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."

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 ...