"They'll track you down," Barry said slowly. "They think you're a menace, they won't rest until they find you."

"They can't find us," Mark said. "The ones who could are in Philadelphia. By the time they get back there won't be any signs of us anywhere."

"Have you thought what it will be like?" Barry cried, suddenly losing the rigid control he had achieved. "They'll fear you and hate you! It isn't fair to make them all suffer. And they'll come to hate you for it. They'll die out there! One by one, and each one will make the survivors hate more. In the end you'll all die mean and miserable deaths.

Mark shook his head. "If we don't make it," he said, "there won't be anyone at all left on earth. The pyramid is tilting. The pressure from the great white wall is bearing down on it, and it cannot stand."

"And if you make it, you'll sink back into savagery. It will be a thousand years, five thousand, before a man can climb out of the pit you're digging him. They'll be animals!"

"And you'll be dead." Mark glanced swiftly about the room, then hurried to the door. He paused there and looked at Barry steadily. "You won't understand this. No one's alive but me who could understand it. I love you, Barry. You're strange to me, alien, not human. All of you are. But I didn't destroy them when I could have and wanted to because I loved you. Good-bye, Barry."

For a moment they continued to look at each other, and then Mark turned and ran lightly down the stairs. Behind him he heard the sound of something breaking, but he didn't stop. He left by the back door, and was through the trees and into the field when Andrew and his companions drew near. Mark stopped and listened.

"He's still up there," someone said. "I can see him."

Barry had broken the boards on the window so he could be seen. He was buying time for him, Mark realized, and keeping low, he began to run toward the river.

"That's what it was all for," Barry whispered again, and now he addressed himself to the walnut head that was Molly. He held the head between his hands and sat down at the exposed window with the lamp behind him. "That's what it was all for," he said one more time, and he wondered if Molly had always been smiling. He didn't look up when flames started to crackle through the house, but he held the carved head tighter against his chest as if to protect it.