sharply northeast to St. Louis
and its lifeless ruins ... then to Chicago and Gary, where little
bands of Stone Age reversions stalked and fought and ate each
other ... Detroit, where things that had completely forgotten
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 that 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 the 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 with 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
wrecked bridge and accumulated enough mass to resist the periodic
floods that had kept the river usually clear. Three human figures
fled across a sand-flat at one end of it and disappeared into the
woods. Two of them carried spears tipped with something that
sparkle