They had to be circ.u.mspect about this activity, because the soldiers posted to guard the cube kept trying to get friendly and paying them unwanted, unannounced visits. They were bored out of their skulls guarding the cube in the deserted neighborhood. They told Samir that there were three other cubes around Mumbai: they had all caused panic among nearby residents, prompting them to flee.

They also said that the army had received orders to take all the items the cube contained, and deposit them in an army warehouse under permanent guard. It was true: three days after his first visit, the sergeant returned leading half a dozen soldiers escorting an unhappy band of rickshaw drivers. Each rickshaw could only take a couple of hundred items at a time. It looked as if unloading the contents of the cube would be a long process.

In the meantime, the sergeant supervised Samir and Rani as they removed their implants, and turned over to him the implant kits, hiber beds, and scrolls that they had kept in their room. They had made sure their second selves in the New World would die right next to the arrival spot. They wanted to retrieve their clothes from the bodies once they"d replicated themselves again in the New World.

Their food ran out. The sergeant graciously gave them a box full of army rations. After taking a close look at the old, stained mattress they were sleeping on, he also gave them back a couple of the silvery mats called hiber beds. He swore them to silence about this. He also told them that the cube would disappear once all the its items were taken; that was what had happened to the two other cubes in Mumbai area.

"And once the cube is gone, everyone will come back. The shops will reopen and everything will be normal once more," he"d said, and patted his hip holster as if the gun there was a guarantee of normalcy.

It was another two days - nearly three weeks in the New World! - before the cube disappeared. Rani and Samir were just about to sit down to their evening meal when they heard excited shouts from the soldiers that were loading the rickshaws with items taken from the cube.

They got up and rushed outside. The cube was gone, and there was no sign that it had ever existed - except for the implant kits and hiber beds piled high on the rickshaws.

The sergeant and his soldiers left soon afterwards. Samir went to the logistics center where he and Rani had worked before the catastrophe. Both the yard and the office were empty. The watchman was the only person he had encountered, and knew nothing of what had become of the other employees or, for that matter, Mr. Go himself.

Rani and Samir had no money left, and enough army rations to see them through a couple more days, not more. That very night, they implanted themselves again, making sure the shining blue dots were well hidden under their hair.

Rani wept as they undressed the bodies of their alter egos in the New World. Then they hauled them out into the creek, and let them sink. They didn"t have the time or tools for a proper burial.

Fortunately, the small herd of goats they had acquired in the New World hadn"t run away. The smoked meat that they kept as emergency rations was still there, as were all of their primitive tools, and a pile of tiger rock stones that they"d been collecting in their settlement.

They instantly set about building a launch platform for transporting goods to Earth. It had to be big enough to contain whatever they wanted to send. The floor was easy, but the walls, which had to be higher than anything they wanted to send, were a problem. They had to resort to gluing the stones together with the viscous mud from the sh.o.r.e of the creek.

Their first transport consisted of a single mango. It appeared on Earth right on top of the mattress they slept on! They did not want to disa.s.semble the launch platform and move it elsewhere; they moved the mattress instead.

That first night, they sent nearly thirty mangoes back to their home on Earth. Come morning, Rani packed them in a bag and took them to the nearest open-air market.

There were just a couple of other traders present, and both didn"t have any food for sale. There weren"t many buyers either, and they all mobbed Rani when they saw she had come to sell fruit. They actually bid against each other to buy the mangoes as if they were at an auction! Rani quickly sold all the fruit she had. She"d made enough money to buy cooking oil and flour and rice.

It turned out to be impossible. All the shops she saw were still closed. However, she found a small restaurant that was open for business. It was charging exorbitant prices, but there was a lineup at its door anyway. After a long wait, she managed to buy two small cartons of curried rice decorated with a few slivers of onion and goat meat.

She had to call on all the willpower at her disposal not to eat any of the food when she carried it home. Samir was waiting for her, and they instantly sat down to eat.

"We must import more food from the New World," Samir said, with his mouth full. "A thousand rupees for two tiny portions of goat curry! It"s outrageous."

"I sold the mangoes at fifty rupees each," Rani said. "That was outrageous, too."

They stopped talking and focused on eating: it was the best meal they both had in a long, long, time. When Rani went out to throw out the dirty dishwater, she saw a light in one of the houses on the other side of the fields.

"The k.u.mars are back," she told Samir when she returned to their room. It didn"t make him happy.

"We"ll have to be really careful," he said darkly. "They threatened to report us when we moved in here - remember?"

" I do," said Rani. "I also remember that happened after you ran into Mr k.u.mar while on your bicycle, and knocked him down."

"He was drunk! He kept weaving from side to side and stepped into the road right in front of me."

"Well, he was still upset that you ran into him."

"He had no right to be upset."

"Does it matter?" asked Rani.

"Of course it matters. It wasn"t my fault!"

"Does it matter?" repeated Rani, with a special sweetness in her voice. That sweetness meant she was starting to get angry.

Samir heard the warning note in Rani"s voice and glowered for a while in silence. Finally, Rani said:

"I think you are right that we must import more food from the New World. We could try sending some fresh fish. They"re so easy to get now that you"ve made those spears."

It was true. A couple of New World weeks earlier, Samir had come across a bamboo grove. He broke off a couple after a lot of hammering with a heavy stone, and then split the trunks lengthwise. They quickly made themselves a dozen short, lightweight spears with very sharp points.

The bamboo spears turned out to be the ideal tool for catching fish. They would stand in the water, and sprinkle chaff on its surface. Almost immediately a fish would appear, looking for something to eat. After a bit of practice, they managed to hit them almost half the time. Once, it took Samir just a few minutes to get five.

The fish were so plentiful that they could sometimes feel them b.u.mp against their legs when they stepped into the creek. There was no danger of a fish shortage.

Samir stopped glowering when he heard that Rani agreed with him about the food. Also, he was quite proud of the bamboo spears he"d made. He said:

"All right. Tell your Rani to get started with the fish. I"ll send Samir further down the coast, past the spot where you found air potatoes. We need to explore a little more. We could find something more valuable than mangoes and fish."

"Such as what?"

Samir shrugged.

"I"ll tell you when I find it," he said.

"Maybe you won"t find anything," said Rani.

Samir threw her an offended look.

"I"ll find something," he said in a hard voice, "And it will be something bigger and better than anything we"ve discovered so far."

As they found out very shortly, he was right.

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