At Exit 194.

 As he drove through the gathering blizzard, The Engineer realized that he had made a potentially life threatening mistake when he’d set off onto the empty freeway headed east toward Duncan Iowa

 His wife - raised in Alabama - had not spoken to him in two hours. He would have apologized were it not for the fact that leaning forward and peering into the whirling snow took all his considerable concentration.

 But then, just before exit 194, he laid hard down on the breaks and the tail end of the car wiggled and lost some traction, then finally slid to a stop. 

 The headlights only momentarily permeated the opaque curtains of snow, but when they did, The Engineer saw the oddest thing he could ever even conceive of, and he was a man who conceived of a way to shoot down satellites with beams of light.

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