“General,” Manuel said, “do you remember us? I’m Manuel Quintana, and this is my wife, Cathy. You saved our lives.”

Archie Gladstone had so much on his mind that the memory came slowly. Then, suddenly he remembered. “Quintana. Oh, yes, of course! You’re the couple we picked off the mountain in the Osprey. How are you doing?”

“We’re doing fine, General. How about you?”

He shook his head and laughed. “Busy. I’m commander of the Western Defense Zone. As you probably know, the secretary of defense ordered a major deployment of combined forces to Albuquerque to escape the volcanic ash. By the way, the secretary never got to meet you, but we’ve talked about you more than once. He’ll be out this way before long. I’d love to set up a meeting.”

“That would be great,” Manuel said. He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a pen and a pad of paper to write down a phone number, paused, then asked “Tell me, General, were you among the affected or the unaffected?”

Archie Gladstone laughed. “The unaffected, but that hasn’t made me too popular with some of my colleagues. How about you?”

Manuel breathed a sigh of relief. “Unaffected—all of us. General, we’re living up in the hills in a place called El Refugio. When we started, there was just a handful of people. Now it’s more like ten thousand, from all over North America. All of them are unaffected. They had to get away from the terrible things that were—that are—” he corrected himself, “happening.”

“I understand perfectly,” Archie Gladstone replied. “I’ll bet you folks could use some help, if there are that many of you. Tell me—what can I do for you?”

“General, we need power tools, earth-moving equipment, trenchers, well diggers—that sort of thing.”

“I’ll have that and a whole lot more sent to help you in less than a week. I’ll also see about sending you the equipment you’ll need to set up a sewage-processing plant. But first, how do my people get up to your place?”

Manuel drew a map on the small pad of paper. “It’s about three hours north and west of Albuquerque,” he said, as he sketched roads and turn-off points. “You go north, then west, and follow the lights.”

“The lights?” he said. Archie Gladstone looked at the map, then at Manuel, then back at the map again. “Oh, the lights!” he roared. “Well, that explains it! My pilots and AWACS guys have been reporting strange weather phenomena down this way—some sort of unexplained luminous columns in the sky over this precise area. We thought they were reflections off the clouds, or some sort of aurora caused by the volcanoes. But now I know better.