Aboard his cart, Tibor McMasters rode in style, with a flourish; pulled by the faithful cow, the cart rattled and bounced on, and miles of weedy pasture passed by, flat country with stalks rising, both tough and dry: this had become arid land, not fit for crops any longer. As he rolled forward, Tibor exulted; he had finally begun his Pilg and it would be a success; he knew it would.

He did not especially fear cutpurses and highwaymen, partly because no one bothered with the highways… he could rationalize this fear away, telling himself that since no traffic passed this way, how could there be highwaymen?

“O friends!” he declared aloud, translating into English the opening words of Schiller’s An die Freunde. “Not these tones! On the contrary, let us sing of—” He paused, having forgotten the rest. God damn it, he said fiercely to himself, baffled by the tricks of his own mind.

The sun blazed down, hot as minnows skimming in the metallic surf, the tidal rise and fall of reality. He coughed, spat, and continued on.

Over everything, the sensual proximity of decay. Even the wild weeds possessed it, this abandonment. No one cared; no one did anything. O Freunde, he thought. Nicht diese Tone. Sondern…

What if there were highwaymen invisible now, due to mutation? No; impossible. He clung to that. Noted, preserved, and maintained that. He did not have to fear men: only the wilderness threatened him. In particular he feared the real possibility of a rupture in the road. A few wide ruts and his cart would not travel on. He could well die amid boulders. Not the best death, he reflected. And yet, not one of the worst.

The broken limbs of trees blocked the road ahead. He slowed down, squinted in the patterned sunlight, trying to make out what it was.

Trees, he decided. Felled at the start of the war. No one has removed them.

In his cart he coasted up to the first tree. A trail of rough pebbles and dirt led off to one side, skirting the fallen trees; the trail, on the far side, led back to the road. If he had been on foot, or riding a bicycle… but instead he rested on a large cart, much too cumbersome to navigate the trail.

“God damn it,” he said.

He stopped his cart, listened to the dull whistle of wind sighing through the broken trees. No human voices. Somewhere far off, something barked, perhaps a dog, or if not that, then a large bird. Squawk, squawk, the sounds came. He spat over the side of his cart and once more surveyed the trail.

Maybe I can make it, he said to himself.

But suppose his cart got stuck?

Gripping the tiller of the cart, he jogged forward, and rumbled off the weed-cracked road and onto the dirt trail. His wheels spun anxiously, a high-pitched whirring sound, and clouds of brown dust whistled up in a dry geyser into the sky.

The cart had become stuck.

He did not get very far, he realized. But, all at once, he felt savage, almost nauseated, fear. A sour taste rose up within him, and his chest and arms burned red with humiliation. Stuck so soon: it humiliated him. Suppose someone saw him, here, caught in the dirt by the side of the collapsing road? They would jeer, he thought. At me. And go on. But—more likely they would assist me, he thought. I mean, it would be unreasonable to jeer. After all, have I become cynical about mankind? They’d help, of course. And yet his ears still burned with shame. To distract himself from his plight he got out a much-creased, oil-soaked Richfield map, and consulted it with an idea that he might find something of use.

He located himself on the map. Hardly a drop in the bucket, he discovered. I’ve only gone say thirty or thirty-five miles.

And yet this constituted a different world from the one he knew at Charlottesville. Another world only thirty miles away… perhaps one of a thousand dissimilar universes wheeling through sidereal time and space. Here and there on the map: names that once meant something. Now it had become a lunar map, with craters: vast potholes scooped out of the earth, down to bedrock. Almost below the soil level, where basalt flourished.

He flicked his whip at the cow, threw the mode-selector into reverse, and, gritting his teeth, rocked back and forth between forward one and reverse; the cart seethed as if on a wilderness of open sea.

The smell of burning oil, the clouds of dust raised… that was all. He groaned, and let up on the throttle. And here am I going to die, a part of his brain declared, and, instantly, he jeered—jeered at himself and his broken plight. He did not need anyone else; he could heap ridicule on himself single-handedly.

He clicked on his emergency bullhorn. Powered by the huge wet-cell battery of the cart, the bullhorn wheezed: his breath augmented. And now his voice.

“Now h-h-hear this!” he declared, and, from all around him, his voice amplified. “I am Tibor McMasters, on an official Pilg for the Servants of Wrath, Incorporated. I’m stuck. Could you give me a hand?” He shut off the bullhorn, listened. Only the lisping of the wind in the tall weeds to his right. And, everywhere, the flat orange luminosity of the sun.

A voice. He heard it. Clearly.

“Help me!” he called into the bullhorn. “I’ll pay you in metal. Okay? Is that okay?” Again he listened. And heard, this time, the scamper of many voices, very shrill, like screams. The noise echoed, blended with the hushed quiver of the weeds.

He got out his binoculars, gazed around him. Nothing but barren countryside, spread out ugly and bleak. Great red spots that hadn’t yet been overgrown, and slag surfaces were still visible—but by this time most ruins had become covered by soil and crabgrass. He saw, far off, a robot farming. Plowing with a metal hook welded to its waist, a section torn off some discarded machine. It did not look up; it paid no attention to him because it had never been alive, and only a living thing could care. The robot farmer continued to drag the rusty hook through the hard ground, its pitted body bent double with the strain. Working slowly, silently, without complaint.

And then he saw them. The source of the noise. Twenty of them scampered across the ruined earth toward him; little black boys who leaped and ran, shouting shrill commands back and forth, as if in a single roofless cage.

“Whither, Son of Wrath?” the nearest little boy piped, meanwhile pushing through the tangled debris and slag. He was a little Bantu, in red rags sewn and patched together. He ran up to the cart, like a puppy, leaping and bounding and grinning white-teethed. He broke off bits of green weeds that grew here and there.

“West,” Tibor answered. “Always west. But I am stuck here.”

The other children sprinted up, now; they formed a circle around the stranded cart. An unusually wild bunch, completely undisciplined. They rolled and fought and tumbled and chased one another madly.

“How many of you,” Tibor said, “have taken your first instruction?”

There was a sudden uneasy silence. The children looked at one another guiltily; none of them answered.

“None of you?” Tibor said, amazed. Only thirty miles from Charlottesville. God, he thought; we have broken down like a rusty machine. “How do you expect to phase yourselves with the cosmic will? How can you expect to know the divine plan?” He whipped his grippers toward one of the boys, the nearest to his cart. “Are you constantly preparing yourself for the life to come? Are you constantly purging and purifying yourself? Do you deny yourself meat, sex, entertainment, financial gain, education, leisure?” But it was obvious; their unrestrained laughter and play proved. “Butterflies,” he said scathingly, snorting with disgust. “Anyhow,” he grated, “get me loose so I can roll on. I order you to!”

The children gathered at the rear of the cart and began to push. The cart bumped against the first fallen tree, going no farther.