As Joe Bob lay watching surreptitiously, they washed as best they could, using water from a Lister bag, avoiding the scum-coated and bubbling water of the foul creek that crawled like an enormous gray potato slug through the clearing. Then the old man with the odd eye came to him and knelt down and pressed his palm against Joe Bob's cheek. Joe Bob opened his eyes.

“No fever. Good morning.”

“Thanks,” Joe Bob said. His mouth was dry.

“How about a cup of pretty good coffee with chicory?” The old man smiled. There were teeth missing.

Joe Bob nodded with difficulty. “Could you prop me up a little?”

The old man called, “Walter...Marty...” and the one who could not speak came to him, followed by the black man with the half-ivory face. They gently lifted Joe Bob into a sitting position. His back hurt terribly and every muscle in his body was stiff from having slept on the cold ground. The old man handed Joe Bob a plastic milk bottle half-filled with coffee. “There's no cream or sugar, I'm sorry,” he said. Joe Bob smiled thanks and drank. It was very hot, but it was good. He felt it running down inside him, thinning into his capillaries.

“Where am I? What is this place?”

“N'vada,” said the woman, coming over and hunkering down. She was wearing plowboy overalls chopped short at the calves, held together at the shoulders by pressure clips.

“Where in Nevada?” Joe Bob asked.

“Oh, about ten miles from Tonopah.”

“Thanks for helping me.”

“I dint have nothin' to do with it at all. Had my way, we'd've moved on already. This close to the tramway makes me nervous.”

“Why?” He looked up; the aerial tramway, the least impressive of all Paolo Soleri's arcologies, and even by that comparison breathtaking, soared away to the horizon on the sweep-shaped arms of pylons that rose an eighth of a mile above them.

“Company bulls, is why. They ride cleanup, all up'n down this stretch. Lookin' for sabooters. Don't like the idea them thinkin' we's that kind.”

Joe Bob felt nervous. The biggest patriots were on death row. Rape a child, murder seven women, blow the brains out of an old shopkeeper, that was acceptable; but be anti-country and the worst criminals wanted to wreak revenge. He thought of Greg, who had been beaten to death on Q's death row, waiting on appeal, by a vark-killer who'd sprayed a rush hour crowd with a squirter, attempting to escape a drugstore robbery that had gone sour. The vark-killer had beaten Greg's head in with a three-legged stool from his cell. Whoever these people were, they weren't what he was.

“Bulls?” Joe Bob asked.

“How long you been onna dodge, boy?” asked the incredibly tall one with the hook for a hand. “Bulls. Troops. The Man.”

The old man chuckled and slapped the tall one on the thigh. “Paul, he's too young to know those words. Those were our words. Now they call them...”

Joe Bob linked in to the hesitation. “Varks?”

“Yes, varks. Do you know where that came from?” Joe Bob shook his head.

The old man settled down and started talking, and as if he were talking to children around a hearth, the others got comfortable and listened. “It comes from the Dutch Afrikaans for earth-pig, or aardvark. They just shortened it to vark, don't you see.”

He went on talking, telling stories of days when he had been younger, of things that had happened, of their country when it had been fresher. And Joe Bob listened. How the old man had gotten his poached egg in a government medical shop, the same place Paul had gotten his metal hook, the same place Walter had lost his tongue and Marty had been done with the acid that had turned him ha1f-white in the face. The same sort of medical shop where they had each suffered. But they spoke of the turmoil that had ended in the land, and how it was better for everyone, even for roaming bands like theirs. And the old man called them bindlestiffs, but Joe Bob knew whatever that meant, it wasn't what he was. He knew one other thing: it was not better.

“Do you play Monopoly?” the old man asked.

The hunchback, his plastic dome flickering in pastels, scampered to a roll-up and undid thongs and pulled out a cardboard box that had been repaired many times. Then they showed Joe Bob how to play Monopoly. He lost quickly; gathering property seemed a stupid waste of time to him. He tried to speak to them about what was happening in America, about the abolition of the Pentagon Trust, about the abolishment of the Supreme Court, about the way colleges trained only for the corporations or the Trust, about the central computer banks in Denver where everyone's identity and history were coded for instant arrest, if necessary. About all of it. But they knew that. They didn't think it was bad. They thought it kept the sabooters in their place so the country could be as good as it had always been.

“I have to go,” Joe Bob said, finally. “Thank you for helping me.” It was a stand-off: hate against gratitude.

They didn't ask him to stay with them. He hadn't expected it.

He walked up the gravel bank; he stood under the long bird-shadow of the aerial tramway that hurtled from coast-tocoast, from Gulf to Great Lakes, and he looked up. It seemed free. But he knew it was anchored in the earth, deep in the earth, every tenth of a mile. It only seemed free, because Soleri had dreamed it that way. Art was not reality, it was only the appearance of reality.

He turned east. With no place to go but more of the same, he went anywhere. Till thunder crashed, in whatever dark closet.

Convocation, at the State University of New York at Buffalo, was a catered affair. Catered by varks, troops, squirters and (Joe Bob, looking down from a roof, added) bulls. The graduating class was eggboxed, divided into groups of no more than four, in cubicles with clear plastic walls. Unobstructed view of the screens on which the President Comptroller gave his address, but no trouble for the quellers if there was trouble. (There had been rumors of unrest, and even a one-page hectographed protest sheet tacked to the bulletin boards on campus.)

Joe Bob looked around with the opera glasses. He was checking the doggie guards.

Tenure and status among the faculty were indicated by the size, model and armament of the doggie guard robots that hovered, humming softly, just above and to the right shoulder of every administrator and professor. Joe Bob was looking for a 2013 Dictograph model with mist sprayers and squirt nozzles. Latest model...President Comptroller.

The latest model down there in the crowd was a 2007. That meant it was all assistant profs and teaching guides.

And that meant they were addressing the commencement exercises from the studio in the Ad Building. He slid back across the roof and into the gun tower. The guard was still sleeping, cocooned with spin ex. He stared at the silver-webbed mummy. They would find him and spray him with dissolvent. Joe Bob had left the nose unwebbed; the guard could breathe.

Bigger killer!

Shut up.

Effective commando.

I told you to shut the hell up!

He slipped into the guard's one-piece stretch suit, smoothed it down the arms to the wrists, stretching it to accommodate his broader shoulders. Then, carrying the harness and the rucksack, he descended the spiral staircase into the Ad Building proper. There were no varks in sight inside the building. They were an on perimeter detail, it was a high caution alert : commencement day.

He continued down through the levels to the central heating system. It was June. Hot outside. The furnaces had been damped, the air conditioners turned on to a pleasant 71° throughout the campus. He found the schematic for the ducts and traced the path to the studio with his finger. He slipped into the harness and rucksack, pried open a grille and climbed into the system. It was a long, vertical climb through the ductwork. Climbing