“Kanwaka. It’s from some Indian names,” Cady said. “It’s like everything else in Kansas. It used to be Indian land, and we took it and turned it into something bigger and better—namely, a huge bomb site. I haven’t paid that much attention to what they’re doing at Kanwaka, but last I heard, there was some question about the land. One of my grandmother’s friends was trying to broker the conversion of Kanwaka into condos, but the deal fell apart.”

“When Emerald and the others were protesting out there, there must have been pretty tight security,” I said. “Did they camp out on the perimeter, or were there houses or trailers?”

“Tents in the field, is what I was always told,” Cady said. “It’s really hard to find anyone who remembers anything about it—details, I mean. You can talk to people in town, and they all remember the demonstrations. Depending on their politics, it was either a wonderful example of grass-roots activism or a horrendous display of mob violence. Of course, that was way before smartphones, so it’s not like people were posting photos to Instagram or anything. And then the commune burned down about two months after the protest, so there’s not anything left out there to look at.”

“Burned down?” I echoed. “How?”

Cady hunched a shoulder. “They say one of the hippies was probably smoking—dope, they mean—and let a fire get out of control.”

She turned back to the microform and found the story in the Douglas County Herald.

After we and the rest of the Fourth Estate took the spotlight away from the demonstrators at the Kanwaka silo, the hippies evaporated, proving what Air Force Col. Malcolm Pavant suspected all along: these were bored publicity seekers. Apparently they didn’t put out their campfires before they took off. Douglas County Sheriff Milt Julkis reports that about ten days ago a fire took out most of the tents and shacks the protesters left behind. The news was kept quiet until Col. Pavant was able to confirm that there was no damage to the silo and no radiation leakage as a result of the fire. He also confirms that there was no loss of life.

“It’s really hopeless,” Cady said. “The only person I know who really remembers the missile part is one of the math teachers at my school. She’s about ten years older than me, and she grew up out near Kanwaka. She went to this two-room school out by the silo and said it totally spooked her and her friends, going past it every day in the school bus, knowing the U.S. thought we were expendable. Like, we could be a first-strike target because we didn’t count.”

I nodded absently, wanting to know more about Ferring’s involvement. “What was the movie, the anti-nuke movie that they made here? Did Ferring star in that?”