d in the sunlight, probably shards of glass.

"You know, Monty, I get nightmares, sometimes, thinking 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 freeze-locker and 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."

He looked across the table. "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 the 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 the outside, the whole district had been
pelted, more or less at random, with fission bombs.

West of the confluence of the Allegheny and the 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."

Loudons had shifted from Forward to Hover and was peering through
a pair of binoculars. "See that island, the long one? Across the
river from it, on the north side, toward this end. Yes, by
Einstein! And I can see cleared ground, and what I think are
houses, inside a stockade...."

II

Murray Hughes walked around the corner of the cabin into the
morning sunlight, lacing his trousers, with