One by one, in silence, they crossed the none-too-stable plank, helped by the fisherman and the young woman. Each person vanished into the block. When his family's turn came, Arthur went first, then helped Francine lift Marty across, and grasped her hand firmly as she lurched over.

"Oh, Lord," Francine said in a trembling voice as they descended the steep, narrow spiral staircase.

"Be brave, Mom," Marty encouraged. He smiled at Arthur, walking before him, their heads almost level.

After descending some thirty feet, they stepped through a half-oval entrance into a circular room with three doorways clustered on the opposite side. The walls were peach yellow and the lighting was even and warm, soothing. When all twenty stood in the room, the young woman joined them. The fisherman and other crew members did not. The half-oval hatch slid shut quietly behind her. A low moan rose from several in the room, and one man about ten years younger than Arthur sank to his knees, hands clasped in prayer.

"We're inside a spaceship," the young woman said. "We have quarters farther down. In a little while, maybe a couple of hours, we'll be leaving the Earth. Some of you know this already. The rest of you should be patient, and please don't be afraid."

Arthur clasped his wife's and son's hands and closed his eyes, not knowing whether he was terrified, or exalted, or already in mourning. If they were aboard a spaceship, and all the work he and the others in the network had done was coming to fruition, then the Earth would soon die.

His family might survive. Yet they would never again breathe the fresh cold sea air or stand in the open beneath the sun. Faces passed before him, behind his eyelids: relatives, friends, colleagues. Harry, when he had been healthy. Arthur thought of Ithaca Feinman and wondered whether she would be aboard an ark. Probably not. There were so few spaces available, fewer still now that the ships in Charleston and Seattle had been destroyed. A breeding population, little more.

And all the rest . . .

The younger man prayed out loud, fervent, face screwed up in an agony of concentration. Arthur could very easily have joined him.

Chapter 67

67

A loose group of ten took to the Four Mile Trail in the early morning, Edward and Betsy among them. They hiked through the shadows of Douglas fir and Ponderosa pine, pine pitch tartly scenting the still morning air. The climb was relatively mild at first, rising gradually to the vigorous Sentinel Creek ford some two hundred feet above the valley floor.

By eleven they were on the steep ascending trail cut into the granite facade to the west of Sentinel Rock.

Edward paused to sit and take a breather, and to admire Betsy in her climbing shorts.

"They used to charge to climb this," Betsy said, propping one well-made leg against a ledge to retie her hiking boot.