She had heard the name Nader mentioned several times, but it took her some time to get around to toggling a different branch of the "footnote" function. As she did so, she asked for explanations of several other things any Stoner would have taken for granted. That triggered an elementary, synopsized history of the Stone, and of the time between the Death and the construction of the Thistledown.

She was more than a little shocked to discover that the Gentle Nader was, in fact, Ralph Nader, the consumer advocate and independent investigator who had made a big stir in the 1960s and 1970s. He was still alive, back on Earth—her Earth, her time—but in the library records his name was always used reverently. He was always "Gentle Nader" or "the Good Man." Those who took his name—the Naderites—were a powerful political force, and had been for centuries. Or. . . would be. She vowed to use the physicist's concept of time from here on, with events strong along a line, and no particular breakdown into past, present or future.

After the Death, the hideous Long Winter and the Recovery Revolutions, a Spaniard named Diego Garcia de Santillana rose to power in the remains of Western Europe, under the banner of the Return to Life movement. He initiated a tentative push for world government. The next year, in 2010 (just five years from now, she thought, breaking her vow) the first Naderite coalitions formed in North America. Nader—"martyred" during the Death—had been chosen for his stand against nuclear energy and excessive technology; however just or unjust the elevation, he became a saintly figure, a hero in a wasteland still filled with fear and rage against what the human race had done to itself. In 2011, the Naderites absorbed the Return to Lifers, and the re-emerging governments of North America and Western Europe made pacts of exchange and cooperation. Naderite governments were put into office by landslide elections and immediate curbs were sought on high technology and nuclear research. "Agrarianize!" became the rallying cry of a third of the world economy, and the Raiders—an elite, somewhat shadowy organization—fanned out around the world to "persuade" reluctant governments to join in. In Russia, the revolution of 2012, staged by Naderite sympathizers, brought down the last Council government of the USSR, which had already retreated into its center of power, the Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic. Nations throughout the Eastern bloc regained their political sovereignty, and most of them went over to the Naderites.