I was - was too weak, delirious, frightened. He threw up the food and convulsed and died. It gave me the strength to go on, but Run was sickening from a snake bite he got the sixth day out of Eden. Must have been decades old, but we cut them open and ate the stuff. When Run and I broke open the box, we found some canned goods inside. Some other hapless wanderers must have brought it here - we found disintegrating skeletons on the second floor, next to charred wood on a sheet-metal plate. We found a steel box in here, all rusted and jammed closed. "It should be over there - in the shadows - propped up against the wall. Rockson fumbled through the dead man's clothing until he found the small steno pad with pencil notes inside an inner pocket of his frost-covered tunic. And so they had desisted from tasting this real human. Perhaps the animals had tried to taste the plastic statues over the centuries and found them unpalatable. The body appeared to be untouched the cold had kept it from rotting. The body was there, stiff and frozen, its eyes wide and mouth gaping, the lips blue. Rockson shone the beam of his light over in the direction Danik indicated. Then they were off on their quest for Eden. He drew estimated margin-of-error lines too - dotted lines that were as much as ten miles to one side or the other of their new route. Rockson drew some pencil marks on the maps, using the meager angles and sun-elevation heights that Dutil had jotted down. They all chanted an amen in unison, and then went back and spread out their maps, and compared them to the notes from Run Dutil's little pad. Rockson hoped that any roving scavengers attracted by the body of Run Dutil would not have eaten his notebook as well - some species of high-plains bobcat ate even metal cans They quickly made for the boulderfield Danik had indicated. "It wasn't like that when I was here two weeks ago," Danik gasped. "I remember this place," Danik said, "the President's Museum is about a mile away from here - just beyond those boulders shaped like a pile of kid's blocks." There is still some heat from radioactive elements in that surface - hence the clicking you hear on the Geiger attached to the front of my sled. You notice that there is no snow on that mile-wide plain either. "The heat of the air-detonated blast melted the sand into that shiny surface. "That's the area that took a nuke bomb hit back in the twentieth century," said Rockson grimly. They came over the ridge and looked down on a glassy-surfaced blackened plain. They didn't like the President's museum much, it seemed. The dogs were howling and yapping, apparently happy to be on the trail again. But there was no letup in the cold temperatures, or in the golfball-sized hailstones pounding the hunched-down travelers. Soon they were approaching the old border of Colorado into Arizona. Taking the bearing to the southeast that Dutil's notes indicated, they moved their sleds along at a good thirty miles per hour through icy weather conditions.
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