os--and
there he'd see an actual change in the coastline, I'm told, where three
of the biggest stockpiles of fusionables let go and opened Death Valley
to the sea--so that Los Alamos is closer to being a port. Centrally he'd
find Porter County and Manteno Asylum surprisingly close together near
the Great Lakes, which are tilted and spilled out a bit toward the
southwest with the big quake. South-centrally: Ouachita Parish inching
up the Mississippi from old Louisiana under the cruel urging of the
Fisher Sheriffs.

Those he'd find and a few, a very few other places, including a couple I
suppose I haven't heard of. Practically all of them would surprise
him--no one can predict what scraps of a blasted nation are going to
hang onto a shred of organization and ruthlessly maintain it and very
slowly and very jealously extend it.

But biggest of all, occupying practically all the map, reducing all
those swollen localities I've mentioned back to tiny blobs, bounding
most of America and thrusting its jetty pseudopods everywhere, he'd see
the great inkblot of the Deathlands. I don't know how else than by an
area of solid, absolutely unrelieved black you'd represent the
Deathlands with its multicolored radioactive dusts and its skimpy
freightage of lonely Deathlanders, each bound on his murderous, utterly
pointless, but utterly absorbing business--an area where names like
Nowhere, It, Anywhere, and the Place are the most natural thing in the
world when a few of us decide to try to pad down together for a few
nervous months or weeks.

As I say, I was somewhere in the Deathlands near Manteno Asylum.

* * * * *

The girl and me were getting closer now, well within pistol or dart
range though beyond any but the most expert or lucky knife throw. She
wore boots and a weathered long-sleeved shirt and jeans. The black
topping was hair, piled high in an elaborate coiffure that was held in
place by twisted shavings of bright metal. A fine bug-trap, I told
myself.

In her left hand, which was closest to me, she carried a dart gun,
pointed away from me, across her body. It was the kind of potent tiny
crossbow you can't easily tell whether the spring is loaded. Back around
on her left hip a small leather satchel was strapped to her belt. Also
on the same side were two sheathed knives, one of which was an
oddity--it had no handle, just the bare tang. For nothing but throwing,
I guessed.

I let my own le