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Out of Milliways: A discovery, along the Old Post Road.

Ellen and Dogmeat step through the door and promptly shake off a cloud of dust- well, Dogmeat does. Ellen just steps away from the heeler and kicks the dust off her stealth suit's boots. "Does anybody here know about people that a university library might be named after?" she says. "An American university library, I mean? We've found what's left of one..."

She's going to get a bowl of water for Dogmeat regardless. Sniffing around in the ruins hasn't done the poor dog's nose or throat any favors, and she's not about to wait for an answer.

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Sasha looks up from his lunch.

"I don't know about people, but I'm sure we've got a catalog of American universities somewhere back at the office. In my time there are an awful lot of them and selecting which one to attend is a long, involved process that occupies a great deal of students' time and attention toward the end of high school. Would that help?

"Also I think I owe you some prototype animal-repelling gadgets."

"It's possible?" Ellen says. "I know we're somewhere in Pennsylvania, about forty miles or so from Philadelphia, and that we're on what the locals call the Old Post Road. The school itself's about a quarter mile or so from the Old Post Road. Mostly I'm trying to figure out what we can expect from the library ruins, assuming there's anything viable left in there at all, but we can't tell if it's named after a scientist or someone literary or some military figure or what."

Because really, who else would you name a library after.

"It's okay if it takes a while with the gadgets, for what that's worth? I'm in the field just at the moment, so it's not like I can give them to anyone in town..."

"I don't know that area myself, but ... hmm. Bar? One copy of some edition of the Fiske Guide to Colleges, please. Contemporary to me, but from her world if you can manage it."

Bar produces a phonebook-sized volume with a napkin on top reading If this publication existed in Ellen's world, it had a different name.

"This isn't all the colleges, but there's an excellent chance it covers the one you found, and it's got a geographic index.

"Maybe I should just leave the gadgets with Bar next time I come in and you can pick them up when it's convenient for you?"

"That would probably be a good idea," says Ellen, and smiles. "Thank you, Sasha. How have you been, by the way? It's been a while."

"You're welcome. I've been well -- we arrested a ring of psychic con men the other week, and I might have invented a device that can recover lost memories, although it needs a lot more testing.

"What takes you to Pennsylvania?"

"One of the people we thawed out from the alien ship I told you about," Ellen says. "She used to be fairly highly placed at a company called General Atomics. They made robots before the War, but they also made power systems capable of running whole Vaults. Their world headquarters was in Philadelphia. If there's anything left of it, she's given us information on how to find the place and what the layout was like, so I've been sent with a few people for backup to see what we can find in the ruins."

"That sounds like it could be immensely valuable," Sasha says, "but is there any nuclear fuel left that you could use for those reactors?"

"There's more of it left than there is of coal or petroleum," Ellen says. "We've only been able to build one wind farm so far, and we don't have the tools or equipment for manufacturing solar panels. We more or less have to try, especially since recovering pre-War tech is basically one of the central tenets of Brotherhood of Steel belief."

"Makes sense. It's interesting that your timeline seems to have made much more use of nuclear reactors in general. We had a couple of highly publicized containment accidents in civilian power reactors, and that put everyone off using it for non-military purposes, even though coal is actually worse in the long run."

Sasha makes a face. (Humans, so irrational sometimes.)

"I'm curious, what did you find that has you asking about people a library would be named after?"

"I don't know that we had much of a choice," Ellen says. "The Texas oil fields ran dry in the 2050s, and other oil supplies around the world didn't last a whole lot longer. I've only ever encountered solar generation as an emergency backup at RobCo and it was barely enough to keep the mainframes running and turn on some of the lights. There were a few hydroelectric dams, and some of the Vaults ran on geothermal, but-" She shrugs. "I don't know. We didn't really get much of a 'why' beyond 'everything else ran out', in history class."

At the question she digs into a pouch on her belt and comes up with an object the size of a deck of cards. After shuffling through it a bit, she pops out a Polaroid-type instant photograph and hands it over; it's of the remains of a sign in front of what looks like about half the remains of a building. The sign reads:

LANGSTON HUGHES
MEMORIAL LIBRARY

"This is the largest remaining building in the area."

Sasha shrugs too. "It hardly matters at your remove."

Then he shakes his head at the photo. "That does look like a university library, but the name doesn't ring any bells, I regret."

(American jazz poets were not a priority in West German primary education.)

"Oh well," says Ellen. "We'll do our preliminary survey when I get back and see if there's anything to be found regardless. Unless there's an archival holotape somewhere, we won't be able to round up much anyway, not until we're on our way back from Philadelphia. We have to save room on the pack Brahmin for whatever we might be able to recover at the mission target site."

"There's still this," Sasha indicates the catalogue of universities. "Though it may only say what university you're likely to be in, and not what they called the library."

"That'd still be helpful. We'd be more likely to prioritize recovering material from a technical school or a general university than somewhere that just taught art or something," Ellen says. "There were colleges that did that, right? Just taught art?"

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