Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,58

learn more but—”

“Your Internet has been down all day. Your ISP is in Moab, I take it.”

“That’s right, C.”

“Well, you might like to know that your site is still up and running—evidently it’s hosted somewhere else.”

“That is reassuring to know,” Bob said. After pondering this news for a moment, he changed his tone of voice and said, “So, you have had Internet access recently. On that thing, I guess.” He glanced at the jet.

Corvallis nodded.

Bob said, “I know something weird is happening around Moab but I can’t make heads or tails of it.”

“It’s happening everywhere in the world except Moab,” Corvallis said. “It’s an Internet hoax. A very sophisticated one. Nothing bad has actually happened to anyone in Moab, as far as I can tell. It’s kind of a long story. I would be happy to catch you up in the truck—we have a little bit of driving to do, I take it?”

Bob nodded. “From here it’s about a half-hour drive to the river landing. I understand that the family wishes to be taken back to Moab? That will be another hour.”

Corvallis checked his watch and was startled to find it wasn’t even noon yet. They could be in Moab by midafternoon. Assuming they’d be allowed in. “What do you know about roadblocks and so on?”

“I am confident,” Bob said, “that I can find my way into Moab.”

Bob had more to say on that as he and Corvallis drove up out of the lake bed. “There’s a bunch of ways into town,” he said. “Worst comes to worst, we just transfer to ATVs and avoid roads altogether. And if that fails, we have a little boat with an outboard motor. We can ride it straight up the river.”

They topped the divide between the lake bed behind them and the valley of the Colorado ahead. The scenery made it obvious why the proprietors of this ranch had decided to throw in the towel on ranching per se and make it over into a tourist attraction. Bob pointed along the azimuth of the main ranch house, which was too far away to be seen with the naked eye. Someone there was still operating a ham radio rig, which had come in handy this morning as Corvallis’s support staff had patched it together with emails from the jet and calls to Maeve’s sat phone to make all of these arrangements.

The drive down to the river landing—the last place to take a raft out of the Colorado River before entering the national park—demanded all of Bob’s attention and so he didn’t say much as Corvallis gave him a rundown of what had been going on with the hoax. Along the way he caught occasional glimpses of the brown water of the river, but famously it was a very small trickle of water embedded in a ridiculously huge canyon system and so mostly what he saw was interesting rocks. The final approach wasn’t on a road per se, it was just chundering down a dry arroyo that plunged straight into the Colorado. During the times when it actually carried water, it had deposited a rocky bar along the bank of the river, and it was there that Maeve and her colleague Tom had pulled two rafts up out of the water and set up a little day camp under a pop-up awning. Older Joneses were huddled in the shade of it, looking beleaguered. Younger ones were splashing in the river, completely unconcerned. Bob piloted the truck carefully across a shallow backwater and up onto the surface of the bar and stopped a few yards short of the camp. Directly on exiting the vehicle he was engaged by stressed-out moms and dads who were so glad to see him. This left Corvallis free to sneak out the passenger door and cut around the back of the truck and head toward the rafts, where Maeve and Tom were sorting through luggage, taking out the Joneses’ personal stuff while leaving company gear in the raft.

“Nice getup” was Maeve’s verdict on what Corvallis was wearing. She had given him a head-to-toe scan with eyes that were such a pale shade of blue as to be somewhat weird-looking.

“Right back at you,” Corvallis responded. Maeve was wearing a shirt of silvery Lycra. It had long sleeves, anchored at the ends by thumb holes. Her hands were covered in paddling gloves made of wetsuit material. The garment didn’t have a collar; it developed into a hood that covered her whole neck and