eyes hollow. "It was that Rocket that did it. That's why we have to destroy it." "Matt, if we don't go now we won't have any home left to go to. Those people don't know how to farm, they'll kill all the animals, and strip the trees and fields, and burn all the buildings--"