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it was entirely his business, and he noted now that a number of his fellow flukers had elected to remain below in their quarters, confident that those who did answer the horn would bring them back something.
    “It’s bright,” Tod murmured, blinking in the sun.
    The care ship sparkled close overhead, set against the gray sky as if hanging from an uneasy thread. Good pilot, this drop, Tod decided. He, or rather
it
, just lazily handles it, in no hurry. Tod waved at the care ship, and once more the huge horn burst out its din, making him clap his hands to his ears. Hey, a joke’s a joke, he said to himself. And then the horn ceased; the careboy had relented.
    “Wave to him to drop,” Norm Schein said to Tod. “You’ve got the wigwag.”
    “Sure,” Tod said, and began laboriously flapping the red flag, which the Martian creatures had long ago provided, back and forth, back and forth.
    A projectile slid from the underpart of the ship, tossed out stabilizers, spiraled toward the ground.
    “Sheoot,” Sam Regan said with disgust. “It is staples; they don’t have the parachute.” He turned away, not interested.
    How miserable the upstairs looked today, he thought as he surveyed the scene surrounding him. There, to the right, the uncompleted house which someone—not far from their pit—had begun to build out of lumber salvaged from Vallejo, ten miles to the north. Animals or radiation dust had gotten the builder, and so his work remained where it was; it would never be put to use. And, Sam Regan saw, an unusually heavy precipitate had formed since last he had been up here, Thursday morning or perhaps Friday; he had lost exact track. The darn dust, he thought. Just rocks, pieces of rubble, and the dust. World’s becoming a dusty object with no one to whisk it off regularly. How about you? he asked silently of the Martian careboy flying in slow circles overhead. Isn’t your technology limitless? Can’t you appear some morning with a dust rag a million miles in surface area and restore our planet to pristine newness?
    Or rather, he thought, to pristine
oldness
, the way it was in the “ol-days,” as the children call it. We’d like that. While you’re looking for something to give to us in the way of further aid, try that.
    The careboy circled once more, searching for signs of writing in the dust: a message from the flukers below. I’ll write that, Sam thought. BRING DUST RAG, RESTORE OUR CIVILIZATION. Okay, careboy?
    All at once the care ship shot off, no doubt on its way back home to its base on Luna or perhaps all the way to Mars.
    From the open fluke-pit hole, up which the three of them had come, a further head poked, a woman. Jean Regan, Sam’s wife, appeared, shielded by a bonnet against the gray, blinding sun, frowning and saying, “Anything important? Anything
new
?”
    “ ’Fraid not,” Sam said. The care parcel projectile had landed and he walked toward it, scuffing his boots in the dust. The hull of the projectile had cracked open from the impact and he could see the canisters already. It looked to be five thousand pounds of salt— might as well leave it up here so the animals wouldn’t starve, he decided. He felt despondent.
    How peculiarly anxious the careboys were. Concerned all the time that the mainstays of existence be ferried from their own planet to Earth. They must think we eat all day long, Sam thought. My God . . . the pit was filled to capacity with stored foods. But of course it had been one of the smallest public shelters in Northern California.
    “Hey,” Schein said, stooping down by the projectile and peering into the crack opened along its side. “I believe I see something we can use.” He found a rusted metal pole—once it had helped reinforce the concrete side of an ol-days public building—and poked at the projectile, stirring its release mechanism into action. The mechanism, triggered off, popped the rear half of the projectile open . . . and there lay the