The Return | Page 2

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 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 sparkled in the sunlight,
probably shards of glass.
"You know, Monty, I get nightmares, sometimes, about what things must be like in
Europe," Loudons said.
Five or six wild cows went crashing through the brush below. Altamont nodded when
he saw them.
"Maybe tomorrow, we'll let down and shoot a cow," he said. "I was looking in the
freezer-locker; the fresh meat's getting a little low. Or a wild pig, if we find a good stand
of oak trees. I could enjoy what you'd do with some acorn-fed pork. Finished?" he asked
Loudons. "Take over, then; I'll go back and wash the dishes."
They rose, and Loudons, favoring his left leg, moved over to the seat at the controls.
Altamont gathered up the two cups, the stainless-steel dishes, and the knives and forks
and spoons, going up the steps over the shielded converter and ducking his head to avoid
the seat in the forward top machine-gun turret. He washed and dried the dishes, noting
with satisfaction that the gauge of the water tank was still reasonably high, and glanced

out one of the windows. Loudons was taking the big helicopter upstairs, for a better view.
Now and then, among the trees, there would be a glint of glassy slag, usually in a
fairly small circle. That was to be expected; beside the three or four H-bombs that had
fallen on the Pittsburgh area, mentioned in the transcripts of the last news to reach the
Fort from outside, the whole district had been pelted, more or less at random, with fission
bombs. West of the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela, it would probably be
worse than this.
"Can you see Pittsburgh yet, Jim?" he called out.
"Yes; it's a mess! Worse than Gary; worse than Akron, even. Monty! Come here! I
think I have something!"
Picking up the pipe he had laid down, Altamont hurried forward, dodging his six-foot
length under the gun turret and swinging down from the walkway over the converter.
"What is it?" he asked.
"Smoke. A lot of smoke, twenty or thirty fires, at the very least."