“What? Really! What a question!” But then Margie shook her head.

“Sorry, I’m just tired. I should have remembered you aren’t.” And she grinned and winked at both Dalehouse and Ana; but when they picked up packs again Nan’s load was changed to water flasks, and limping old Marguerite Moseler was carrying the fuel rods.

Margie looked terrible, and at every stop she seemed to look worse. Her plumpness was long gone. The bone structure of her face showed for the first time in years, and her voice was a rasp. More than that, her complexion was awful. When the Krinpit had buried her for two hours, its molting juices overrode her defenses. A day later she had broken out in great purplish blotches and a skin discoloration like sunburn. She said it did not hurt; there, too, Dalehouse thought she lied.

But he thought she was telling the truth about one very important thing, and perhaps that was the reason he could not repress a feeling of cheer. The bomb they were carrying would not be used.

He had been the one to propose it, and she had accepted the idea at once. “Of course,” she said. “I don’t want to destroy their camp. I want it, all of it — not only for us, but for the future of the human race on Jem. The bomb’s best use is as a threat, and that’s what we’ll use it for.”

He said as much to Ana at their last halt before coming in sight of the Greasy base. “She’s planning for future generations. At least she thinks it’s worth keeping your chromosomes intact.”

“Of course,” said Ana, surprised. “I have that confidence too.” And so, Danny Dalehouse was discovering, did he. Bad as things were, he had hope. It carried him through that last belly-crawl, three hundred meters in the drenching rain, into the muddy cave that was their point of entrance for the burrower tunnels under the Greasy base. It sustained him while Major Vandemeer and Kris Kristianides painfully and gingerly assembled the parts of the detonator and fitted the fuel rods into it. It survived after Margie and Vandemeer and two others wriggled their way into the abandoned courses and disappeared from sight. The part of his life, of all their lives, that they were living through at that moment was misery and fear. Maybe worse than that, it was self-reproach; they were doing something that Dalehouse could not think of as noble or even tolerable. It was a holdup. Armed robbery. No better than a mugging. But it would be over. And a better time would come! And that hope kept him going for two full hours after Margie and the others had crawled away. Until Kris Kristianides, looking scared and harried, checked her watch and said, “That’s it. From now on, everybody stay inside. Face the wall. Hands over your eyes. When the fireball comes, don’t look up. Wait ten minutes at least. I’ve got goggles. I’ll tell you when you—”

Then they drowned her out, Dalehouse first and loudest. “She’s going to do it! But she promised—”

“Shit, Dalehouse, she couldn’t keep that promise! The Greasies would think it was a bluff. She’s going to take out their arms and food just like we planned, and then we’ll move in and wipe them up.”

“What insanity!” cried Ana. “There’ll be nothing there! The fallout will kill us if we go into the camp.”

“Maybe. I’ve got a counter; we’ll check everything out. The important thing’s the planes. If we get them we can get to their base on Farside.” She hesitated. She had been carefully rehearsed in all this and had carried the secret with her for more than a day. But she had dreaded this moment. If it had not been for her burns, she would have been in the warrens with the colonel and the major, and a lot happier there than she was here. “Anyway,” she finished, “there’s nothing we can do about it now. She’ll blow the bomb in the next ten minutes. Get your faces down!”

And then, at last, hope was dead.

For the Brood Mother, too, all hope was gone. Blind and alone she moved slowly down through the tunnels to the only place left for her to be.

The thirty-meter level was for pups and outcasts. It was a place to play growing-up games or, at the end of all games, a place to die. Mother dr’Shee had never been there before. She had been a biddable pup, trained early to responsibility. As a tiny thing she had found it tingly-thrilling to listen to the stories of the half-growns, shivering in delight as she groped for the teat in her nurse’s sheltering silk. But she had never explored the adventurous levels for herself. Not once. She had known that the time would come soon enough when, at the end of her life, she would drag herself down to see those old, unvisited levels and die.

In that she had been partly wrong. It was time to die, and she was there. But she could not see.

With dignity the Brood Mother raised her forebody to its fullest stretch and called, “Is anyone near?”

There was no reply. No sound. No scent except the stale, spoiled smell of elders long dead. She tried again, not because she had any hope of being answered, but for the sake of being methodical. “Person or pup, can anyone hear my voice?”

Nothing. If there had been an answer, it could only have been one of the wild young males who roamed the upper corridors, seeking only to kill. But there was not even that.

So another of her senses had become useless to her. Hearing meant nothing when there was nothing to hear.

It was a pity she was blind, but she bore no malice toward the Two-Legs who had burned out her eyes with their stroboscopic lights. She had in any case revenged herself upon a number of them in advance — for poisoning her tunnels, for abducting her young, for perverting the brood into new and vile practices. Most of all for coming to disturb her life in the first place. She had fought against it all, against the Two-Legs and sometimes against members of her own brood turned against her by the new ways of the Two-Legs. And now the tunnels were empty, and she was blind. Tssheee! It would have been less — less final to be here and alone if she could have seen at least an occasional phosphorescent glimmer of fungus or decay. What was left of her senses? Taste no longer mattered. There was little to eat. Smell was unrewarding, with neither males nor pups to nuzzle. She could still feel the powdery dust floor beneath her, the curving wall at her side. Dr’Shee took comfort from being tightly enclosed, as she had been through all the happiest parts of her life…

Which was now over.

She stretched and sighed a feline, purring sound of despair. She was beginning to be very hungry. The Two-Legs had ruined most of the food stores when they poisoned the tunnels to get at her and her few surviving allies. But the tunnels stretched ten kilometers in all directions. Somewhere there would be something, in this immense engineered warren that had been her world. She did not seriously think of seeking it. A Brood Mother did not debase herself to prolong a life that was over.

Woomf -

The tunnel around her moved. It was not a shake or a tremor, but a deliberate and almost peristaltic movement. Mother di’Shee had never before experienced such a thing. Burrows sometimes crumbled, Krinpit invaded them, the rains might wash through a roof. But for all the earth to move? Such a thing could not happen! For the Brood Mother such an event was exactly as disquieting as it would have been for a fish to scull its tail and yet not move, or for a human being to feel the air about him turn glassy and shatter.

And then, from thirty meters above and more than a kilometer away, she heard the sound that followed. It was more than a sound; it was a pressure in the air that stung her ears and left them filled with a distant, discordant chatter, like the peeping of a hungry litter. But there were no pups to cry for her, ever again.