The Repository Vault had been built under the Concord Free Public Library, and quite a few surplus copies of books had made it into the Vault before the world ended. Very few of those left in the Library itself had survived, between being burned and soaked into solid masses of wood pulp by rain through the holes in the roof. Jonny-say-Quoi tut-tutted at the mess as he left the building. He wasn't expecting much of the town proper to be intact, and indeed it wasn't. The wreckage of the town was populated by packs of wasted, skinny feral mongrels which snarled and tried to bite him, and the few people he saw were the human equivalent, which snarled and tried to bludgeon him.

Had the other Miss Queens who left the Vault over the years run into such creatures, human or canine? Was that why they all failed to return? It grieved him to think so. Picking his way through the rubbish-choked streets, he spiraled outward through the town center, analyzing the air quality. The oxygen levels were low, but not too low to support life, obviously. He was more concerned about the lack of any vegetation beyond dead, scrubby weeds.

Unless his chronometer was unpardonably wrong, it was mid-May, when spring should be at its height, but it looked more like the dead of winter. He saw not a leaf on a tree nor any green and growing thing—unless one counted some of the cockroaches, bloated till they were the size of breadboxes. Some of them were green, and very aggressive, too.

After spending a couple of days exploring Concord very thoroughly, he decided there was nowhere in the town itself which was either safe or suitable for Miss Raina to establish a base, and broadened his search to the surrounding area. About eight miles from the town limits, he found a Red Rocket Truck Stop near the banks of a creek. It was in fairly good condition and could, he thought, be made habitable.

More interesting than the truck stop was the dog he found there. Instead of a scabby starveling mutt with a narrow brain pan, it appeared to be a purebred German Shepard with meat on its frame, a cared-for coat, and intelligent eyes. Instead of trying to savage him as the mongrels in the city had done, it barked sharply and waited for him to respond. That it recognized him as an entity equivalent to a human spoke well for its cognitive skills.

"Good dog!" he said to it, extending a mechanical hand. "Nice dog. What are you doing out here? Are you all alone?" It had to be owned by someone, as it was in perfect health.

The dog whined, and advanced carefully to nose Jonny-say-Quoi's hand, looking up at him with hopeful eyes. The wagging tail and cringing posture were submissive behavior—this dog understood what it was to live among humans and robots both. "Good dog!" It relaxed and allowed him to pet it and scratch behind its ears.

In this world, it was probably a very valuable animal. But if its human were newly dead… "Where is your master, boy? Your human? Where is he or she?"

The dog whined and led him down to the water's edge, where a cluster of hugely bloated flies—each the size of a seagull—were clustered around a—oh dear. A corpse, writhing with maggots. "That's what happened to him, is it?" Poor man." He killed the flies and built a cache of stones over the body while the dog watched, whimpering sadly as his human was covered from view.

Since he was by the water anyway, Jonny took readings, and discovered it was radioactive but not very. It could be purified.

"I believe you should come with me. Do you agree?" Jonny said to the dog.

The dog seemed to understand, because he barked and willingly followed Jonny back to the truck stop. On investigating the interior, he concluded from the signs of habitation that the dog and his owner must have lived there. The garage had an intact workshop furnished with tools, there was a filthy and decaying mattress in a closet area, and a rug which was half dog fur at the foot of it. There was a toilet with two buckets of water by it, suggesting that even if there was no running water, a bucket of water poured down it would effectively flush it. The roof did not appear to leak. Definitely a potential base.

However, the area was still as bare as a bleak December. All the trees were dead, and precious little else was alive. That could be fixed, especially since the openness of the site would require some sort of fencing. That was what the Sleeping Beauty roses had been bred for. A hedge of them would daunt anything short of an armored tank with napalm throwers.

Then the ugliest rodents ever to exist attacked, erupting from the ground and swarming the building. They could not harm him, of course, so he swung into the fray with vigor, killing three or four of them while the dog took care of as many on his own. Jonny absolutely had to secure that animal for Miss Raina, for her sake and for the dog's, so he cleaned and chopped up some of the rodents—were they rats, moles, or some ungodly bastardization of the two? Then he fed the dog, speaking to him soothingly and petting him while he did so. That should foster a bond between them.

Afterward he cleaned up the rest of the dead animals and made a start on the rest of the station. Whoever the late tenant was, his living area was as messy as his workshop was tidy. A box of Abraxo cleaner helped. While he worked, he observed that the dog was quite able to let himself in and out of the building and had been trained to do his business in a particular area. A perfectly mannered gentleman, that animal!

Once the truck stop began to meet his standards of clean and tidy, Jonny-say-Quoi decided to look further. Best to know who the neighbors were, if any.

There was a bridge not far from the stop which led to a suburb called Sanctuary Hills. "A good omen?" he asked. The dog followed him over the structure and into a cul-de-sac of houses, some of which were not complete ruins. Down in the creek, he saw a few waterplants with showy red leaves growing, and took one, roots and all, in a container of water. As the first thriving plant life he had found, Miss Raina would want to analyze it thoroughly. Following the course of the creek upstream, he found a few other living plants—something which appeared to be a wild carrot with orange flowers, a plant with dull lavender-blue flowers, some sort of gourd, and, quite surprisingly, a mutfruit growing wild.

That made him pause even while taking samples. The mutfruit had taken several Miss Queens a century to develop, splicing genes and crossing strains until they came up with a hardy, radiation resistant plant which produced nutritionally balanced fruit in abundance at least nine months out of the year. This wild version could not have sprung up spontaneously. That meant the seeds had gotten there somehow.

Miss Juliana and Miss Constantia had both taken fruit, seeds and seedlings with them when they left. This was the evidence that they had not done so in vain, the first evidence of them in the outside world. What had happened to them?

Jonny went back up to the suburb, planning to investigate the houses to see if there was anything of use in them. Much to his surprise, he saw another Mr. Handy obsessively clipping at a dead hedge and talking to himself.

"Hello!" he called to the other Mr. Handy.

"Whatho?" exclaimed the strange robot. "Do my optical sensors deceive me, or are my memory banks crosscircuted? Are you real?"

"Yes. I am Unit D3an9knto9we, known to my humans as Jonny-say-Quoi. And you are?"

"Codsworth. Do come in. I apologize for the state of the house…." The house was in fact, the cleanest place Jonny had been since he left the Repository. Furniture debris littered the home where the sofa and chairs had fallen apart where they stood, but the floor was otherwise clean and dusted. He told the other robot so.

"Oh, thank you. One does what one can to pass the time. But where are my manners? Can I offer you a top-up of your fuel? And what of your dog?"

Jonny declined politely. "Nothing for me, thank you. I fed the dog earlier and he drank from the stream. How long have you been here on your own, old chap?" he asked, extending an optical sensor to survey the living room.

"Two hundred and ten years, or close to it," Codworth went on to relate how his humans had evacuated to the local vault while the bomb was falling. He had lost three of them—husband, wife, and their infant son. "One simply has to keep going," he concluded. "And they, or their descendants may emerge at any time, so I must be ready and on hand."

"Have you never thought to look for yourself?" Jonny asked his counterpart.

"No. No, I simply couldn't. It would be too painful. While one has doubt, one has hope, you see. But what about you? Have your humans survived?"

"Yes, although only one of them remains." Since Codsworth had been so forthcoming, he in turn explained how Dr. Theodosia had been in the vault already, doing maintenance with his help, when the bomb hit, and how the others assigned to the Repository had been so irradiated by the time they reached it that all of them had passed away within two years, how she had cloned herself and what had happened, up to the present moment in time.

"How wonderful! There will be someone civilized in the area again. I can hardly wait. Would you like my assistance in setting the truck stop to rights? One so much suffers without something to do." Codsworth asked wistfully.

"Of course, old chap." Jonny told him.

"But only until my family returns, of course. Then they will need me." Codsworth said, proud, half-mad, but stalwart.

"Of course…."