rius or Jupiter.

The hot smoky light was turning from the amber of midday to the bloody
bronze of evening.

The line of towers I was following showed the faintest spread in the
direction of their canting--they must have been only a few miles from
blast center. As I passed each one I could see where the metal on the
blast side had been eroded--vaporized by the original blast, mostly
smoothly, but with welts and pustules where the metal had merely melted
and run. I supposed the lines the towers carried had all been vaporized
too, but with the haze I couldn't be sure, though I did see three dark
blobs up there that might be vultures perching.

From the drift around the foot of the nearest tower a human skull peered
whitely. That is rather unusual. Years later now you still see more dead
bodies with the meat on them than skeletons. Intense radiation has
killed their bacteria and preserved them indefinitely from decay, just
like the packaged meat in the last advertisements. In fact such bodies
are one of the signs of a really hot drift--you avoid them. The vultures
pass up such poisonously hot carrion too--they've learned their lesson.

Ahead some big gas tanks began to loom up, like deformed battleships and
flat-tops in a smoke screen, their prows being the juncture of the
natural curve of the off-blast side with the massive concavity of the
on-blast side.

None of the three other buggers and me had had too clear an idea of
where Nowhere had been--hence, in part, the name--but I knew in a
general way that I was somewhere in the Deathlands between Porter County
and Ouachita Parish, probably much nearer the former.

* * * * *

It's a real mixed-up America we've got these days, you know, with just
the faintest trickle of a sense of identity left, like a guy in the
paddedest cell in the most locked up ward in the whole loony bin. If a
time traveler from mid Twentieth Century hopped forward to it across the
few intervening years and looked at a map of it, if anybody has a map of
it, he'd think that the map had run--that it had got some sort of
disease that had swollen a few tiny parts beyond all bounds, paper
tumors, while most of the other parts, the parts he remembered carrying
names in such big print and showing such bold colors, had shrunk to
nothingness.

To the east he'd see Atlantic Highlands and Savannah Fortress. To the
west, Walla Walla Territory, Pacific Palisades, and Los Alam