ipped, 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, some time, 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." He 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. That was about the way Loudons
thought of things; he couldn't psychoanalyze them.

He gestured with his pipe toward the nuclear-electric conversion unit,
between the control-cabin and the living quarters in the rear of the
box-car-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,
with its red and green and blue and yellow patchwork of van