He arrived shortly before ten, after a twenty-minute drive from his townhouse on Ocean Drive, facing the Bay on the southern side of the city, clad in a sport shirt with slacks that he could throw a jacket over for the press conference later. Vicki greeted him in a weekend casual top and shorts. Robin joined them, and they sat down to breakfast in the glass-enclosed summer room that had been added as an extension of the kitchen. Keene had always thought Robin a great kid with a natural ability to get along with anybody, who deserved to have known a natural father. He was fair like his mother, although his hair was more yellow, and his skin, unlike hers, kept a year-round tan. His features seemed to alternate between deep frowns when he was intent on something, to wide-eyed vistas of distant blankness when he was off into the realms of . . . wherever he went. Keene sometimes wished he had kept a notebook to list the questions Robin had come up with in the time they had known each other. For a while, someone at Robin’s school had formed the opinion that he had an attention-deficiency problem, but Vicki thought it was more the result of a communications failing somewhere; any kind of communications channel has two ends. It hadn’t been Keene’s place to interfere, but in his own mind he had agreed with her. He knew from his own experience that Robin was capable of fearsome and sustained concentration on things that interested him.
Besides her job with Protonix, Vicki had a sideline creating advertising graphics at home. When she wasn’t breadwinning or single-parenting, she managed to find time for a mix of interests that never ceased to amaze Keene, ranging from biology and medieval history to pen-and-ink drawing and decorating, in between which she desk-published the newsletter for a local church group, made sure that Robin fed and looked after his menagerie, and amassed books on seemingly every subject imaginable. She believed nothing on TV or in newspapers that was of interest, and had no interest in the things she did believe. When she seriously wanted to know something, she dug and pestered until she found sources that were reliable, or she went to someone who knew. She had first entered Keene’s world of awareness through tracking him down when they were both at Harvard, to answer questions she had about the electromagnetic properties of space after finding the theories of dark matter to account for anomalous motions of galaxies unconvincing.
“The hounds are baying,” she told Keene, referring to reactions that had been building up to Amspace’s stunt the day before. “But we knew that would happen. Have you caught much of it?”
Keene shook his head. “I’ve been screening those out. That’s what Amspace has a PR department for. No doubt I’ll get my share this afternoon. Who’s saying what?”
“The EA secretary was bilious,” Vicki said—the name of the former EPA had been shortened, after some thought the original form sounded too alarmist. “He called it criminally irresponsible and wants a formal ban on space nukes to be declared internationally.”
“He’s got an image to keep up for the faithful,” Keene replied. “It’ll never happen. The Defense people need to keep an option open to match the Chinese if they have to, and the Chinese will never buy it.”
Robin attended to his eggs and bacon, his mind roaming in whatever realms it turned to when grown-ups got into politics. Keene watched Vicki refilling the coffee cups and then let his gaze wander over the kitchen, searching for a change of subject. Sam, the household dog, lay in the doorway watching him with one eye open, still unable, quite, to figure out whether or not Keene belonged. Labrador and collie contributions were discernible, with various other ingredients stirred into the mix. Vicki had originally christened him “Samurai,” but he just didn’t have the image. The parakeets squawked noisily in their cage from the kitchen beyond.
There were a few more pictures and drawings adorning the wall. A model of a tyrannosaurus had appeared on top of the refrigerator. “Oh, what’s this?” Keene murmured. He remembered what Vicki had said at the office the previous evening. “Is Robin going through his dinosaur phase? I guess he’s at just about the right age.” Robin returned immediately from wherever, registering interest.