Only a few nuclear weapons fell in America-the weapons that destroyed our nation were biological and, ultimately cultural. But in the chaos, the famine, the plague, there exists a few pockets of order. The strongest of them was the state of Desert, formed from the vestiges of Utah, Colorado, and Idaho. The climate has changed. The great Salt Lake has filled up to prehistoric levels. But there, in the fringes, brave, hardworking pioneers are making the desert bloom again. A civilization cannot be reclaimed by powerful reorganizations, or even by great men alone. It must be renewed by individual men and women, one by one, working together to make a community, a nation, a new America.