It took Vickers over thirty-five minutes to locate the door. He'd crossed the unfinished area by dead reckoning and then worked his way along the wall. He'd missed the start of the tunnel on the first pass. He hadn't been expecting it to be concealed behind anything as mundane as a sheet of corrugated tin. Vickers moved the tin to one side and shone his light into the black space. The tunnel was nothing special. It was narrow and the curved roof was just high enough to allow a man of normal height to walk without stooping. Any group of people coming down the tunnel would have to do it in single file. It was clearly intended to be easily defensible. Instinctively, Vickers ducked as he stepped inside.

Vickers saw something on the floor of the tunnel up ahead. It looked as though someone had dumped some untidily coiled electrical cable. He was sufficiently keyed up to stop and regard it suspiciously before going forward. The mess seemed harmless enough, an untidy confusion of cable ends, but Vickers couldn't quite figure out why cable off-cuts should be dumped some two hundred yards down a tunnel that had no electric wiring. It wasn't anything to make him turn back, though. Then one of the cables moved.

"Sweet Jesus Christ!"

The cables were snakes. Vickers detested snakes and knew nothing about them. He could only assume that they were nasty and probably poisonous. Vickers had no idea why they were there but he only had the haziest idea of what snakes might be capable. Presumably they had somehow gotten in from the desert. His first impulse was to unhitch the Churchill and blow the whole squirm of them away. He realized in time, though, that if he started blazing away with an autoload in such a confined space, he might, with luck, kill all the snakes and avoid being hit by ricocheting pellets but the noise would certainly destroy his hearing. His second impulse was to turn back but that would totally destroy his self-respect. What was he going to tell Fenton? There were snakes in the tunnel and he'd chickened out? He walked gingerly forward. As far as he could tell, the radiation suit was probably thick enough to stop a snakebite but he didn't want to bank his life on it.

There were just enough foot-sized spaces in among the snakes for him to walk through the living minefield without actually treading directly on one of the reptiles. This wasn't to say that one might not still take offense and sink its fangs into his ankle. He tried his first step. One snake slithered lethargically but nothing threatened him. He paused on one foot. His heart was pounding. He put his foot down for a second time. At first it seemed okay, then a snake rattled at him. Vickers wanted to jump, possibly to scream as well. Instead, he bit down on his tongue. The snake coiled back but then, instead of striking, it slipped harmlessly across his boot. One more step and he'd be past the snakes. He wanted to shut his eyes but that would hardly be very bright. He raised his foot and moved it forward. Very slowly, he put it down. Three rattlers came up. One snake struck at his boot. Its teeth sank in. Vickers felt nothing but he still leapt. The snake's teeth were hooked into the outer fabric of his boot. It jerked with him. It was only shaken free when Vickers hit the ground. To his infinite relief, it wriggled quickly away back to its companions. Vickers leaned against the wall, sweating and gasping for breath. He didn't move for a few moments, partly to let his heart stop racing and partly to see that nothing had happened to his ankle. When two minutes had passed and there was no sign of swelling or anything else amiss, he straightened up and walked on.

The tunnel ended in a steel, submarine-style bulkhead door with a large locking wheel at its center. Vickers knew that this was about as close to the moment of truth as he was going to get. He closed the faceplate of his suit and turned on the air supply. He gripped the wheel and twisted. Nothing happened. Vickers bit his lip. He couldn't believe that he could have come all this way to be stopped by a simple lock. He twisted again. There was a little give. He threw all of his strength against the wheel and grudgingly it started to turn. It was simply stiff from lack of use. After three turns the wheel refused to turn any further. Vickers pushed against the door. At first it resisted but, when Vickers put his shoulder to it, it slowly swung open. As far as he could tell he was on the underside of a small bridge or large culvert. The door was built directly into the wall. Presumably the whole structure had been designed to conceal the secret exit. The light at either end of the tunnel was blinding. His first thought was how he wished he'd brought some dark glasses. Then something caught at his throat. It was eighteen months since he'd seen the sun. He looked at the radiation counter on his wrist. It still showed green. That meant, if the thing could be trusted, that the radiation level was negligible. He wasn't quite ready, however, to open his faceplate. His watch told him, what with the snakes and the other delays, he had already used up fifty minutes of his two hours. He checked the Yasha, slung the Churchill over his shoulder and started out into the world.

IT WAS HOT as hell inside the orange suit. The radiation counter still showed green and Vickers was almost but not quite tempted to take the damn thing off. The desert looked perfectly normal. A desert is hardly the liveliest of places but the scrub appeared to be growing and a small dun-colored lizard had scuttled from under a rock. The tunnel had come out on the shallow side of the escarpment under which the bunker was built. As far as he could figure it, he was on the opposite side of the hill from where the elevator entrances had been.

The secret exit had indeed been concealed by a small bridge that took an almost overgrown dirt road across a dry creekbed. He wondered if he should follow the road or simply head up to the top of the rise. The incline wasn't all that steep but it would still be an uncomfortable climb in the overheated suit. On the other hand, the road seemed to go nowhere and come from nowhere. He would learn a great deal more from the top of the escarpment. The condition of the roads and the other structures around the bunker entrance would indicate if there had indeed been a nuclear hit in the vicinity. With a good deal of reluctance, he began to trudge up the slope. Sweat was pouring down his body. In addition to dark glasses, something else he should have brought with him was water. Inside the controlled environment of the bunker it had been all too easy to forget what it was like in the desert. Every few yards Vickers would stop. Not only to catch his breath but also to look up at the clear blue sky. After all the months in the bunker it was breathtaking. The higher he climbed, the further he could see across the immediate landscape. The drab scrub ran clear to the low blue hills at the horizon. There were still no positive signs of life but, equally, there also were no definite signs of death. For Vickers there was something euphoric in just being able to see so far after being shut in for so long. The combination of the sense of space and the fact that his suit's system was feeding something close to pure oxygen was making him lightheaded. It was thus that the sudden and totally unexpected voice hit him like a hammer blow.

"Hold it right there, buddy. Don't make a move or I'll blow you clean away."

Vickers froze. Slowly and carefully, he raised his hands. The suit had muffled his hearing and the faceplate only gave him a very limited field of vision. Whoever now had the drop on him had sneaked up on his considerable blind side. He felt like an idiot.