“By signs and gestures I was soon able to converse with my rescuers. They were a girl and boy, and their names were Machine Washable and Allow Twelve Days For Delivery. It seemed that they had been on an expedition of their own when they found me; digging for Blast Glass in the ruins of an ancient city called Duluth. (I discovered, by the way, that the members of their savage tribe prize a Blast Glass necklace just as much as any well-dressed lady in Paris or Traktiongrad. Both my new friends wore armlets and earrings of the stuff.) They were very skilled at surviving among the dreadful deserts of America; turning over stones to catch edible grubs, and finding drinkable water by observing the growth-patterns of certain types of algae. But that wasteland was not their home. No, they had come from further north, and now it seemed they were returning with me to their tribe!
“Imagine my excitement, Tom! Going up that river was like going back to the earliest beginnings of the world. To begin with, nothing but barren rock, pierced here and there by time-ravaged stones or twisted girders which were all that remained of some great building of the Ancients. Then, one day, I spied a patch of green moss, and then another! A few more days of northing and I began to see grass, ferns, rushes clustering on either bank. The river itself grew clearer, and Allow Twelve Days caught fish, which Machine Washable cooked for us over a fire each evening on the shore. And the trees, Tom! Birches and oaks and pines covered the landscape, and the river opened into a broad lake, and there upon the shore were the rude dwellings of the tribe. What a sight for a historian! America alive again, after all those millennia!