Bradman grimaced at her, his agate eyes frozen in a pallid face that should have gone with red hair. The sand-blown lines in his face were cruel. "Sister, you've got a smile like a slab of concrete. Don't try it again." "You didn't _have_ to say that," Annie said quietly, closing her eyes against the winds of her anger. "You didn't have to come here," he replied. "Goodbye." "I'm not leaving," she said, still holding tight the doors of her anger. "_I_ am." He paced heavily over the sand floor and pulled back the flap of the door. "Where are you going?" Annie glanced back at the towering giant, now glowing red in the sunlight, like some huge, grotesque devil. "Into the storm cellar. Nobody lives through a Martian sandstorm." Annie ran after him. "For God's sake take me with you! You can't leave me...." "Mine's built for one," he said, and pulled the top in over him as he disappeared into the hole. Annie broke her fingernails pulling at the cover. The wind was blowing sand in her eyes. She saw blood staining the rim of her index finger. She pounded with her fists. "Let me in!" she screamed. "In the name of God!" But all she heard was the keening sand in the wind. She looked around. The devil was closer, malignant and hungry. It wanted to eat her alive. It made her angry. "I'll fight it," she screamed. "By God, I'll fight!" Five minutes, she guessed. Maybe five minutes left. She ran into the house, ripped open her suitcase. Bundles of nylon marriage clothes. She began to sob. Some were with lace. "Fight!" she shouted to herself. There was her oxygen mask. How much oxygen? Anybody's guess. It was made for maybe a few whiffs a day over a period of several months. Swell. But it wouldn't keep the sand from tearing through her eyeballs and flaying her alive. Wrap in nylon nightgowns? Ridiculous. Spacesuit? Annie went through the one-room house as fast as she could. No spacesuit. Why should he have one? Three minutes left. Sand was blowing under the hemisphere, piling up at one end and oozing out beneath. It was possible she would simply be buried. The refrigerator! That wasn't a refrigerator. Only a cabinet, loosely joined. Annie went outside, on the side where the field of lichens grew up a smooth, stone hill. The red devil was whistling at her now; a low, insinuating whistle. Something rattled faintly against one steel rib of the hemisphere. It was a shrub, about five feet tall. Annie began to laugh hysterically. Brady had protected the shrub with loving care. It was tied to the steel rib through grommetted holes in the hemisphere, and covered with its own plastic bag to shield off the wind. One minute. The red devil was shouting now, laughing with triumph. He ran his sandy fingers through her hair and blew his gritty breath in her eyes. She pulled the zipper at the bottom of the polyethylene bag that covered the shrub and yanked the bag off. It was heavy, almost oily plastic, slippery and pliant.