ished
political divisions, and the transparent overlay on which they had
plotted their course. The red line started at Fort Ridgeway, in what
had once been Arizona It angled east by a little north, to Colony
Three, in northern Arkansas; then sharply northeast to St. Louis and
its lifeless ruins; then Chicago and Gary, where little bands of Stone
Age reversions stalked and fought and ate each other; Detroit, where
things that had completely forgotten that 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 the 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 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 on 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