inst things.

The excitement of getting down and opening the Christmas packages saved
me from speculating too much along these or any other lines.

I hit a minor jackpot right away. In the same bag were a compass, a
catalytic pocket lighter, a knife with a saw-tooth back edge that made
my affection for Mother waver, a dust mask, what looked like a compact
water-filtration unit, and several other items adding up to a deluxe
Deathlands Survival Kit.

There were some goggles in the kit I didn't savvy until I put them on
and surveyed the landscape out the viewport. A nearby dust drift I knew
to be hot glowed green as death in the slightly smoky lenses. Wow! Those
specs had Geiger counters beat a mile and I privately bet myself they
worked at night. I stuck them in my pocket quick.

* * * * *

We found bunches of tiny electronics parts--I think they were; spools of
magnetic tape, but nothing to play it on; reels of very narrow film with
frames much too small to see anything at all unmagnified; about three
thousand cigarettes in unlabeled transparent packs of twenty--we lit up
quick, using my new lighter; a picture book that didn't make much sense
because the views might have been of tissue sections or starfields, we
couldn't quite decide, and there were no captions to help; a thin book
with ricepaper pages covered with Chinese characters--_that_ was a
puzzler; a thick book with nothing but columns of figures, all zeros and
ones and nothing else; some tiny chisels; and a mouth organ. Pop, who'd
make a point of just helping in the hunt, appropriated that last item--I
might have known he would, I told myself. Now we could expect "Turkey in
the Straw" at odd moments.

Alice found a whole bag of what were women's things judging from the
frilliness of the garments included. She set aside some squeeze-packs
and little gadgets and elastic items right away, but she didn't take any
of the clothes. I caught her measuring some kind of transparent chemise
against herself when she thought we weren't looking; it was for a girl
maybe six sizes bigger.

* * * * *

And we found food. Cans of food that was heated up inside by the time
you got the top rolled off, though the outside could still be cool to
the touch. Cans of boneless steak, boneless chops, cream soup, peas,
carrots, and fried potatoes--they weren't labeled at all but you could
generally guess the contents from