The failure of Liriodendron to return had some benefit for the Institute as a diversion from the curiosity of the populace.  True or false, rumors of new discoveries from the Ancient's lands always had fast talkers eager to spread anew the suspicions of Scientist hoarding that would inflame imaginations and raise the banners of the neo-shamans.  Many were convinced that treasures were to be found beyond the Masodisco Line, the northern frontier of the Mother's people who had reclaimed lands unjustly incorporated in the Ancients' empire.  Fearing unknown diseases and the challenging control of trafficking in potentially noxious artifacts, the Sages had closed the border area and beyond to anyone but the flyers under penalty of death. The borderlands were hard to travel anyhow.  After many centuries of windstorms they were still deserts with sandy horizons spreading East and West to beaches warring with the oceans' seas.

     For centuries folks had heard tales of secret installations where witches brews were blended by Scientists hordes protected by alien mercenaries.  The origins myth of the Scientist Order told of a well-known teacher, a vocal critic of religious dogma who had been warned of an imminent threat.  The Shaman had put a price on his head.  The teacher with his spouse and daughter had boarded their magic chariot and escaped to the wilderness where they attracted disciples.  Their labor had improved the tribe's lot as their devising of rites and incantations dried the eternal deluges and returned the jungle to the warm paradise the Mother had once gifted to her children.

     The Institute's archives told a slightly different but no less amazing story.  The teacher's family had indeed escaped a death threat by driving off to their country home in a Jeep, a chariot of the times.  With the supplies and extra fuel stashed there, they headed North hoping to reach safety in the Ancients' land at a research station the teacher had heard of.  On a sparsely traveled road they came to a bridge at a remote border crossing.  There, disciples of the Shaman had recently done their work.  Hundreds of bodies, strangled, stabbed, or beaten to death cluttered the way making it impossible to avoid running over the dead.  Vultures and coyotes were feeding on the corpses, rats skittered about.  On the bridge a mass of entangled bodies stranded the Jeep.  On foot, under driving rain and in sickening stench, they carried on to find the border post abandoned, its gate blown open.

     They went on, seeking shelter, finding nothing but cadavers and torched dwellings.  They slept in sheds on remnants of litter stinking of the animals butchered there.  The teacher's wife died.  Not of exhaustion, but of despair, he later said.  With his daughter he went on, their supplies dwindling to a few crackers, until they found a side road and walked past 'Warning' and 'Restricted Area' signs to reach another abandoned guard post, its half-opened gates crowded with tumbleweeds.  Exhausted, not caring, perhaps hoping for the thunder of gunfire, they went to a cluster of buildings, shuttered, and dominated by a very large half-round hangar.  It had a small attached shed with an opened door.  Near, they caught the scent of a kerosene heater.

     "What's your name ?" asked a young man who was holding an odd weapon, a two-barrel shotgun with outer hammers, both cocked.  The teacher hesitated, and said "Santiago," after a destroyed city he had once visited.  The young man raised an eyebrow and turned to the young woman.  Caught off guard, drenched and shivering, she was struggling to think of an answer to back her father's lie.  "Sss... Sspp... Spiranthes," she blurted.  At a workbench lit by an oil lamp, an older man was filling empty shells with what appeared to be black powder and ball bearings. "You got to do with what you have," he said, "call me Fixit."  The young man shook his head, disarmed the gun and extended his hand.  "Welcome to Camp Galaxy," he said, "I'm Shotgun Sammy."  That one broke the ice and brought a smile from everyone, though in their levity they had no idea they had started a trend.  Identifying in one word became a Scientist imperative to ward off the accumulation of dynasty power over generations.  Spiranthes, the genus name of Ladies' Tresses, an Orchid, became a favorite choice for female Scientists while the Fixit label humbled the status of many engineers, but Santiago was too revered a name to usurp and Shotgun Sammy was one and only.  As for Camp Galaxy...

     "Camp Galaxy ?"

     "Well, yeah, we'll give you a tour by-and-by."

     Santiago offered his full name and further acquaintance revealed that the older men knew of each other credentials though they lived in different countries.

     "Science knows no border," said Fixit.

     Their hosts' domain was an aeronautics lab which had been transferred to the military.  Fixit had headed the site from its construction until all personnel and guards had been ordered to retreat to an urban location following reports of the imminent collapse of the social order.

     "I had no place to go to and I didn't have the heart to leave," he said, "then I found Sammy, forgotten in a cell where he was doing ten days for a discipline infraction.  His so-called buddies had skittered away with all the weapons and ammunitions. Almost all the ammunitions. I mickeymoused some signal cartridges to fit my great-grandfather's shotgun that was on the wall in my office.  We haven't used it so far, the area has, ahem, emptied of its population.  The quails, well, they are gone, probably unable to take the weather.  We haven't been wanting, though.  Let me show you..."

     He led them into the adjacent space, cavernous and dark where his flashlight could just reveal the shape of an enormous airplane laying strangely low, almost on the ground.

     "It's a Lockheed Martin C5 Galaxy.  Special order, with all the trappings and supplies to evacuate a gaggle of high government officials to Lord-knows-where.  They never showed up. Maybe they were told the last guy on the flight crew shot all the tires flat.  'If I can't get out, they can't get out,' he had said."

     Santiago chuckled.  "You think that's funny?" asked Fixit.

     "Sorry, it reminded me of a joke I heard on a trip to Europe," said Santiago, a bit embarrassed.

     "Really."

     "Oh, it was about the difference between a French worker and an American worker."

     "Huh Huh?"

     "Well, that's how it goes.  When an American sees his boss driving by in a new Cadillac, he dreams of the day when he will be able to afford his own luxury car.  When a Frenchman sees his boss driving by in a new Citroen, he dreams of the day when the revolution will come and the son-of-a-bitch will be walking like everyone else."  Sammy raised both eyebrows, Spiranthes hazarded a pinched smile.  Her father had put his foot in his mouth, Fixit was the boss, the son-of-the-bitch on the premises.

     "Maybe the crew was angry, feeling abandoned," he said after a polite chuckle, but he didn't seem amused at all.  Fixit, the tech boss left behind, commiserating with the help, contemplating the dawn of the post-industrial age.

     "A shame about that plane," he sighed, "anyway, we have been living off it. All kind of groceries and fuel for the stove. Living well. Hope you stay for awhile, the frozen stuff won't last forever..."

     Power was the issue.  Fixit had to be thrifty in his use of the plane's batteries and he couldn't understand why he could not access any of the dozens of spare generators supposed to keep the lights on and the computers humming on the site.  "Everything, every damn lock, is controlled electronically under encryption," he said, "I have all the codes, but they don't work anymore.  I couldn't even break out Sammy.  Good thing the pokey was a janitor hangout upgraded by the Seabees.  If I had built it, he would have died in there.  For refusing to shoot a dog.  It was hard enough, just him and I at the ends of a hacksaw blade.  It took two hours and after that we had to break into the Galaxy's liquor stash."

     Santiago and his daughter weren't going anywhere.  First, they would all hug each other and then, back to the stove.

     Three women arrived a few days later.  Two were in shock, mute, unable to sleep, seemingly unaware of their environment and lost in crying fits over the horrors they had witnessed in their journey.  They were part of the team that had designed and installed the independent power grid that controlled the extra-fuel systems on the Galaxy.  They would be helpful in keeping that beast from decaying in the stench from failing freezers.  The third, Mona, had been the archivist of the place.  There would be more refugees, if they could make it back, she said.  The goods stored in the plane had been the subject of much talk.

THE ARCHIVIST

     Although all personnel at what was then Area 71 had been ordered to retreat to another installation most never made it that far.  Before leaving, Mona was to save all sensitive material on a storage drive, hand it to her commanding officer and destroy all electronic records on site. She did not.

     Mona was angry.  A gaunt, fit, middle aged woman with the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel, she was neither spy material, nor would-be whistleblower.  She simply had witnessed the leadership she had served all of her adult life failing irremediably to control the mayhem in her country.  It was a tragic, stupid case of a criminal mismanagement she had observed times after times in the series of interminable meetings she had attended in her duties.  There, impeccable and impassive, Mona sat in a corner with a tiny earplug and a laptop, recording the proceedings and ad-libing where needed.

     It did not help that she was emailed an order to 'humanely euthanize her dog' --read have a guard shoot the darn thing-- before leaving.  A handsome German shepherd retired from the Special Forces, he was her only love and family.  She took him for a last run in a remote part of the Area, ordered him to 'stay' and returned by a convoluted route, crossing, re-crossing and walking several flooding arroyos.  Perhaps he would survive on his own.

     And Mona did not destroy the site's electronics; she simply modified the encryption parameters that she saved on the second copy of sensitive materials that she kept in a waterproof satchel hanging just beneath her bra, very close to her heart.  Mona was planning to come back, and there she was, sitting by a kerosene stove, soaked like a retriever just out of a pond with a duck in its maw, except Mona's bounty was a tad different, it was not a trophy, it was a key.  A key to every secure system in every building on site, free access to every stash of this or that, including the underground hangars housing the secret fleet of flygliders and Stealth Transports designed to become the new toys of the secret services.  There was a hitch.  Power. The place was darker than Hades.  All switches were off, and it was unclear how much energy the photovoltaic systems were collecting, if any.  Never mind, there were generators fueled up, legions of batteries at some charge level, hand-crank devices.  Conservative use of resources and judicious management would do the trick.  Mona's hand could be on most switches, but surely not all of them.

     Here she was in her civilian travel gear, drying off.  And there was Fixit, eyeing her, knowing full well the extent of her access to the installation's works and already suspecting she could have set up a 'back door' into the systems.  They quickly came to an agreement and set the rules.  The two of them brought to a minimum of life the building their office was in and welcomed the others to claim personal space there under blackout regime and without access to anything else without Mona or Fixit.  Not that anyone there much cared about the temperature in the water coolers --though the coffee machines were awfully tempting-- or was in the mood to rush to a keyboard, but there would be more residents, no doubt.  Mona set the example; she fetched paper and started writing.

Next, LAST RITES and NEW LOVE