Chapter Seven
That inane romance novel, the one whose cover painting showed a buxom blonde in an off-the-shoulder dress getting groped from behind by some bare-chested guy with windblown black locks, was the first book Garrett ever discovered in the hydrogen-bombed ruins, and at the time even this humble thing had seemed something special to the poor solitary man. It was cheap and hackneyed, it was tawdry and yet had not even the honesty of purpose of true erotica, it bore about the same relation to “culture” as a crumpled cigarette butt blowing in the slipstream of a maglev train once had had…but by God, it was still a book—a book! He had to have it.
When he had completed his exploration for that trip—meaning that he had used about 40% of the crawler’s power supply in his meanderings, s
