On an RV parked by the side of the road, a door flew open and a man, still in the act of shrugging an assault rifle over his shoulder by its strap, pounded down an external staircase and turned to face them. Watching on the other side with only mild curiosity was an older man standing before a smoking steel drum and using tongs to flip hot dogs. The one with the rifle strutted into the road and began waving both arms above his head. Following the instructions from the woman in the information center, Sophia kept the car moving at maybe five miles per hour and simply drove around the guy, slaloming around a series of barriers that did not quite block the road and passing into the uninhabitable radioactive wasteland beyond. The road negotiated a few curves and dips that limited visibility for a while, and then came out in full view of a Starbucks.

“What was it like before?” Sophia asked Enoch a few minutes later, after they had all got drinks at the drive-thru. The autopilot was back in effect and they were heading toward the relatively bright lights of Moab, still a couple of miles distant. She was thinking about the woman reading the book in the information center. About the whole idea of information centers. About information.

“Depends on how far back you want to go,” Enoch pointed out.

“Just saying that for everyone else in this car the post-Moab world is basically all we’ve ever known. Where people can’t even agree that this town exists.”

“What was it like when people agreed on facts, you mean?” Enoch asked. He seemed a little amused by the question. Not in a condescending way. More charmed.

“Yeah. Because they did, right? Walter Cronkite and all that?”