“I understand from the phone call that you just got here from Phoenix, and before that you were in a plane crash. You just about look it, too. We’ve got soup, beans, and coffee going, if you could use some.”
Mitch said that sounded great but explained that they had some injured back at the airfield who needed medical attention urgently. Weyland stared at them for several seconds. Then, sparing them a lecture on the obvious, he got up, went to the gap at the end of the partition that served as a doorway, and called over one of his officers. He outlined the situation, and the officer went away to make some calls. Keene and Colby nodded their thanks. Keene didn’t feel entirely comfortable about jumping the line. But there are times when one has to look after one’s own. “And now can we get you people something to eat?” Weyland asked again. They accepted.
It turned out that the general’s readiness to receive them stemmed more from a hope of being told more himself of what was going on than any recognition of a need to inform them. He had assumed from Colby’s credentials that they represented, or at least could enlighten him as to the existence of, some administrative authority that had survived of a national or even international nature. He was in landline contact with the military command at Cheyenne Mountain, several regional headquarters, and also a number of FEMA centers. As far as he was aware, Washington had ceased functioning. The President, along with his family and immediate staff, had vanished three days previously with Air Force One when the administration left for the war-survival and command center located near Atlanta. The Secretary of State was supposed to have taken charge in Atlanta provisionally, but Weyland hadn’t had any contact from there. A further mystery was the disappearance of the Vice President, who had left to set up a West Coast shadow government a day before the President’s departure from Washington. Colby set the record straight on that score, which led to an account of the mission that had taken him and Keene to California. It was the first news Weyland had heard of what had become of the Kronians. Keene presumed that General Ullman would have reported it at Cheyenne Mountain, which seemed by default to have become the nearest that existed to a national coordinating center. Weyland noted the details, clearly with the intention of reporting them independently anyway. His unspoken implication—that there was no guarantee that anyone from Vandenberg had made it to Cheyenne Mountain—didn’t hit Keene until a couple of minutes afterward. Maybe he was more tired than he realized, he told himself.
Weyland then moved to local and more immediate matters. Sitting on America’s rocky spine, El Paso was the focus of two floods of evacuees converging eastward from southern California, Arizona, and New Mexico, and in the opposite direction from Texas and Oklahoma. They were arriving hungry, thirsty, exhausted, and traumatized, the survivors of meteorite falls, firestorms, hurricanes, and rain torrents, bringing their sick and their injured by the tens of thousands; by the hundreds of thousands. And there, in the dust, the dryness, and the heat that was setting in after the rain, they would die, as they were already starting to, in numbers almost as large. The emergency measures that it had proved possible to mobilize in the time available were too few and too late. And in any case, all the planning had been a product of the slowly evolving thinking of years gone by. None of it had envisaged anything like this. The worst that had been imagined was nuclear war, in which strikes on worthwhile targets and perhaps population centers would produce intense devastation in relatively localized areas, but with comparatively unscathed regions between, able to provide help and relief. But with everywhere smitten equally, there was nowhere to turn to. For every township and community, enclave and locality, anything beyond the preoccupation of staying alive from one hour to the next and securing a refuge to gain some respite vanished from the equation of reality. The result was that the whole infrastructure by which the nation maintained itself as a cohesive social and productive organism was coming apart with a rapidity that in any other circumstance would have been deemed impossible; and the same was no doubt true for every other part of the world also.