Joe and Al had agreed to this, and Ken approved as he heard of it. "It's a good idea. I was hoping to reach some other areas. Maybe we can add some industrial laboratories to our net if any are still operating."
"We've got three," said Maria. "General Electric in Schenectady, General Motors in Detroit, and Hughes in California. Amateurs working for these companies called in. They're all working on the dust."
Through these new amateur contacts Maria had learned that Chicago had been completely leveled by fire. Thousands had died in the fire and in the rioting that preceded it.
New York City had suffered almost as much, although no general fire had broken out. Mob riots over the existing, scanty food supplies had taken thousands of lives. Other thousands had been lost in a panicky exodus from the city. The highways leading into the farming areas in upstate New York and New England areas were clogged with starving refugees. Thousands of huddled bodies lay under the snow.
Westward into Pennsylvania and south into Delaware it was the same. Here the refugees were met with other streams of desperate humanity moving out of the thickly populated cities. Epidemics of disease had broken out where the starving population was thickest and the sanitary facilities poorest.
On the west coast the situation was somewhat better. The population of the Bay Area was streaming north and south toward Red Bluff and Sacramento, and into the Salinas and San Joaquin valleys. From southern California they were moving east to the reclaimed desert farming areas. There were suffering and death among them, but the rioting and mob violence were less.
From all over the country there were increasing reports of groups of wanderers moving like nomadic tribesmen, looting, killing, and destroying. There was no longer any evidence of a central government capable of sufficient communication to control these elements of the population on even a local basis.
Maria played the tapes of these reports for Ken. She seemed stolid and beyond panic as she heard them again. To Ken, hearing them for the first time, it seemed utterly beyond belief. It was simply some science-fiction horror story played on the radio or television, and when it was over he would find the world was completely normal.
He looked up and saw Maria watching him. He saw the little tin-can stove with a few sticks of green wood burning ineffectively. He saw the large rack of batteries behind the transmitter. Unexpectedly, for the first time in many days, he thought of the Italian steamship alone in the middle of the Atlantic.
"The White Bird," he said to Maria. "Did you hear anything more of her?"