technological breakthrough. Books were useful here. No amount of nuking can
destroy every book in the entire world. Knowledge was power over the darkness,
the destroyer of ignorance and fear.
For much of the twenty-first century the survivors lived on a knife-edge. It was
a hand-to-mouth existence. Yet slowly they learned how to cope with disaster,
take each day as it came, adapt. They began to experiment with what they had,
discover new ways of doing old things—and discover old ways of doing old things.
They began to explore.
Toward the end of the century a man stumbled across an astonishing cache of food
and merchandise and survival equipment and weapons. He discovered that this was
a Stockpile, laid down before the Nuke by the government of the day. The man
learned that there were other hidden Stockpiles dotted across the vast land. He
began to trade this material, began to search for more caches, began to
travel—at first by steam truck and then, after he’d come across the first of
many huge Stockpiles of oil and gasoline, by gasoline-driven vehicles.
At first he did this for purely mercenary reasons, but as the years went by he
found that bringing light to dark places had its own reward.
Then others began to trade, others whose motives were by no means as altruistic.
This is often the way.
NOW, IN 2104—old style—just over one hundred years after the Nuke in what had
once been known as North America, the descendants of those who had not succumbed
to radiation sickness or died by violence at the brutal hands of their fellow
men and women, look out upon a vastly altered and for the most part hideously
strange world.
To the north lies a cold waste where men clothe themselves in furs the year
round. Where once the Great Lakes had been, there is now a huge, sullen inland
sea, bordered on the northeast and south by a blasted land. From Cape Cod down
to South Carolina lies a ruin-choked wasteland to which only now is life slowly
returning, but to the north of this seared terrain—New Hampshire—and below
it—South Carolina—there exist bustling Baronies, ruled by powerful families who
have clawed out territory for themselves over a period of sixty years or so.
Here primitive manufacturing industry can be found, a veneer of civilized
sophistication. Even electric light. But there have, of course, been no
advances. Weapons, tools, gadgets: all these date from the last quarter of the
twentieth century, either as relics handed down from father to son over three
generations and kept in as workable condition as possible, or as loot from the
various Stockpiles opened up over the years.
Where in the South the rich and evil soup of chemical and biological agents
vomited across the landscape, there now exist fetid strontium swamps and
near-tropical forest, where new and terrible life-forms lurk.
The Southwest has become a huge tract of simmering hotland, dust-bowl territory
for the most part, skinned of cacti and even the most primitive forms of
vegetation, where 250 mph winds hurtle in from the Gulf. And when by some
atmospheric miracle storm clouds sweep across from the Pacific, it is acid rain
that falls—pure acid that can strip a man to the bones in seconds flat.
The resculpted West Coast has now calmed down, although it is still volcanic,
and far below the earth’s surface and beneath the waves there are still
tremendous natural forces simmering in uneasy captivity. Stark fjords stab into
the mountainous coastline to the north; steaming lagoons lie to the south.
In the heartland of this huge country there are dramatic changes. The Great Salt
Lake, already rising dangerously in the late twentieth century, has extended its
bounds because of quake subsidence at the Wasatch Fault and the years’ long
drenchings caused by intense climatic disturbance. It now covers nearly 15,000
square miles and is roughly the area of the ancient Lake Bonneville of more than
ten thousand years ago.
Everywhere there are ruined cities overgrown with noxious vegetation where
people, of a kind, still live and battle for survival and supremacy among the
brooding tree-and undergrowth-choked urban canyons. A new lake has formed in