Changes

== Aftermath ==

== Aftermath ==

Whether Mouch, Ferris, and Taggart even reached a hospital, the novel does not say. Ferris would doubtless learn later that [[Project X]] had destroyed itself and a two-hundred-mile-diameter disk of [[Iowa]] countryside, and cut the [[Taggart Bridge]] in half. Ferris might have connected the disappearance of [[Robert Stadler]] from New York, three days before, to the Project X disaster. Or he might not. Ferris was not the best judge of character, and Robert Stadler never gave anyone a clue, during his life, that he would take any such initiative.

The most likely hospital to which Ferris and Mouch would have tried to take Jim Taggart was the Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital in Hanover, [[New Hampshire]], down the Lyme road from the State Science Institute. Whether anyone was even ''at'' the hospital to admit Taggart, the novel never says. Ferris would doubtless learn later that [[Project X]] had destroyed itself and a two-hundred-mile-diameter disk of [[Iowa]] countryside, and cut the [[Taggart Bridge]] in half. Ferris might have connected the disappearance of [[Robert Stadler]] from New York, three days before, to the Project X disaster. Or he might not. Ferris was not the best judge of character, and Robert Stadler never gave anyone a clue, during his life, that he would take any such initiative.

 

In any event, the Project X disaster would have a ripple effect that would strand Ferris and his companions in New Hampshire.

One may infer that various citizens' [[militia]]s strove with the various criminal gangs that were running rampant throughout the land and asserted themselves as the new force for law and order. Either Ferris and the others fell into the hands of one of those gangs (in which case they were probably killed out of hand), or they fell into the hands of one of the militias. In which case that militia held them for eventual trial by a reconstituted Federal judiciary, either before [[Judge Narragansett]] or at least before a court that operated under rules that Judge Narragansett, as [[Chief Justice of the United States]], made and enforced. Floyd Ferris would probably have been defiant to the last and dared the court to impose the maximum penalty. Whether he would have actually suffered that penalty is impossible to infer reliably.

One may infer that various citizens' [[militia]]s strove with the various criminal gangs that were running rampant throughout the land and asserted themselves as the new force for law and order. Either Ferris and the others fell into the hands of one of those gangs (in which case they were probably killed out of hand), or they fell into the hands of one of the militias. In which case that militia held them for eventual trial by a reconstituted Federal judiciary, either before [[Judge Narragansett]] or at least before a court that operated under rules that Judge Narragansett, as [[Chief Justice of the United States]], made and enforced. Floyd Ferris would probably have been defiant to the last and dared the court to impose the maximum penalty. Whether he would have actually suffered that penalty is impossible to infer reliably.