"What for? For books to feed the soul of Phoenix! I tell you, our civilization will not repeat the mistakes of this one!" She shrugged. "So okay. It ain't far from where I live, anyway." All the way down the street she told him how glad she was to be going away with him, and all down another street where no elms were, only sidewalks with broken glass on them. They walked past doorless apartments, gutted stores, and rusting, overturned cars. The scuffing of their shoes mingled with the stupid cooing of pigeons and the scuttling of rats. They found no books in the library, only a skeleton with a high-heeled shoe on its left foot. As they walked down the steps the Earth Mother said, "I guess they burned them when it got cold." "There were other things to burn," he said. In her apartment she packed two suitcases while he searched the other apartments for books. He found about a dozen paperbacks, Westerns and detectives, which he kicked into a corner. When he went back to her apartment she was pounding on the lid of a suitcase. He said, "Well, don't stand there smirking. Pick them up and we'll be off." Hesitating, she said, "But I don't even know your name. We ought to know each other's names. Mine's Darlene." "Gad, yes, it would be." "But what's yours?" she said, the suitcases banging against the steps. "Odysseus. Odysseus, the wanderer." "I get it. You're kidding." They walked half a block down the middle of the street that was shadowed now by big late-summer clouds. With pride in his voice he said, "My name is C. Herbert Markel, the third." She had no answer to that. As they reached the intersection leading to the street where he had left his car, he stopped abruptly. From behind them came a metallic growling that grew to an outrageous sputtering and roaring. They turned and saw a man on a motorcycle weaving spectacularly down the street, in and out between the debris. He cornered past a rusting old Chevrolet, circled, and curved to a stop a few yards away. The man leaned the motorcycle on its
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