* * * * *
I
Altamont cast a quick, routine glance at the instrument panels
and then looked down through the transparent nose of the
helicopter at the yellow-brown river five hundred feet below.
Next he scraped the last morsel from his plate and ate it.
"What did you make this out of, Jim?" he asked. "I hope you kept
notes while you were concocting it. It's good."
"The two smoked pork chops left over from yesterday evening,"
Loudons said, "and that bowl of rice that's been taking up space
in the refrigerator the last couple of days, together with a
little egg powder and some milk. I ground the chops up and mixed
them with the rice and other stuff. Then added some bacon, to
make grease to fry it in."
Altamont chuckled. That was Loudons, all right: he could take a
few left-overs, mess them together, pop them in the skillet, and
have a meal that would turn the chef back at the Fort green with
envy. He filled his cup and offered the pot.
"Caffchoc?" he asked.
Loudons held his cup out to be filled, blew on it, sipped, and
then hunted on the ledge under the desk for the butt of the cigar
he had half-smoked the evening before.
"Did you ever drink coffee, Monty?" the socio-psychologist asked,
getting the cigar drawing to his taste.
"Coffee? No. I've read about it, of course. We'll have to
organize an expedition to Brazil, sometime, to get seeds and try
raising some."
Loudons blew a smoke ring toward the rear of the cabin.
"A much overrated beverage," he replied. "We found some, once,
when I was on that expedition into Idaho, in what must have been
the stockroom of a hotel. Vacuum-packed in moisture-proof
containers, and free from radioactivity. It wasn't nearly as good
as caffchoc.
"But then, I suppose, a pre-bustup coffee drinker couldn't
stomach this stuff we're drinking."
Loudons looked forward, up the river they were following. "Get
anything on the radio?" he asked. "I noticed you took us up to
about ten thousand, while I was shaving."
Altamont got out his pipe and tobacco pouch, filling the former
slowly and carefully.
"Not a whisper. I tried Colony Three, in the Ozarks, and I tried
to call in that tribe of workers in Louisiana. I couldn't get
either."
"Maybe if we tried to get a little more power on the set...."
That was Loudons, too, Altamont thought. There wasn't a better
man at the Fort, when it came to dealing with people. But
confront him with a problem about things and he was lost.
That was one of the reasons why he and the stocky, phlegmatic social
scientist made such a good team, he thought. As far as he, himself,
was concerned, people were just a mysterious, exasperatingly
unpredictable order of things which were subject to no known natural
laws.
And Loudons thought the same thing about machines: he couldn't
psychoanalyze them.
Altamont gestured with his pipe toward the nuclear-electric
conversion unit, between the control-cabin and the living
quarters in the rear of the boxcar-sized helicopter.
"We have enough power back there to keep this windmill in the air
twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a
year, for the next fifteen years," he said. "We just don't have
enough radio. If I'd step up the power on this set any more, it'd
burn out before I could say, 'Altamont calling Fort Ridgeway.'"
"How far are we from Pittsburgh now?" Loudons wanted to know.
Altamont looked across the cabin at the big map of the United
States as they had been, the red and green and blue and yellow
patchwork of vanished political divisions. The colors gleamed
through the transparent overlay on which this voyage of
re-discovery was plotted.
The red line of their journey started at Fort Ridgeway, in what
had been Arizona. It angled east by a little north, to Colony
Three, in northern Arkansas ... sharply northeast to St. Louis
and its lifeless ruins ... then to Chicago and Gary, where little
bands of Stone Age reversions stalked and fought and ate each
other ... Detroit, where things that had completely forgotten
they were human emerged from their burrows only at night ...
Cleveland, where a couple of cobalt bombs must have landed in the
lake and drenched everything with radioactivity that still
lingered after two centuries ... Akron, where vegetation was only
beginning to break through the glassy slag ... Cincinnati, where
they had last stopped....
"How's the leg this morning, Jim?" he asked.
"Little stiff. Doesn't hurt much, though."
"Why, we're about fifty miles, as we follow that river, and
that's relatively straight." He looked down through the
transparent nose of the copter at a town, now choked with trees
that grew among the tumbled walls. "I think that's Aliquippa."
Loudons looked and shrugged, then looked again and pointed.
"There's a bear. Just ducked into that church or movie theater or
whatever. I wonder what he thinks we are."
Altamont puffed slowly at his pipe. "I wonder if we're going to
find anything at all in Pittsburgh."
"You mean people, as distinct from those biped beasts we've found
so far? I doubt it," Loudons replied, finishing his caffchoc and
wiping his mustache with the back of his hand. "I think the whole
eastern half of the country is nothing but forest like this, and
the highest type of life is just about three cuts below Homo
Neanderthalensis, almost impossible to contact, and even more
impossible to educate."
"I wasn't thinking about that. I've just about given up hope of
finding anybody or even a reasonably high level of barbarism,"
Altamont said. "I was thinking about that cache of microfilmed
books that was buried at the Carnegie Library."
"If it was buried," Loudons qualified. "All we have is that
article in that two-century-old copy of Time about how the
people at the library had constructed the crypt and were
beginning the microfilming. We don't know if they ever had a
chance to get it finished, before the rockets started landing."
They passed over a dam of flotsam that had banked up at a
wrecked bridge and accumulated enough mass to resist the periodic
floods that had kept the river usually clear. Three human figures
fled across a sand-flat at one end of it and disappeared into the
woods. Two of them carried spears tipped with something that
sparkled in the sunlight, probably shards of glass.
"You know, Monty, I get nightmares, sometimes, thinking about
what things must be like in Europe," Loudons said.
Five or six wild cows went crashing through the brush below.
Altamont nodded when he saw them.
"Maybe tomorrow, we'll let down and shoot a cow," he said. "I was
looking in the freeze-locker and the fresh meat's getting a
little low. Or a wild pig, if we find a good stand of oak trees.
I could enjoy what you'd do with some acorn-fed pork."
He looked across the table. "Finished?" he asked Loudons. "Take
over, then. I'll go back and wash the dishes."
They rose, and Loudons, favoring his left leg, moved over to the
seat at the controls.
Altamont gathered up the two cups, the stainless-steel dishes,
and the knives and the forks and spoons, going up the steps over
the shielded converter and ducking his head to avoid the seat in
the forward top machine-gun turret. He washed and dried the
dishes, noting with satisfaction that the gauge of the water tank
was still reasonably high, and glanced out one of the windows.
Loudons was taking the big helicopter upstairs, for a better
view.
Now and then, among the trees, there would be a glint of glassy
slag, usually in a fairly small circle. That was to be expected:
beside the three or four H-bombs that had fallen on the
Pittsburgh area, mentioned in the transcripts of the last news to
reach the Fort from the outside, the whole district had been
pelted, more or less at random, with fission bombs.
West of the confluence of the Allegheny and the Monongahela, it
would probably be worse than this.
"Can you see Pittsburgh yet, Jim?" he called out.
"Yes, it's a mess! Worse than Gary, worse than Akron even."
"Monty! Come here! I think I have something!"
Picking up the pipe he had laid down, Altamont hurried forward,
dodging his six-foot length under the gun turret and swinging
down from the walkway over the converter.
"What is it?" he asked.
"Smoke. A lot of smoke, twenty or thirty fires at the very
least."
Loudons had shifted from Forward to Hover and was peering through
a pair of binoculars. "See that island, the long one? Across the
river from it, on the north side, toward this end. Yes, by
Einstein! And I can see cleared ground, and what I think are
houses, inside a stockade...."