In the Fall (c) copr all rights reserved 1995 by T.J.Hardman, Jr. HTML
version of In The Fall (c) copr all rights reserved 1996 by T.J.Hardman, Jr
and TJH Internet SP. No part of this work may be reproduced, copied or
distributed without the express handwritten permission of the author, with
the exception of on-screen viewing.

This is a work of fiction. Any similarities to any persons living or dead
are entirely coincidental. Some use may be made herein of real locations or
institutions, but such use is entirely fictional in intent. Any use of
tradenames or trademarks is completely accidental, and is not to be
interpreted as any attempt to disparage or recommend.

Many thanks are extended to those who have been trying to keep abreast of
issues and technologies which will be examined in detail in this story.

All medical or biologic concepts herein described are, where not presently
under patent or copyright protection, to be considered as either the
intellectual property of T.J. Hardman, Jr, or as extant espionage tools not
protected by either patent or copyright law.

All menuing systems described herein, especially motion-control menuing
systems, where not already under patent or copyright protection, should be
considered the intellectual property of T.J. Hardman, Jr and are not to be
duplicated in any manner whatsoever without direct contractual consent.
Insofar as it is implied, all due credit is to be given to the pioneers of
voice-recognition systems, particularly International Business Machines
(IBM). All described original inventions and modifications to extant simple
technologies, or combinations of advanced extant technologies into new
systems are to be considered the intellectual property of T.J. Hardman, Jr.
and may not be marketed for profit without contractual arrangements.

Some of the predicted icon-based task-programming systems are conceptually
similar to a display motif of a product of the University of New Mexico
called 'khoros', although to my knowledge, their scientific dataprocessing
and visualization system was developed completely independently of my own
concepts.

Time marched on, with the lush breezes of a verdant Pennsylvania summer giving way to the crispness of Piedmont fall, leaves reddening and then dropping from the trees to be swept away by chilling winds. The surfacers rarely needed human attention now. The telefactors had drop-shipment boxes laid out before them from horizon to horizon, and they had demonstrated that they could run without supervision, though when they began to perform scheduled maintenance, Wilson made sure that he was always there in case some difficulty should arise. It seemed that he'd done a good enough job in the flowgramming (with help from the angels of cyberspace), and such difficulties were few. He worked assiduously to revise the occasional glitches in the flowgrams, and none of the difficulties were repeated. Wilson and Roberta basically moped about during the days, watching the increasingly-robotic automated equipment drift noisily along, while in the distances beyond the margins of construction, there seemed to be less people. The troopers brought gossip of wolfgangs, riding the highways in groups of two and four, suddenly assembling at pre-arranged locations, to pillage, loot and rape, but these attacks seemed to be growing more sparse, or perhaps they were less reported.

The news broadcasts became ever more saccharine. There couldn't possibly be as much good news in the world as was broadcast. The newsfeed anchorpersons, familiar fixtures all, became more and more harried-looking, and finally, they began to disappear, to be replaced by fresh smiling talking heads who also quickly grew edgy and frayed, and then were themselves replaced, at an ever- increasing rate.

Beltcom data searches were also less informative. The NETS newgroups seemed to be somewhat Bowdlerized, and far less InterNet traffic came from abroad, with no traffic originating in China, Siberia, or the Lesser Russias. File transfers from such areas became non-existant. Wilson was not much of a newsgroup reader, but Roberta was, and she remarked upon the scarcity of traffic from those areas, and tried sending test mail to some of the persons posting from those regions. She claimed that the return answers from that test mail, what few returns she got, might as well be form-letters, responses generated by least-class AI. The newsgroup stuff seemed to be more frequently falling into the category of ill-disguised press releases and propagandistic blurbs... but at least, it was not the saccharine sappy stuff that seeped from the broadcasts. Wilson sought out Harry, who had been less and less available, having been issued a room in the Administrative building. He never answered voice calls, and mail from him was generally oneliners, or hurriedly jotted replies. The roadbed tentcamp had been moving along with the construction, and travel from the camp to the Administration building was no longer a matter of a fifteen minute walk, and besides, with winter closing in, brisk northwinds chasing blowing fogs through the gaps in the Appalachians, nobody was much interested in walking. The weather began to drive most people inside their tents, or into the canteens, where rumor was rampant.

Steuben was, as usual, the best informed speculator on most any subject. His squad was one of the perimeter patrols, and they reported ominous developments.

Traffic on the Turnpike's open lanes had been restricted to large trucks, and those were appearing at perhaps a third of the normal rate. Laser fencing had been installed parallelling the highway. One of Steuben's squad's jobs was to go around and pull dead animals out of the beampaths. Small armed telefactors had begun to appear, teamed with Border Defenders. There had been no non-official visitors to the Project for three months now, and the official visitors were fewer and farther between. Teleconferences had become rarities, and generally consisted of congratulations to the workers, and progress reports. The latest teleconference was a stunner, as it stated that all of the roadcrew drop-shipments were either in place or in the pipeline.

Most of the workers had formed relationships of varying degrees of constancy. Some had married, some were major singles'-games players at the various canteens which lined the road. The roadside tentcamps had become small edge-cities, with their own infirmaries, distribution centers, and of course the inescapable law of the laser fences, the scattered fast-response Army MPs, and the eternal if backgroundish presence of the Border Defenders and the Adminstration personnel. Roberta shared a tent with three other single women. Wilson assumed she was trying to get better socialized, and indeed, as time went on she became slightly more feminine. At least she developed the knack of moving with some amount of grace, despite her ungainly mannish feet. Wilson had listened to some of the females ribbing her about them, with comments ranging from comparisons between her shoes and boats to catty remarks about how she should lead when slowdancing, 'cause her feet were bigger than most mens' feet. The single men who plied the singles' circles didn't talk to her, since the consensus was that either she was gay, frigid, or simply pathological, which rumors seemed to suit her just fine. She did hang out with Wilson now and then outside of working hours, which Wilson still found uncomfortable. He'd finally learned to ignore her, strenuous as that effort was for him.

He turned forty-four in that October of 2020, and amazed himself with his own fitness. His hair, which had never completely grayed nor disappeared entirely, began to grow back a little bit, in fine wisps of baby hair that was the natural color of his adolescence. He felt stronger than he had in years, though a new arthritis bothered him somewhat on cold mornings. His beard lightened slowly from salt and pepper to a more uniform brown, and the strength that he had once taken for granted, and then mourned as it had waned, seemed to renew itself. Perhaps the Ganges Symbionts were indeed effective.

Roberta herself grew more ravishing. With her new grace, she could captivate him inadvertantly by whirling about, all bounce and health and green green eyes that took in everything, and her already lush form took on a less adolescent firmness. She occasionally momentarily broke old Wilson's heart, and then he would steel himself to his promise of platonism, and he would imagine a green scary-monster face instead of elegant contours and healthy pink, and equinamity would return.

The Roads Project marched on. The news got more trivial than ever, and then, about mid-January, holes began to appear in the trivialities.

The latest fresh face lost her smile in the middle of some headlined story about some human-interest development in some small midwestern town, and the view cut to the story, and when it returned, some thoroughly non-announcer type was lamely reading from the teleprompter. He did a passable job, but it was clear that this network at least had run out of announcers. In a media-based society, this was similar to Australia running out of cane toads, or Newcastle running out of coal. Wilson was at a loss to understand this, and even the rumor mill had little to say, any conjectures on the subject probably having been too wild to bear repeating.

As the crews moved on down the road, they finally came upon one of the small towns, nestled cozily in a junction of mountain valleys, which had once served mostly to sell gasoline and provide motels for the weary. Certainly, whatever industry it might have once had was long-since fled. The chainlink fencing that had been placed to keep all but the most determined away from the laser fence deathzone scarcely blocked the view of a ghost town. The Army troopers had strict orders to allow nobody to pass through the fencing to check out the town, but one squad decided that they could not properly defend against totally unknown terrain, and had, led by Steuben, made a sortie.

Steuben and Wilson had long since become drinking buddies. Steuben found the old man's placid nature to be a bromide against the uncertainties of Army life, no matter that his posting showed all evidences of permanence. When Steuben's squad returned from their unauthorized sortie, Steuben showed up at Wilson's two-man tent with a bottle of liberated Jack Daniels. Wilson had developed the habit of moving his tent every three days, so as to be close to the surfacers. For some odd reason, he found their howling to be comforting, and could not sleep well without it. For this reason, he had his privacy, as most of the personnel preferred to be away from the machines they worked with daily, replacing the whine of turbines and superflywheels with the nattering of a close-packed tentcity.

Steuben scratched politely at the entrance to Wilson's tent. Wilson peered through a crack in the flap, and bade him enter.

"Hey, Steuben! Haven't seen you for a couple of days. What brings you here?"

Steuben responded by doffing his pack and weapon, unzipping the pack and presenting the bottle. Wilson beamed. "My main man!"

"You're maybe gonna need it more'n want it, Wilson. Have I got a story to tell you!"

"Hell, Steuben, you're telling stories all of the time, don't nobody listen to you that much any more." Wilson cracked the bottle, took an experimental sip, and coughed politely. Steuben waggled his hand at him, pinky extended, and Wilson took this as a bit of an invitation. He took a good healthy sip, and passed the bottle back as a shiver took him to contrast with the fire flowing warmly from his throat. "Damn, that's good!"

Steuben took the bottle, and turned it upside down for a good two seconds. Wilson saw his throat work twice. Steuben, an old hand at Jack Daniels' well, winked a bit, but otherwise kept up a stone face, though his pupils dilated and contracted. The howling of the surfacers droned through the night, and Steuben pulled off his beltcom, and motioned Wilson to do the same. Steuben stuck them outside of the tent flap, sealed it, and then turned to Wilson.

"Wilson, I have to tell you. I know you're not much of a talker, but I also know it ain't 'cause you're dumb. I 'spect it's more a case of still waters runnin' deep, I have seen you push icons around your beltcom with the best of 'em, and I ain't heard of no troubles here with your end of things on this here Roads project. I 'spect you know how to keep your own counsel, and to hold your tongue, otherwise I wouldn't be tellin' ya this."

Wilson accepted the bottle, and as a sign of his assent, he nodded sagely, and tipped up the bottle, and took a healthy belt. Sweet fire. Liquid tranquillity.

"Go 'head," he said, coughing slightly. Steuben examined him with the eye of a man who could hold his liquor, and like the ancient Persians, considered no deal worth doing unless struck drinking with a drinking man.

"Well, I guess you might have heard that we did a little recon mission out there in the town. No? Hmm, musta been quieter than I'd hoped. Good. Okay, here it is. We all, my squad that is, we snuck on out to the town, broad daylight and all, went out like we were clearing critters outta the beam paths. Big deal, but check this. No critters. That's a first." He sipped. "All along the way here, the fences have been knocking them dead, raccoons, possums, the odd coyote, occasional stray dog, two bear. But hereabouts, we ain't seen shit. First weird thing.

"So we get into town, and I pegged Jonesey as a subleader. Sent him off with two other guys to reconnoiter, and they trot up the street. No signs of life, sez Jonesey. Okay, so the town's dead. Ain't no business hereabouts, ain't been any for years, I 'spect, so no surprises 'bout it bein' dead. But, check this, it ain't dead. Ain't been dead, I mean. Jonesey and his boys get up to the post office, it's all locked up and everything, but they have this year's jeeps, and he looks about, whilst me and the rest of the squad trot on up what appears to be the main street, and Jonesey reports that the calendar on the wall says it's December 18th. Guess he busts in, 'cause a minute later I hear from him that there's packages and stuff all over the back room, Christmas mailings and such, I guess. I tell them get on outta there, go look around and see what there is to see.

"I keep on up the main drag with the boys, and there's every sign of an orderly departure, except there ain't been one. There's storefronts with fairly fresh paint, no more'n a year or two old, I don't guess, and cars neatly parked in driveways, and busted out windows in the houses. Ain't any 'lectricity near's I could tell, and so I decided that I would check a house or two. Meantime, Jonesey says they are at the liquor store, and I ask him does he see any signs of life? He says hell no, but he damned sure can't figure why anyone would abandon a town and leave a fully stocked liquor store. So I tell him, what the hell, get a couple bottles for all of us, and so he does. And while he's doin' that, I head out back of this pretty nice li'l house and kick in the back door. Me and the boys start quartering the place, and what do we find upstairs but a pretty messy ol' corpse lyin' on a bed with a gun near it, shot through the head, best's I can make out. Okay, I says, more weird shit. We check out the rest of the place, and there ain't nothin' there. So I go back up to the room where the ol' boy done kilt hisself, and sure enough, there's a laptop with a O-ROM slotted. Here ya go," Steuben said, and fished the memory out of his beltpack and handed it to Wilson. "You view that, hear? Anyways - we go on to a few more houses, and for the most part, they're empty."

Steuben held out his hand for the bottle, which Wilson had been trying not to nurse. He took another healthy swallow and winced, and handed the bottle back. Wilson nipped at it.

"Okay. So then - ahem, I tell Jonesey to report. He says he ain't seen shit, the whole business section's deader'n shit, say's it's spookin' him somethin' fierce. Ain't a soul around, but it appears to him that everybody must have left on a bus or something, 'cause nothin' seems to have burned, no bullet holes, but there ain't enough leaves piled up for it to have been before November. He's from these parts, I trust him to know stuff like that. Plus there's that calendar he seen in th' post office. I tell him to rendezvous on up the road a piece, and he says yassuh and heads out.

"Now we get on up the road ourselves, gimme bottle - ahem - ah, we go on up the road, and still ain't nobody. Wyczowski says he thought he seen somethin' but we all figured he was just buggin'. But when we get to the rendezvous point, Jonesey says he thought he seen something too. 'Dog or cat, mos' likely,' says I, but then I got to thinking, hell, I ain't seen a damned thing like a dog or a cat. Not live, not bones, not dead at the laserfence neither. I myself start to gettin' a bit spooked. We start back towards the interchange, and there she is. Li'l ol' white gal, looking 'bout as forlorn as you can get, comin' t'wards us in a goddamned mink coat. Now this is weird shit huh?"

Wilson allowed that it was, and took a knock off of the bottle. Steuben waggled his pinky at him again, and Wilson took another as Steuben continued.

"So she comes on up the street towards us, not too pretty, mind ya, she's 'bout as skinny as a fence rail, and Wyczowski says something like, are you ok miss? and she keeps on coming, walks right up to him. Tries to stick him with a knife, but she ain't quite slick about it, and he jumps back outta the way, and she all of a sudden looks mighty pissed. The boys start closing in, and next thing you know, they got her ass down. She tried to bite 'em, but they got on winter gear ya know, and once they seen what she's about, they grab her ass but good, and she ain't going nowhere. So we try to question her, and she jes' growls like some kind of animal, spits and tries to bite. We was going to bring her back here, but then she tried to bite Jonesey, and he slapped her down, but when he did, she got knocked into Parlesi, and grabbed at his gun. Parlesi, he's that crazy Eyetalian from New York, he just smacked her upside the head with his rifle, and that was all she wrote. She weren't in the best shape, and he stove th' side of her head right in. We sorta dragged her into the bushes, and left her there, and I ordered a hasty retreat." Steuben took a hard pull from the bottle, nearly draining the fifth.

"Couldn't talk, you say?"

Steuben looked at him. "Didn't. Jes' growled, like a dog or something. Pos'tively chillin'. Like that guy they foun' up on the road a few months ago, 'fore they put up the laser fence."

"She seem, well, hell you said she was homicidal. And the town was empty."

Steuben set the bottle down between them with a clunk. "I 'spected you might be a one to ask the right questions. What the hell is goin' on, Wilson? Was we wrong? Yes, she was homicidal. Told ya that."

"Damn. Steuben, I tell ya what, you tell me what you think."

"'Kay."

"Shit." Wilson reached for the bottle, and Steuben just looked on as he killed half of the remains. "You just keep your eyes out, ol' buddy, look to your men. I ain't gonna tell nobody about this, but - um, hey, did she try to bite you?"

"Didn't get nowhere's close. She mighta got Wyczowski, l'il bit. Nothin' serious."

"I am serious," said Wilson, looking it. "Look to your men, Steuben, all of those who were in physical contact with that girl. Keep them in barracks at night, just keep 'em from fraternizing. Two weeks at least. Tell 'em anything, hell, tell 'em it's to keep a wrap on your excursion until we get past this town. But for two weeks, minimum. And I'll look at that memory to see what's there."

Steuben stood and killed the bottle. "Knew you'd be good to talk to 'bout this. Keep it quiet, willya?"

"No problem," said Wilson, knowing there was one other person who'd have to hear this.

When Steuben left, Wilson reviewed the video files. Starting in October, the old man had watched as neighbor after neighbor had left town on some trip or another, and failed to return. By November, he had watched half of the town, the cheating part and the single part, develop headaches and visit the local doctor, to be carried away in police cars. He had watched his daughter grow feverish, and then wicked, watched her calling the neighborhood cats to their deaths until she could no longer even call a cat, and he had documented her short trial for infanticide and cannibalism, her hanging and burial. He had watched the doctor carried away, and then had watched the town's eight cops themselves led off, first by each other, and then by the troops that had come to clean out the town. Rather than leave his town, the mayor had turned his gun on himself. The video had captured his final statements, totally unrecognizable in any language Wilson knew, but the video was quite clear, an old man weeping on his bed, pistol in hand, waiting for the arrival of troops, whose hard expressions softened in the doorway seen beyond the old man's cooling body. One of the troops had tried to deliver something of an eulogy, and his stammered and increasingly unrelated incoherencies had provoked expressions of dismay on the faces of his cadre, and the fear was also there: who would be next?

Wilson was not a man of strong emotion, but Jack Daniels had long been known to make him morose, and so he called Roberta. When she arrived, bundled against the growing cold of the western Pennsylvania winter, he merely gave her the O-ROM video diary, told her to view it, and passed out. When he woke from his drunk in the wee hours, there was another warmth in his bed, and both sides of the pillow were wet from tears. In the morning she left him wordlessly, grimness showing in the set of muscles beneath the lineless skin of her face.

The Roads grew past the small town. Here in the mountains, the roadbed had been overengineered when first laid, and little rebuild was necessary. The basalt shoulders of the mountains were close to the surface, and for the most part, a simple ripping of old surface, and overlaying of the polyresin-matrixed concrete was all that was required before Wilson's surfacers could howl along at their flat-out top speed of 10 miles a day. Somewhere, miles behind him, Border Defenders stood guard over the crews who were installing the superconductor-wound stator-field coils which would turn this project from a grossly over-surfaced boondoggle into a semicentrally-powered linear induction motor easily capable (or so he had been told) of moving five thousand tons of rolling freight per mile at speeds of 200 kilometers per hour.

Steuben kept his men on patrol or in the barracks, watching for headaches or fever, as per Wilson's request. None succumbed, despite Wilson's suspicions. Perhaps the woman had lived past the infectious stage.

Two weeks later, deep in the February snows, icy fogs condensing from the steam released by the heat of the roadsetting equipment, they converged upon the construction crew coming from the Tunnel. The earthmovers (which had always operated about five miles ahead of the crushers and refillers which immediately preceded his own surfacers) from the two crews met, and moved their last earth, and pulled off to the side, where they were slowly dismantled into shippable components. Within two days, final connection of the surfaced roads would be completed. Wilson wondered where the RL- 442s might be headed, and then, of course, wondered where he himself might be headed.

The news came that evening, as the various crews huddled close to the electric heaters in their favorite canteens. Everyone's beltcoms chimed for priority call, a feature most people expected to hear perhaps once a month. Everyone in the canteens opened their beltcoms or laptops, and the projection screens in the canteens flickered to life.

The screen once again showed Mr. Richards. He was looking rather haggard above his impeccable cravat. "Congratulations to the Pennsylvania Turnpike Crews! With the final joining of the Allegheny East segments, Interstate Seventy will have been rebuilt from Denver to Baltimore. Field-coil installation is seventy percent complete. Final connections should have been established coast-to-coast within the month, and by this time next year, Interstates Five, Twenty-Five, Thirty-Five, Eighty-One and Ninety- Five should be completed, connected, and online. About forty percent of those Roads are already online and operational. Here's some tape for you."

The screen showed a lot of shots of various roads being cut, chopped, pulverized, excavated to bedrock, refilled, tamped, concreted-and-sealed, and surfaced. Wilson was interested to note that in one barely-glimpsed scene, amid the flowing grainfields of the Midwest, a great tube had been laid down near the bedrock, surrounded by thickwalled concrete blockhouses spaced at precise intervals. The Roads grew in fast motion. As the shots flickered from location to location, the seasons changed, with flowers blooming in the desert, growing grainfields rising to nod under heavy heads of wheat and oats, green foilage of eastern oaks glowing suddenly redgold and then brown and naked as fall flew into winter. Machinery flickered and blurred, tentcities appeared and vanished, but the Roads remained and grew, with the greenish black sheen of cured impermeable polyresin. Occasional vehicles flickered along the surface, and then vast stretches of finished Road vanished under the gales of winter, black and brown mudpatches churning under the scuttling of the great machines, craters trailed by green-black, with the finished surfaces vanishing under the drifts of encroaching snow. A voice-over began.

"These roads are expected to last, with absolutely minimal maintenance, for five hundred years, barring direct nuclear strikes, volcanic eruptions, or earthquakes. Near fault-lines, the roads have been segmentized, to minimize damage caused by tectonic changes. We hope that by the time the Roads suffer significant disrepair, technology will have advanced to the point where roads are no longer necessary for any reason.

The view cuts to a freeway interchange, somewhere in the southlands, if the moss-hung live-oaks are any indicator. A sign glimpsed in the background bears the number four in the red and blue federal shield. I-4, then. A tractor-trailer pulls onto an entrance ramp, passing through a tollgate. As it waits, a forklift-type device approaches the trailer, and attaches a long boom-mounted pod to the bottom of the trailer. The pod, a smooth aerodynamic shape reminiscent of the drop tanks of an old fighter-jet, clears the surface of the road by perhaps four inches. Wilson begins to see why there has always been such emphasis on extremely tight grading tolerances.

"Notice the automatic mounting of the linrotor pod. Until trailer manufacturers begin to install these pods, they'll be rented to the truckers as part of a use fee for the Roads. While the Roads were mostly pre-paid by taxpayer bonds, there are still power generation charges and other charges which must be paid, and so the roads will be toll roads for the forseeable future. This might seem uneconomical in comparison to the old freeway system, but since the truckers do not have to pay for internal power while on the roads, these fees remain quite competitive. Also, witness the disrepair the tax-subsidized freeways fell into, compared with the high level of maintenance on the various toll-supported turnpikes."

The trucker rolls out onto the road, and the view switches to the inside. The rig reaches speed, and the trucker reaches out and flips a switch from one position to the other, marked "external". The power-usage guage swings home to the zero peg. The right bottom quadrant of the screen fills with spreadsheet, with columns indicating per-mile costs of the old system versus the new system. (Several people touched their beltcoms to save this data to files.) The view draws back from the trucker.

"Presently, we project full usage of the line-driver lanes to be competitive with the various maglev rail lines, especially since the maglev rails are notoriously sensitive and very high in maintenance costs. Their cars also are very high in maintenance costs, and can be used only on maglev tracks. This technology uses existing trucking stock, with minor temporary modifications. Also, since this is a proprietary public work of the Federal Government, we can keep our costs extremely low through the use of proprietary high-temperature superconductor, while the public sector competitors must use liquid-nitrogen cooling for their best superconductor. We also use considerably less energy in operation, since ordinarily we will not be using magnetic levitation. Instead, we invested similar long-term expenses in providing a roadway with which currently widespread technology is compatible with absolutely minimal modification. In the future, with the general public installation of automatic vehicle controls, we expect to take over most of the maglev long-haul freight business.

"Again, all associated with this project are to be congratulated!" The projection screen blanked, and people began to fold up their beltcoms and laptops.

Steuben, Wilson and Roberta looked at each other, and their expressions said, conference. All around them, voices were raised in unanswered questions.

"So what do we all do now?"

"What's the job markets like out there?"

"What's the world like out there?"

"Wilson, got any ideas?" Steuben looked pretty baffled.

"I'd like to hear what you two think first."

"I really don't know anything," said Roberta.

"I checked for new orders for us troops, and there aren't any. I asked my commander, and he said he'd check, but standing orders are to secure this camp, and see the outbound equipment shipments through. I also tried to mail some people. No responses, but that's nothing new. We knew that there was a near-total blackout for us here on the Project... but I didn't know that I'd get a return mailing from all of my family members I tried to reach... it said, account abandoned."

Wilson and Roberta turned to him in near-shock. "Abandoned?" said Roberta, "You don't get 'account abandoned' unless the person's dead or totally out-system! Wilson, have you tried to mail out to any real people?"

Wilson shook his head. "I don't know any real people outside of this camp, not really, not well enough to know their addresses by heart - except Jenkins. I tried to mail her a few times, but I ran into the security lockouts and I don't know if any of it got through. I sure didn't get any mail back. A piece that she sent me six months ago got through, but other than that, nothing. Don't you know anybody, Roberta?"

She practically hissed at him. "No, I don't know anybody either. Nobody who'd answer mail from me. But there's one thing I haven't had the nerve to try... recently. Hang on." She flipped upon her beltcom, and began to key numbers. After a moment, she got a response. "Huh," she said, and showed them the response. It said, bad domain name. "I haven't seen that one for a long long time. It means that the entire mailserver system for that area's down."

"And where exactly was that?"

"Fort Detrich, Maryland."

The bells woke her, along with everyone else.

Felice sat in the cafeteria, waiting for her breakfast, as did so many of her new companions. The people who could still talk had organized them early on, leading them in exercises, teaching them the exaggerated politenesses necessary to people who could not speak, and could not, in many cases, even understand signs. She'd learned to read facial expressions and body language quite well, however, and had watched the growing unease around her with trepidation of her own. Breakfast was not forthcoming.

She had grown accustomed to the rhythm of her new life. Most others had also grown used to being herded around, led from one place to another, given pantomime instructions, and put to work at often incomprehensible tasks.

Sometimes the tasks made sense. Before winter closed in, they had been taken to the fields outside of Frederick, where the corn nodded heavy in the late September sunshine, and they had been given burlap bags, and instructed to pick. She remembered old flat-films of people harvesting by hand, but weren't there machines that did this? She didn't see any signs of such equipment. They carried the full bags back to the compound, which had begun as a highschool. They were led to a room which must have once been a science lab, but which now was a huge kitchen, with the gas petcocks hooked to improvised burners heating vast pots of boiling water. They'd been shown how to husk the corn, and later, how to can the whole sweet kernels. They canned other produce as well. The cobs were sent out back, where the pigs fattened. After a few days of this silently taught home-economics, her group spent time learning to sew by hand. She wondered, inarticulately, not even able to shape the words in her mind (thinking instead in snatches of waking dream and visual memory), where the machines were. She'd used sewing machines before, to repair old-style garments that had been in vogue before the universal recyclable paper fabrics with their cyanoacrylic seaming had come to dominate the markets. But what would they sew? She was given a packet of needles, and some pins, and they went in her beltpack, wrapped in some sort of greased paper. She was also given thread, two spools each of black and white. As the winter went on, some of the people in her group disappeared, going to unknown places. She could not even ask where. Finally, she was given a steady assignment, which constancy put her rather more at ease. She was an after-meals dishwasher.

She couldn't wash the dishes after the meals, of course, unless there had been a meal. She got up and joined the crowd gathering to peer through the windows in the door to the kitchen. By this time, ordinarily, they would have been opened, with the fat ladies who cooked for them banging pots and pans and the serving helpers clattering trays and utensils. None of that was to be seen or heard, though, and she recognized many of the women gathered at the doorway as the serving helpers. She took the initiative nobody else seemed to have though of, and knocked on the glass window. There was no answer. She knocked again. Still no answer. She rattled the door, and then began pulling at it fiercely. She was not very strong, by herself, but when the other women joined in, finally, the door popped open.

Inside, it was simply the normal spotless kitchen. She didn't know exactly what she'd expected. She wandered over to the door to the outside, and experimentally pushed at the exit bar. It worked. Outside, on this blustery March day, clouds scudded over an empty parking lot, ordinarily filled with the green trucks that brought the Army nurses and Reserve soldiers who guarded and guided them. Now there was only a Border Defender, crouched immobile against the building, operating the power plant. Where could they be?

She would never know. They were many miles up the highway, trying to contain the flash-plague of mindless predatory manshaped monsters who had escaped confinement at the Hagerstown military stockade when local power failed. The Border Defender which should have been tending the pocket fusion reactor had been required elsewhere, as was increasingly the case, and without midframe tuning, the fusion fire had guttered out, as it was designed to do.

The former staff of the plague-survivors camp were final reserves, suddenly called out to aid the few remaining National Guard troops who had not themselves become infected by one or another of the modified rabies viruses. There were no doctors available to treat the wounded, other than a few Army medics and the Army nurses pulled from the various retraining camps, as the majority of doctors had themselves been finally struck with one or another of the plagues.

The predators seemed to have lost none of their cunning, and with no compunctions, had put up a deadly fight. They had early on captured the stockade's armory, and they fought like the animals they'd become, with little regard for personal safety, and less regard for their opposition. It was fortunate that they could not organize. This emergence had been finally brought down, but before the remaining contingent could return to caring for the aphasic women of the Frederick compound, they received orders to head west to Breezewood, Pennsylvania, to join a group formation. The force leader objected strenuously. A response came back, rather laconic. At least the brigadier spared the time to make a voice call.

"You've been trying to re-educated them, so they can take care of themselves, right?"

"We've done our best, sir, but I don't think that they're really capable! These were a bunch of secretaries and housewives, for the most part, totally bewildered by the changes they've been through. I mean, they're complete semantic aphasics, we couldn't exactly explain things to them. As it is, they can't communicate any better than chimps! Perhaps not even that well. We were going to try to teach them to plant crops, but it's not the right time of year yet."

"They'll have to get along without your people, Captain. They have ample supplies, canned goods, right?"

"Yes, sir! Not a very varied diet, but it'll get them through to mid-summer. But sir, can you tell me what the situation is?"

The brigadier's voice was dangerous. "What situation, Captain?"

"Sir, the national situation. The blackout has been complete, sir. Is this local to the area only, or is there a greater national emergency?"

"Captain, that's classified. You have your orders, now get your troops together and move them out!"

"Yes sir!" The voice link cut out, and the Captain folded his beltcom. He ordered his leutenants to ready the troops, and to proceed according to their orders. He had his own dangerous look now, and they scurried to obey.

The captain bleakly wondered if the situation in Frederick, Maryland, was duplicated elsewhere in the country. Most non- essential personnel had been relocated away from Frederick and the smaller outlying towns. Some were drafted, until rabid inductees spread plague through the ranks. Some were sent to retraining camps. Some, emerging predators, were simply taken out and shot. Many were sent to staging areas outside the various cities that seemed to be mostly unaffected, to be plagued by food shortages, then food riots, overwhelming even the laser fences in human-wave mass-escapes... often running from want into plague or open warfare. Due to the total communications blackout, the Captain had no idea that he had been supervising one of few gravy assignments.

Baltimore was in flames, with great ships standing out to sea, afraid to dock, not knowing that the rats on their ships carried the plague that had made this port uninhabitable. Philadephia, not for a century the city of brotherly love, was considerably less friendly now. The simply speechless fled from the mindlessly vicious things that shambled out of alleys, and where fires could burn, they burned fiercely. The refineries of New York and New Jersey had been hurriedly shut down, by Executive Order. A few Border Defenders raised their laser pickets about the industrial facilities that could have poisoned all of the Atlantic had they been burned in the wrong order. In the rural areas, the plague spread less quickly, but still it spread. In Pittsburgh, martial law had been in effect for quite some time, since an entire restaurant and most of the patrons had gone insane over the period of a week, the cook serving patrons to other patrons. People had been shot for headaches, but the largely automated steel-mills still ran, after a fashion, but with only one manned shift a day. In the rest of the wintry industrial north, relatively unaffected by the plague, the pocket fusion generators still poured forth their terawatts, but the demand lessened, and fewer linemen reported to work (or even reported at all) to repair the high- tension lines that still serviced rural areas. Towns darkened, and the people fled the gathering fury of the northern winters. Detroit fell under the snows and the riots and the burnings, though the mills still stood, guarded by fences that sliced interlopers with laserfire, and then cooked the pieces to ash. In the Midwest, people stayed in their homes, eating from cans, saved for now by the snowy distances between their abodes. In the South, the rats and mice spread the plague with every little dominance- nip. Brave headaching mice nibbled the toes of sleepers, and unkilled by this survivable rabies, further spread the disease. The rodents had no instincts to warn them of this odd rabies which smelled nothing like any other disease, and it didn't kill them much, and so the plague concentrated wherever grain was stored, and the cats brought it inside to the farmers and their sons and wives and daughters, and in the West, even the great spaces were no defense against a disease that travelled within and among the cows that came from shows and went to markets.

There were, however, many parts of the country where the men and women who had been the first to be sequestered lived in old schools, in converted Welfare-prisons, in farm-labor Welfare camps. Those who had been the first to be affected by the merely aphasic rabies had been mostly very-well treated by a society which was running at a steady surplus. The government had thought to contain the plague through modern purely-medicinal means, but unfortunately, the doctors at the Centers for Disease Control (who would have been the first to recognize that the plague had run wild, and who might have been the last chance to actually stop it) had been the first to go.

Felice turned on the big burner under the largest kettle, and went to the walk-in refrigerator, and pulled out the cart that carried the eggs from the chickens that were esconced in a hurriedly built prefab poultry-hutch, located out back. In the pantry, she peered into bottles until she found the vegetable oil, and by now the kettle was hot. She began to break eggs, and inspired by this, the serving helpers busied themselves, searching through bins to see what might be good to eat.

As the day went on, it was a simple task to follow ritual. There weren't any teachers present, but they went to classes anyway. In each of the classes, as a rule, there had been someone who had known the subject as well as the teachers. They now taught. The people who felt that they had mastered one skill went to other classes, to see what was being taught there. As March trod on towards April's cruelty towards her fools, the skies (while still cold) grew lighter, the days longer, and as April arrived with its morning snowshowers and warm sunny afternoons, one day the Border Defender sent one of its small caretaker drones to open a shed, and the women crept cautiously forth to find bags of seeds. They knew little of planting, most of them, but there were a few farm girls among them, and the wallcoms in the school offices and classrooms worked just fine. Women followed plaintive beepings to the wallcoms, to see looped video of pre-industrial agricultural procedures, mostly taken from the previous century's National Geographic television-specials online archives.

They walked across the fall-plowed fields, towing large bags of seed corn. They gathered pointed sticks, and one row of women marched forwards as another row followed, the first poking holes, the second seeding. As they crossed the field, a hungry horse, escaped from whatever field had once confined it, plodded over to the the fence to whicker hopefully. The woman who approached the fence had no sugar for the horse, but she did have kind hands and a gentle coo for the horse, and it suffered itself to be led into the next field, where the stubble of a previous crop was welcome fodder. The woman saw to the horse, and ran back to the old school building, and there danced a horsey dance, gathering a few of her friends to go with her to search a neighboring farm for horse- supplies.

Sometimes it was impossible to figure out exactly what was what, since many of the bags were merely hand-lettered, but enough of the packaging was illustrated. They returned with a little red wagon filled with canned goods, and a sack of oats, some of which they gave to the horse, some of which they planted after clearing sod from the once-immaculate playing field. They also bore many other things, including a rather nice shotgun and a case of shells.

As time passed for the women of Frederick, May opened the leaves of trees and thrust the grains forth from the ground. In South Central Pensylvania, the tentcities coalesced into one huge camp.

Wilson watched the final installation and connection of the stator-field coils, and watched the power go on, watched his surfacers disassembled, and taken away, loaded at last onto the modified semi-rigs that launched silently uphill along the accelerator ramps leading to the fully-functional segments of the Roads, to merge into the sparse traffic that whistled along the Turnpike. The silence of the traffic was eerie, just the hiss of tires and the whistle of the 200kph payloads splitting the air. Occasionally, some mammoth load would drift by at a lesser speed, and if one stood close enough to the road as these drifted by, one would feel the sensation one feels before a nearby lightning strike, a strange crawling sensation as the amplified fields of magnetic propulsion precessed past, boosting perhaps thousands of tons up the hill toward the tunnel, where there was still some sort of massive work underway.

Occasionally, the few Border Defenders still remaining around the facility would freeze in mid-stride, and all would whirl, assume odd orientations, and fire barrages of railgun fire skywards, and then scamper to new positions, and fire again. Sometimes, lances of actinic light could be seen stabbing earthward from on high. One did well to not gaze at the night sky, searching out stars, for one never knew when one of the glittering points of light that dusted the clear mountain skies would erupt into a glare of blinding intensity, signalling the death of one or another orbital battlestation. Once, not a hundred yards from Wilson's tent, shortly after one of the Border Defenders' displays of firepower, one of the huge Moe-type telefactor was suddenly enswathed in a cone of blue-green laser light, and the cone tightened focus, and the telefactor slumped into a smoking puddled wreck. Wilson scrambled for cover, glancing foolishly skywards along the path of the beam, and then fell temporarily blinded into a ditch as the source of the beam was obliterated in a hellish glare of relativistic impact of charged particles.

For a period of about a week, such displays were common, and then as he huddled frightened with Steuben's platoon and a thousand others in the shadow of a bridge, the low rising moon far to the east flared momentarily to a hellish brightness, and behind them, the surface of the Road gave off an eerie display of flickering blue foxfire as the superconductor coils reradiated the electromagnetic pulse from a device that must have cooked most of the Eastern hemisphere. The commtech in charge of their makeshift shelter shouted, and tore off his earphones, and clutched at his ears, and wisps of smoke rose from his hardwired equipment. Their beltcoms were mostly useless after that, even protected as they had been within a charged metal box. The comm functions worked just fine locally, and they supported local processing to the best of their limited ability, but there had evidently been major system damage in the routing mainframes and satellite commsystems, and remote processing and agented operations were unavailable. Over the next month, some of the functions came back, as new comsats were lofted into geosynchronous orbit and new earthstations were placed, but for a month or more, the Border Defenders (which had of late become almost intelligible in their mad machine way) were uncommunicative, and sadly mechanistic in their motions and procedures. The angels of cyberspace appeared to have been largely silenced, as well. At least they no longer made their occasional visits to this region.

After this month of terror, Wilson was somehow not surprised to see refugees begin to roll in, along with the occasional mystery shipment of heavy equipment, this last arriving under tight security. After a few of these shipments, the Border Defenders began to regain something approaching wits, and he had to assume that these shipments were redeployments of refined silicon. He watched the camp double in numbers and quadruple in size as it expanded into the fields of the valley through which the Road ran, and watched the new arrivals set up farms. This late in the season, it was anybody's guess as to the harvest that could be produced. His gut feeling, though, was that there was going to be a long, lean winter ahead of them, with an extremely limited diet.

The camp changed character as well. At first, the conscript labor tilling the fields was sequestered from the Roads crew, those who remained. Then more and more of the apparent refugees arrived, eventually coming to be the majority as more of the Roads crew were bussed off. Many of the crew had been loaded onto busses and other heavy personnel transport, ominously resembling the boxcars of Jews destined for Auschwitz eighty years before. Wilson finally got to see some of the farm labor people. They looked healthy enough, not surprising since the Welfare farmcamps they came from were designed to be as self-sustaining as possible. Generally, farmers eat well. In their splendid isolation, cut off from all real news of the world, knowing only that there had at last been the war with the east so long dreaded, a war they'd survived (but how well-survived remained to be seen), the tentcity grimly turned its attention to providing for the near future, and due to the rigors of this task, there was little time for speculation. Wilson himself found that after hoeing and weeding with the best and the worst of them, he had little energy left for idle chatter, and often, his only desire after a sparse meal was for a good night's sleep. The rest of the world was not his concern... at any rate, he knew nothing of it.

In early June, though, a cry and alarum ran through the camp, and Wilson, along with most of the remaining un-redistributed Roadcrew ran to the fences where the noise originated. The sound reached Wilson before he saw them. The chainlink fence at the outer edge of the farms was lined with people. And what people they were! Filthy, ragged in torn clothing, unkempt, they moaned. They held out supplicating hands, and moaned, wordlessly, unendingly. The sound pulled at Wilson's heart and guts when he first heard it, and when he realized what was making the sound, he had to stand his ground for a minute to reconcile his shock. Had the enemy's bombs made it through to this continent, then, despite the technical superiority of the Orbital Defenses and the Border Defenders? Others also stood stilled from their rush to the fences, with looks of incomprehension or horror or pity plastered on their faces. There were perhaps two hundred tentcamps people inside the fenceline, and outside perhaps fifty. A Border Defender stalked towards the fence, and planted itself inside the fenceline, and began to emit a red beam of laserlight, parallel to the fence.

Wilson searched the faces in the line of supplicants. Most of the unkempt lot were pressing against the chainlink, blankfaced or sorrowful, hollowcheeked all. They couldn't have been eating very well. They were mostly male, with perhaps ten women among them, most of those pregnant to varying degrees. They looked the worst, with none of the glow that one ordinarily attributes to the expectant mother. Instead, they all sported the same bruises and scrapes that the males exhibited. Harry was in the crowd, and he approached the Border Defender. He began to speak to it, and Wilson decided that he wanted to hear this conversation. He pushed his way through the crowd towards the programmer and the sentinel, who were gathering a crowd of their own.

"...off right now! Those are injured civilians! Power them down, I tell you!"

"This is a plague-containment zone. Fence maintenance has a very high priority. No outside personnel may be admitted without proper medical certification."

"What plague?" asked one of the campers.

"Classified." The sentinel was not much of a conversationalist, it certainly did not lie well. The citizens outside the fence were obviously suffering from something. Muttering began to run through the crowd. "The plague they were talking about six months ago." "But I though they had that under control." "Jesus, how dumb are you? Been watching the news much? Remember the light-show last month?" "But it can't be that bad, can it?" "See for yourself," with a pointed thumb. "But they didn't close down the project, it couldn't be that bad." "Hell, keeping us locked up here was probably the best way to keep us safe!" "But look at them! It's like they're cave men or something!" Harry muttered something angry, and approached the fence. The sentinel's amplified voice boomed, "Do not cross the interdiction line. The fences remain active."

Harry continued to mutter and to march. He did stop just short of the red line in the air and yelled out at the crowd of bewildered moaning people outside the chainlink, whose agitation had increased. Wilson again turned his attention to them. A few scrabbled at the dirt beneath the chainlink, which evidently was lightly charged. The men would have been climbing it otherwise. The women hung back, jittering nervously. One of the men made a rudely ineffective pantomime of eating, waving his hands to include his party, and motioning to his face, and champing his jaws. The moaning continued.

"Zombies!" said someone in the camp, and most of the campers within the fencing began to edge away, the word spread through the crowd, and there was a sudden pell-mell rush away from the inside chainlink. Fortunately nobody was injured. Harry came back over to the sentinel and began to dress it down rather royally.

"You have identified me, sentinel. Command level root, authority voice enable rewrite command priority-set unlock command priority-set order define enable."

"Disallowed," said the sentinel.

"Zero law precedence!" snapped Harry, clearly perturbed.

"Zero law is engaged," said the sentinel. "Cannot assign priority to individual over group. Cannot assign priority to small group over large group. Logic path is: given, unaffected populations must be isolated from affected populations. Containment fencing isolates unaffected population, remove fencing thus removes isolation, plague containment invalidated. Logic path valid, request superuser Broder, Harry T. is invalid. Cannot comply."

"But they're suffering out there, they're starving! They need medical attention."

"Cannot comply. Cannot drop fences. Cannot allow traverse of containment zone. Cannot admit affected personnel to facility."

"Can I at least send some food out to them?"

The Border Defender paused for a full ten seconds, a vast amount of time for a computing device. Wilson could almost see the electrons flowing. "Will allow outbound-only telefactor transport of required supplies. Please enter materiel request."

One of the people at the chainlink had evidently dug enough of a hole to worm their way under the fence without getting zapped, and was standing in the clear zone between the chainlink and the sentinel's warning beam. He held his hands up, open, to show that he was unarmed. Harry shouted at him to go back. The man went to his knees, holding out begging hands, and the sentinel turned a spotter beam on him, another red line in the air, ending in a dot on the man's forehead. Fear etched his features, but he continued to knee-walk towards the inner chainlink. The sentinel boomed: "Turn back! Do not approach the inner fence!"

Harry made desperate warding-off motions to the man. "He can't understand you!" he yelled at the sentinel. "He doesn't speak English!"

The Border Defender boomed amplified commands in Spanish and French. The man continued to knee-walk towards them. Wilson tore his daypack from his back, and rummaged inside for his lunch. He pulled it out and tossed it past the man in the deathzone, and the man smiled, and got up and ran for the lunch. He ripped it open, and began to stuff his face without ceremony. The sentinel tracked him with the spotter beam, but turned it off as he began his retreat. Wilson suspected that it had been only moments from opening fire. Harry waved to attract the attention of the others outside the fence, and pantomimed eating, and pointed to his watch, and the people outside seemed to understand. Harry returned to the sentinel. It asked him, "Was he French or Spanish?"

"He's aphasic," Harry said.

"I do not find that under nationality listings. What language do aphasics speak?"

"That's just it. They don't. Look it up under medical. It doesn't matter how much you tell them, they can't understand it."

Wilson spoke up. "Hey, Harry, long time no see. Uh - I know that there's a national disaster going on, but what the hell is the extent of it all? I mean, we're pretty much OK in here, but looking at these folks, I can't imagine them not being rounded up and cared for unless the system was at the point of collapse. Is it the whole state? The whole country?"

"Oh, God, Wilson, I wish it was that small potatoes. Remember the light-show? Our missile-shield really did work as advertised, but this might be the only continent on earth where life is really possible for anything more complex than cockroaches and mice... but we certainly didn't escape unscathed. The HindAsians hit us with a Babel-plague... among other things. The reason that the sentinel is so adamant (I tried the highest level priorities I know on it) is because small camps like this one, and a few military bases and such like, are the last bastions of civilization. Those people out there are survivors. The only reason we're not awash with the smell of death is that this area of the country is pretty unpopulated. As near as I can tell, it's not just the state, not just the country... it's the world."