CRADLE OF SATURN BY JAMES P. HOGAN

The Rustler carried four folding stretchers, which were brought out. The troopers helped people from the vehicles load them aboard the plane, along with four more of the injured on improvised pallets. The worst seemed to be a woman who was moaning deliriously, both her legs crushed in a traffic accident out on the highway. After another brief conference, the men who appeared to be speaking for the group selected two couples to accompany the eight. Keene was relieved to see that all the children would remain. This was already getting complicated enough.

Keene watched the hapless group through one of the forward windows as the Rustler turned to begin taxiing out, standing expressionlessly before their vehicles. They were still there when the plane roared back along the runway and lifted off, as if not knowing where to go next.

The sea seemed amazingly calm, Keene thought as the strip of dunes and beaches came into view. Then he realized that what he was looking at was mud. The tide was out to a distance that must have been close to a mile.

At the back of the plane, the woman with the crushed legs was starting to scream.

* * *

Cliff scanned through frequency bands as the Rustler climbed. “Santa Barbara’s out. LAX is out. Seems the West Coast is about out of business,” he reported. Charlie Hu was behind him in the jump seat, following the procedures. “Military Sector Control is operating at San Bernardino. They’re routing us over Phoenix. Come around onto zero-nine-eight degrees and make for thirty thousand to try and get over the turbulence. Two transports and a high-altitude reconnaissance flight in the area. I’ve got ’em on radar. Otherwise free of traffic. Still a lot of clutter. Reports of heavy rock falls in the Midwest, all flights grounded there.”

“Gotcha,” Dan drawled from the captain’s seat.

When they leveled out, Alicia and the medic in Mitch’s team, whom the others called Dash, opened up the Rustler’s medical locker and went back to see what they could do for the injured who had been brought aboard. With some sedation, the woman with the hurt legs quietened down. There were two more women, both hit by falling rocks, one with a shattered arm and shoulder, the other comatose from a head wound. A man had a leg almost severed at the thigh by a piece of flying metal. Two more were head injuries, both with concussion. One had lacerations and probably fractures from being in a truck hit by a mast that was blown down. The last was a youth of about seventeen who had been blinded by flying glass. Dash confided quietly to Mitch that he didn’t think the kid’s sight could be saved.

Between washing and dabbing with pads, and helping to place dressings and tie bandages, the two couples—Denise and Al, Cynthia and Tom; it was funny how they had suddenly become people now that they had names—who had accompanied the injured recovered their faculties sufficiently to tell the gist of their story. They had been among somewhere around fifty or sixty friends, neighbors, and relatives from nearby Vandenberg village, many of them employees of the base, who had decided to travel inland to Arizona as a group. Less than twenty miles along the highway, they had been caught in the the gravel storm of the previous day. Seven of the party were dead, including the husband and sister of the woman with the crushed legs, who was called Joan and worked as a teller in one of the banks on the base. A group of them had brought the worst cases back into the base believing they would find help, while the rest had arranged to meet farther up the highway. There were a lot like that out there. Police, paramedics, and volunteers had set up emergency dressing stations along the way, but they were swamped.

As the Rustler with its forty-two souls aboard climbed above the denser blanket of cloud, the surroundings transformed into a shimmering panorama of surreal yellow and orange sculptures twisting and unfolding upward toward a sky woven from streamers of electric violets and pink. Beneath them, foaming curtains of vapor descended, raining amber and ochre into the cauldron that the world had become. Above it all, blurred through the watery opacity of the cloud and the plasma filaments, glowed the light of two suns.