The flesh in the furnace

lives. And when they were feeling defensive, they would say, yes, well, perhaps it is, not a necessary highway today, but in the future, when the millions return from the stars, we'll all be thankful for it. Then it will be a highway of need and not just a work of magnificence.
        Of course, the millions never returned. But the magnificence remained, and that would have pleased everyone who had a hand in laying the smooth stretch of road.
        Late in the afternoon they pulled into one of the widely scattered fueling stops, identical to the one where they had encountered the stranger in the long cargo van. If Sebastian remembered how he had broken Belina's neck with one quick twist of his hands, he did not show it. He seemed happy and pleased with himself at his continuing skill behind the wheel of the truck.
        "Eat," he told Belina.
        She came with him, walking in the path he broke to the front door of the automat. She thought of running, sure that the snow would hide her from him. But that was death, and it was Sebastian who was slated for death, not Belina, not her.
        It was in the automat, then, that she found something that she could use to force the idiot to do her bidding. It was something she should have known about before, because he had mentioned it. But so much that he said struck her as meaningless that she had not attached any importance to the things. Spiders.
        Spiders.
        Although the fueling station automat was warm and tolerably clean, portions of its robotic maintenance system seemed to have gone dead. There was one corner where dust had gathered and where some mold had sprouted on the plastic wall paneling. Some of the automat doors delivered food while others were empty. And when the idiot pulled open a panel that was supposed to conceal apple pie, he withdrew half a spider's web that had been woven in the cubbyhole beyond.
        A huge, brown spider fell onto his tray, directly in the center of a sandwich he had taken farther up the line. It was inconceivable that such an enormous spider, fully as large as Sebastian's thumb, could be indigenous to this place where snow was common nine months of the year and where spring hardly came before it went. More than likely it had been brought up with the construction materials or with supplies for the automat doors. It might have been the hundredth-generation descendant of another brown spider transplanted from warmer regions many years before. Its origin hardly mattered, as far as Bitty Belina was concerned. What mattered was its effect upon Sebastian, whether it was a foreign spider or a domestic one.
        He swiped at it, knocking his food to the floor, making the tray clatter on the cafeteria rail. The spider, however, escaped and darted along the innermost of the rails. He watched it go, whimpering and calling Pertos' name over and over again.
        "There's another one," Bitty Belina said.
        He looked where she pointed, at the dangling shreds of web, and he screamed, turned, fell across a chair. Frantically, he crawled free, made it to his feet and through the door, into the snow.
        She watched him, unable to understand. "It's only a spider!" she called. But he did not come back.
        For a moment, she was afraid he was going to leave without her, but he only slammed the door of the truck cab and sat there, shaking, hiding his face in his hands.
        Spiders?
        She stood there a moment, watching the spider in the web, thinking. She had been walking on the rails where the trays were slid along so that she could see the automat doors to know what she wanted to eat. The thing was within easy reach. Sebastian was blowing the truck's horn.
        
        Belina jumped down, ran to one of the tables and picked up a large clear plastic saltshaker. She poured the salt out and went back to the cafeteria line. It took a minute or so to gain the rails, but once that was done it was easy to reach out, pluck the spider from the web and drop it into the bottle. It was half as large as her dainty hand, but not dangerous. Sebastian was impatient to be gone, laying on the horn until she was cursing him at the top of her voice.
        She found the second spider clinging to the silver rail and put it in with the first. They bristled, stalked each other, then decided they were friends.
        Quickly she got some sandwiches and hurried out into the growing darkness. The