the shape of the can. Eggs that heated
when you touched them and were soft-boiled evenly and barely firm by the
time you had the shell broke. And small plastic bottles of strong coffee
that heated up hospitably too--in this case the tops did a five-second
hesitation in the middle of your unscrewing them.

At that point as you can imagine we let the rest of the packages go and
had ourselves a feast. The food ate even better than it smelled. It was
real hard for me not to gorge.

Then as I was slurping down my second bottle of coffee I happened to
look out the viewport and see the Pilot's body and the darkening puddle
around it and the coffee began to taste, well, not bad, but sickening. I
don't think it was guilty conscience. Deathlanders outgrow those if they
ever have them to start with; loners don't keep consciences--it takes
cultures to give you those and make them work. Artistic
inappropriateness is the closest I can come to describing what bothered
me. Whatever it was, it made me feel lousy for a minute.

About the same time Alice did an odd thing with the last of _her_
coffee. She slopped it on a rag and used it to wash her face. I guess
she'd caught a reflection of herself with the blood smears. She didn't
eat any more after that either. Pop kept on chomping away, a slow feeder
and appreciative.

To be doing something I started to inspect the instrument panel and
right away I was all excited again. The two screens were what got me.
They showed shadowy maps, one of North America, the other of the World.
The first one was a whole lot like the map I'd been imagining
earlier--faint colors marked the small "civilized" areas including one
in Eastern Canada and another in Upper Michigan that must be "countries"
I didn't know about, and the Deathlands were real dark just as I'd
always maintained they should be!

South of Lake Michigan was a brightly luminous green point that must be
where we were, I decided. And for some reason the colored areas
representing Los Alamos and Atlantic Highlands were glowing brighter
than the others--they had an active luminosity. Los Alamos was blue,
Atla-Hi violet. Los Alamos was shown having more territory than I
expected. Savannah Fortress for that matter was a whole _lot_ bigger
than I'd have made it, pushing out pseudopods west and northeast along
the coast, though its red didn't have the extra glow. But its
growth-pattern reeked of imperialism.

* * *