Read Directive 51 for Free Online Page B

around, and a rain of ending would fall gently on the Big System below, perhaps in drips and spots across several square miles. Two hours later, the balloon itself would be gooey sludge on the ground somewhere—and another source of infection.
    “Yeee-hah!” he yelled, as the balloon rose higher and caught the bright morning sun.
    “Thank you for your applause,” Tracy said. “That was sixty-seven seconds, but I bet I can get it under forty before the day is out. Which will leave me the world record holder since we’ll never need to do this again.”
    “I’ll brag endlessly of your record,” he said. “Just one of many things to brag about.”
    She came back and insisted on a kiss before getting back to work, and that was lovely too. Daybreak was honestly the best idea Grady had ever encountered. Even being up in the morning sober would be all right if he had to do more of it, which he might, because they had already discussed that until things settled down after Daybreak, they might have to do some fishing or cargo-hauling to conceal the existence of the half ton of gold beneath the false lowest deck.
    Contemplating a world where he had nothing to complain about, he grinned, and shouted, “Yeee-hah!” again.

ABOUT THE SAME TIME. ALONG COLORADO STATE HIGHWAY 13. 7:10 A.M. MST. MONDAY, OCTOBER 28.
    The long, winding two-lane road that snaked up into and over the mountains into Wyoming was nearly empty and Jason drove through deep tunnels of evergreens, burst into sunny meadows, and descended around the edges of wide, sunny valleys.
    This road would become a track for wagons, then just a trail with the occasional traveler with a leather or canvas (never nylon again!) pack. Elk would graze on whatever popped up between the old cracked asphalt. The neat metal buildings of the ranches would fall into rusty piles. Stupid ranch houses, made of bricks hauled up here from a thousand miles away, would be dens of bears and roosts of crows. Great idea, too late to be a poem, probably. Maybe after.
    Jason had taken this job because someone had to lay down the Daybreak seeds in the far back country so that, if the Big System tried to retreat from its deadly, miserable cities and spread its ecocidal madness to the clean wilderness, the nanoswarm and biotes would be here already, dug in and ready to stop the Big System from doing anything other than what it needed to do—stay in place, and die.
    It was an honor to be trusted with such a vital assignment, when so many others were just out throwing biotes and nanoswarm any old place in the cities and along the highways. Besides, Jason admitted to himself, he had always loved driving in the mountains, especially in the fall, and this would probably be his last chance ever to do that.
    He made his first stop in a broad meadow, about two miles across, at one of those solar-powered signs that talked to the satellites or the distant cell towers and displayed messages from the Highway Patrol: DRY & CLR THRU RIO BLANCO. During the winter it probably had more important things to say.
    Nobody coming in either direction, not even a distant rooster-tail of autumn dust. He pulled on his gloves, leaving the engine running despite the added pollution and waste of gas, taking no more chances than he had to with his starter.
    Jason reached in among the egg-packing cardboard and pulled out an object about the size and shape of an egg, the color of polished obsidian with a thick coating of clear varnish, except for one flat side, where a ring of white plastic surrounded a silvery spot the size of his thumbprint. From the toolbox in the back, he pulled out a caulking gun loaded with Liquid Nails, and applied a neat ribbon of the brownish glue to the white plastic, careful not to lap over onto the metal. He didn’t need the stepladder; the sign wasn’t much taller than he was.
    The sign was double-sided, and the other side said, OPN RNGE—CATTLE ON RD. The solar collector faced south, on an