The convoy proceeded north, but oh so very slowly now. And even when they came across a badly potholed, shrub and bramble festooned road the going wasn’t too much improved. But things could have been worse; the radiation count was so far down that chief tech Andrew Fielding was beginning to have doubts about his instruments; and the one-time hydroponics chief, Doris Ainsworth, was almost delirious about the quality and quantity of greenery bordering the route.
Close to an ancient farm whose stone buildings leaned under the weight of years and rampant ivy, there were fields of vegetables run wild and apple orchards where early fruit was already ripening on lush, heavy branches. A five minute halt to let the clan folk gather armfuls of good sweet food, and then they were on their way again.
Less than a ponderous mile later there was a great stand of oaks set back from the side of the road, but the travellers had never in their lives imagined anything like this! The thicket—though that was hardly the right word for it—was perhaps two acres in extent and packed solid with trees that soared as much as eighty feet tall, apparently vying with each other for space and light! In the dense, luxuriant outer canopy a vastly sprawling rookery housed hundreds of huge glossy crows who protected their nests with raucous cries, a handful of them even swooping on the column in an attempt to scare the noisy intruders off…
In the middle of the afternoon, when the leader called the customary short halt to allow for calls of nature, Doris Ainsworth came bustling up front to the rauper to speak to him.
“These trees and the countryside all around—” she told him, “—all of the green things—Jon, I tell you it’s not natural! The radiation levels are down, I know, but still there’s mutant growth in all this stuff; in fact these are almost new species! In the last hundred miles or so the change from what we used to call ‘badlands’ to what we see now—the difference in the quality of the soil, and the obvious viability of rich clean growth in all this vegetation—it’s truly astonishing! And if things continue improving like this the further north we journey, then I’ll readily concede to a belief in just such a paradise as the kindred have told us they’re accustomed to! Why, if not for the awful fear of fly-by-nights, we might even have built our homes and settled around that tumbledown old farm back there; or perhaps right here, right now, where no one would need to go short of anything ever again!…Well, shelter perhaps, next winter, but certainly not good food! Oh, and by the way—here, do try one of these apples. Not quite ripe just yet but pulpy, pungent and utterly delicious!”
“Madame, I thank you,” Big Jon told her. “Yes, and I too am sorry there are such things as fly-by-nights—but alas, there are! So please don’t go making suggestions of that sort to anyone else; for there are some who might just be stupid enough to give it a go…only to die in the very first raid, or as soon as they run out of ammunition.”
“Ah!” the lady replied, rapidly blinking as she backed off. “But—did you call it a suggestion? Hardly that—no, never! It was nothing more than an ‘if’, that’s all.”
“Why yes, of course it was,” said the other. “And ‘if’ pigs could fly…?” But Doris was already making her way back to her own position in the convoy. Observing her retreat, Big Jon took a bite of apple, chewed meditatively for a moment, then spat it out. Too bitter for his liking, he felt it would give him wind. Anyway it was time to go, and he mounted his rauper’s rusty flank…
Some three hours later, having climbed a long slow rise through wild but flourishing countryside, the convoy looked down from a basin’s rim on a broad valley offering vastly dissimilar views. The now almost non-existent road—its surface reduced by time, weather and burgeoning scrub to tilting blocks of concrete and asphalt under dense layers of bramble and creeper—descended steeply to the valley’s floor, where it then proceeded more or less parallel with a wide river whose source lay somewhere beyond a hazy northern horizon. East of the defunct road, rising contours diverted the water toward far distant regions; but something a little less than two miles due north and ahead of this divergence, twin bridges a quarter-mile apart had long ago surrendered to the flow. Now their half-submerged skeleton sections formed gapped jetties against which the rushing water gathered speed and energy, spinning itself into gleaming whirlpools as it was sucked below, resurfacing on the southern side in spiralling eddies and gushing foam.
East of the river and almost directly ahead of the convoy, the remains of a medium-sized town lay clearly visible. Mainly in ruins, still a handful of squat, three- or four-story buildings on the river’s edge—possibly mills that once ran on hydroelectric power—had survived, barely. Most of them had lost their roofs, and the entire top floor of another had collapsed inward.
Away from the river across town, a railroad’s once-terminal remained mostly intact, with arrow-straight tracks running east through ruined suburbs. About halfway to the eastern limits of unaided vision, a train’s carriages lay scattered like cast aside toys across badly cratered tracks; while at a similar distance but a mile or so north of the wreck, a great crater almost a quarter-mile in diameter sat central in a scene of total devastation. In fact, nothing but this ashen moonscape remained to be seen: just this vast rayed bowl with its shallow lake, where despite the passing of so much time only a blue-green algae had found a way to survive and even flourish; and outside the crater’s raised rim, a star-burst effect of symmetrical white rays, laid down by the outfall over the blackened debris and desolation of what was once a small village…
“Well, and so much for lands east!” Big Jon Lamon muttered morosely to himself where he stood in the turret of his rauper and surveyed the valley’s expanse. “And whatever our journey’s ultimate destination…” he shook his head, and then continued determinedly, “it definitely won’t be in that direction!”
As for the countryside to the west:
Houses and other buildings when blown up, knocked or burned down, soon become rubble and ashes. But trees, foliage, all the green things in general—while they too suffer occasional disasters—they tend to return: they grow back again and quickly, often to the extent of shoving aside and burying the rubble and the ashes. Here in the westerly reaches of this valley, however—whether as the product of Doris Ainsworth’s theory of nuclear radiation and mutation, or simply the result of evolution in an environment radically transformed by the absence of Man and his poisonous works—here the green things tended to grow, and to grow…and to keep on growing!
Which would definitely appear to be the rule in the rising countryside to the west of the river, where the derelict road—or more properly its smothered and increasingly obscure outline—continued to parallel the water as far as the collapsed twin bridges…and then disappeared utterly beneath the outer canopy of an immense forest!
Big Jon’s bottom jaw fell open. Where earlier he had judged a stand of giant oaks and a rookery of fat glossy crows “astonishing,” now he found himself rethinking that previous evaluation. For what he saw down below, thrusting itself into being on the riverbank opposite the fallen bridges—then opening out to climb rising contours to a ridge some four or five miles west—at the same time spreading out and reaching across the valley’s floor all the way to the northern horizon…now that was truly astonishing! Indeed for long moments he could only stare, finding it hard to take in and accept the sheer enormity of it!