* * *
With all the rushing around in Washington, Keene hadn’t learned much about the three who had traveled with him until they got a chance to talk on the plane. Barbara was built on the heavy side and moved slowly, but she was systematic and methodical in her work. Her White House job was to tide her through while she looked after an invalid mother. After that, she had planned to go abroad, maybe to take up political journalism. Gordon was the opposite: lively, impulsive, constantly on the move or on the phone with some new angle. He had intended making some kind of a career in Washington and was due to be married in August. Clearly, they were both rational, realistic people, and yet each had talked as if those plans still meant something. Keene wondered if it was because letting go of the things which at present filled those spaces in their minds would leave no way of dealing with having nothing to replace them with. Whatever the explanation, he had tried to avoid saying things that would dispel their illusions.
Colby Greene was in his thirties, slightly built with prematurely thinning hair and large, rimless spectacles that dominated his face. Originally a mathematical chemist before joining Sloane’s staff via a stint in one of the regulatory agencies—which he had despised—he was knowledgeable and quick witted, with a weirdly cynical humor that pervaded everything he did. He was under no illusions about what Athena meant, but seemed almost to regard it as not especially surprising—as if some kind of disaster or other had been the inevitable destiny toward which the absurd theater of human existence had been directing itself from the beginning. “Life is a plane you never wanted to get on, which you know is going to crash,” he’d explained to Keene in the bus that had brought them from March Air Force Base to JPL. “So what’s the big deal if you get shot down a little bit sooner?”
It all answered a question that Keene had sometimes pondered, of how people had coped and somehow managed to get through such things as genocidal war, mass bombing, political terror, earthquake, plague, and other situations of devastation and terror, and in particular how he himself would behave if ever faced by the kind of inevitability they were seeing now. The short answer seemed to be that you pretty much carried on as normal as best you could, for the simple reason that there wasn’t a lot else that you could do.
Since they had also grabbed some sleep on the plane, they spent the small hours going over the work done so far and preparing a general form for the report to be sent that afternoon, details to be filled in when the scientists returned later. Charlie Hu stayed up to guide them through and offer what other help he could. It made horrendous reading. When dawn came, Keene found himself by the window, watching the line of the San Gabriel Mountains slowly taking form in the first pink hint of day. The night had been hazy, and the now constant display of meteorite trails flashing across the sky, which had been awesome seen from the plane on the way from Andrews and was apparently all the talk among jet travelers, was obscured. He stared at the lights of the still sleeping city below, and for a moment the picture came into his mind of foaming walls of water brimming up behind the peaks and bursting through the gaps between to roll over the towns in the valley like breakers sweeping away footprints on a beach. Then he put it firmly out of his mind and turned to Hu, who was explaining some calculations to Colby.
“Charlie, is there a phone with a screen somewhere that I can use?” It would be a reasonable hour of the morning back east, even if on the early side.
“Sure.” Hu showed him into one of the empty offices and left, closing the door. A minute or so later, Keene was talking to a sleepy-eyed Marvin Curtiss. With all the things that had been going on, they hadn’t talked for two days.