"America..." (p. 141) must mean the whole continent? The Rangers do control the entire Western hemisphere. In any case, America is entirely covered by a ramparted, gated megalopolis interrupted only by deserts: concrete, steel, energy, ten billion slaves, windowless mile-plus-high towers linked by cables, tubes and elways, Brann's steel tower topped by blue flame, the sometimes painful noise of machines, spouts from a hundred furnaces.
Lockridge's identity, faked by the Wardens, is authentic enough to get him past the guards but clearly false to Brann, which is why he agrees to receive "Guardsmaster Darvast":
bred thirty years ago;
educated in Creche 935 and the Academy of War;
special service appointee in the household troops of Director Brann;
politically reliable;
decorated for hazardous assignments;
now returning by gravity belt through an ocean storm from a special mission.
Darvast sounds like an interesting guy but, unfortunately, he is a fiction within the fiction.
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