against rocky headlands, hissing tidally and slowly, in an age-long process, pulverizing the rock. The sea far off, a clean sea, not sea-smelling sea, a sea whose waters must evaporate countless times and be borne up over the naked rocks in vapor and clouds and come down in pelting, endless rain and rush across the rock, frothing and steaming—a sea which must do this countless times in the eons to come, and would do it, to bring salinity to its own waters.

"It kind of scares the hell out of you, doesn't it?" Adam Slade said. He was a big man with a thick neck and heavy, sleepy-looking eyes and a blue beard-shadow on his stubborn jaw. He said those words as he climbed out of the prison tank with Marcia Lawrence. The tank's metal was still warm from over-heated travel.

"I didn't think anything would scare you," Marcia Lawrence said. She had conquered her initial terror in the five hours of clanking tank flight from the prison. They had come a great many miles from the prison dome, paralleling the edge of the saltless sea and then finally, when their fuel was almost gone, clanking and rattling down toward the sea. She was a newspaperwoman, that above all now. She must not be afraid. She had a story here. A story.

"Get moving," Adam Slade said. "I got nothing against you, lady," he told her for the tenth time. "But you try anything, you're dead. You get that? I got nothing to lose. One time is all they can kill me. But first they got to find me, but they won't be able to take me as long as you're here. Just stay meek and you'll stay alive."

"How long do you think you can hold out?" Marcia Lawrence asked practically. They had begun to walk away from the now useless tank. Adam Slade was carrying the dead guard's M-gun in the crook of his bent left arm and walking with long, easy, ground-consuming strides. Marcia almost had to run to keep up with him as they went down a stretch of slightly sloping black rock toward the steaming, hissing, pounding, roaring, exploding surf.

Slade smiled. "Plenty of water," he said.

"But no food, Mr. Slade. There is absolutely no food on earth now and no possible way of getting food unless you want to stick around for a few million years."

"You think I came out here without a plan?" Slade asked with some hostility.

"I don't know. You were desperate."

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