Safeguard Read Online Free PDF Page A

squealed with joy. A cartoon bird—how could cartoons have birds, not just people?—flew toward the hot ball of morning in the sky, chased by a person. Sudie, Kim, and Jana crowded close.
    Li watched through the clear place in the car's sky as Baker and Ann walked toward piles of dirt and crying people. He watched for a long time. The hot ball of morning sunk down into the ground (how did it do that?) and the sky turned wonderful colors, purple and red and yellow. Baker and Ann came in and out, carrying things out with them. On one coming in, Ann touched a place on the wall and morning came inside the car's world, although not in the big world outside. The girls watched the cartoons, too absorbed to even laugh. Li looked outside.
    Figures moved in and out of houses made of blankets, some of which Ann had folded. Little bits of morning lighted the blanket houses. And by that light, as he peered out of the car with his nose pushed flat against it, Li saw her.
    "Taney!"
* * * *
    Her back ached. She had moved too much, lifted too much, grown too old for this sort of field work. For any sort of field work. But everything was done that could be done tonight. Under the capable direction of the DDR agents, Ann Lionti and Baker Tully, the wounded had been treated, the homeless housed in evac inflatables, the spring water tested and found safe. Everyone had been fed. Tomorrow the dead would be buried. Katherine looked up and saw a ghost at the window of the DDR mobile.
    No. Not possible.
    But there he was.
    Li waved his arms and Katherine, dazed, half lifted her hand before she let it drop. How ... But it didn't matter how. What mattered was that Lionti and Tully, that everyone here, that Katherine herself, were already dead.
* * * *
    The leaving door wouldn't open. It wouldn't open , no matter how Li pushed it. He cried out in frustration and shoved Sudie, who was making everything harder by pushing the door in a different direction from Li. But then he got the door open and tumbled down the square rocks made of sky material and he was with Taney, throwing his arms around her waist, Sudie and Jana and Kim right behind him. Kim started licking Taney's face, jumping up in mute excitement.
    "Taney! Taney!"
    "You found us!"
    "You lost your covering! I can touch you!"
    "Taney, the world broke and we came out! It broke!"
    "Taney! Taney!"
    "You know these kids?” Baker said behind Taney. She turned, Li and Sudie still clinging to her, and Baker said in a different voice, “Doctor—what is it?"
    "We ... they ... Kim, stop !"
    They had never heard that voice from her before. Li, startled, stepped back. But then Taney's kindness was back, although she sounded very sad.
    "Li, take the others back inside the trailer. I promise I'll come in just a little while, okay? Just everybody go inside."
    They went, of course; this was Taney . Jana and Li stared at each other. Sudie went back to watching the cartoons still showing on the screen. Kim pressed her nose against the clear sky-metal to watch Taney, mutely following her every tiny movement in the gathering dark. Li joined Kim.
    A woman ran up to Taney and Baker, waving her arms and shouting.
* * * *
    "Experiments?” Baker Tully said, bewildered and angry and, Katherine could see, terrified. As well he should be. “Bioweaponry experiments?"
    "From the very end of the war,” Katherine said. “Intelligence discovered the operation and we sent in two entire battle groups five days before the surrender."
    "And Ann—” He couldn't say it. It had been hard to pull him away from Ann Lionti's body, lying crumpled between a DDR inflatable and the ruins of an adobe house. Beside her, incongruously, lay an unbroken planter filled with carefully watered dahlias. Now Katherine and Baker stood behind the huge mobile, away from the others. She looked at his young, suddenly ravaged face, dimly lit by a rising gibbous moon, and she thought, I can't do this .
    He had courage. He got out, “How long? For