"Maybe if we tried to get a little more power on the set—"
That was Loudons, too, Altamont thought. There wasn't a better man at the Fort, when it came to dealing with people, but confront him with a problem about things, and he was lost. That was one of the reasons why he and the stocky, phlegmatic social scientist made such a good team, he thought. As far as he, himself, was concerned, people were just a mysterious, exasperatingly unpredictable, order of things which were subject to no known natural laws. That was about the way Loudons thought of things; he couldn't psychoanalyze them.
He gestured with his pipe toward the nuclear-electric conversion unit, between the control-cabin and the living quarters in the rear of the box-car-sized helicopter.
"We have enough power back there to keep this windmill in the air twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, for the next fifteen years," he said. "We just don't have enough radio. If I'd step up the power on this set any more, it'd burn out before I could say, 'Altamont calling Fort Ridgeway.'"
"How far are we from Pittsburgh, now?" Loudons wanted to know.
Altamont looked across the cabin at the big map of the United States, with its red and green and blue and yellow patchwork of vanished political divisions, and the transparent overlay on which they had plotted their course. The red line started at Fort Ridgeway, in what had once been Arizona It angled east by a little north, to Colony Three, in northern Arkansas; then sharply northeast to St. Louis and its lifeless ruins; then Chicago and Gary, where little bands of Stone Age reversions stalked and fought and ate each other; Detroit, where things that had completely forgotten that they were human emerged from their burrows only at night; Cleveland, where a couple of cobalt bombs must have landed in the lake and drenched everything with radioactivity that still lingered after two centuries; Akron, where vegetation was only beginning to break through the glassy slag; Cincinnati, where they had last stopped—
"How's the leg, this morning, Jim?" he asked.
"Little stiff. Doesn't hurt much, though."
"Why, we're about fifty miles, as we follow the river, and that's relatively straight." He looked down through the transparent nose of the 'copter at a town, now choked with trees that grew among tumbled walls. "I think that's Aliquippa."