“This way,” Jason said, turning to lead back the way he had come. Keene followed them to a room across the corridor that was evidently being used for living quarters. Robin had been napping on a couch, from an office suite or reception area somewhere, that had been made into a bed. He had his share of blotches and facial sores like everyone else, but he was clean and looked rested. From his expression as he rubbed his eyes and looked the arrivals up and down, he evidently couldn’t say the same about them.
“I never knew you dressed like that,” he told Keene. “It’s like out of some movie. You look like you should be in a war somewhere.”
“Me?” Keene objected. “You’re the one who got shot in the arm.” Robin conceded the point with a rueful nod. “How does it feel?” Keene asked.
“Oh . . . it could have been worse, I guess.”
“We’ve got a couple of people here who are going to take care of it. Professionals. You’ll be okay.”
“Mom told me about Earth being a satellite of Saturn, and the gravity being less then, and that’s how the dinosaurs existed. Is that the way you think it really was?”
Keene shook his head incredulously. At a time like this, that could still bubble to the surface of his mind? “That’s only part of it,” he answered. “Half of science is going to have to be reconstructed. You’re going to be a busy guy when you get older.”
Alicia, who had been waiting near the door with Vicki and Dash, moved forward. “We’d better take a look at that arm,” she said.
“I get squeamish about these things. I’ll leave you to it,” Keene said, moving toward the doorway.
“Do you really think I could get to be involved in work like that, Lan?” Robin called after him.
Keene winked back at him. “You’d better believe it.”
* * *
Robin’s upper arm had been hit by a ricochet, but the break was a simple one. Alicia and Dash reset it and announced that it should heal without complications. Over bowls of a spicy beef and vegetable stew that Joe had concocted, accompanied by hunks of crusty buttered bread and, incongruously, a selection of not-bad wines purloined from a cabinet in the Executive Suite, the arrivals told their story and listened to a condensed account of events at San Saucillo.
The trouble at Kingsville, which Harry Halloran had described when Keene called him from Vandenberg, had resulted in different groups deciding to go their own way instead of the concerted early evacuation that Keene and Marvin Curtiss had hoped for. When Vicki began recruiting for a group to go with her to San Saucillo and wait for Keene, others had conceived the idea of organizing a launch from San Saucillo themselves and trying to join the Osiris. By that time the military was using the San Saucillo airfield as an adjunct to the vulnerable coastal bases around Corpus Christi to fly essential cargos inland. One shuttle was launched but exploded in the boost phase—it was thought from a meteorite hit. After that, the pad area rapidly became unserviceable and further attempts were abandoned. Most of the others gave up then, and left with the military when they pulled out three days previously. “We might have done too,” Vicki concluded. “But some kind of local gang came in—because of the stuff the military had left behind. But that wasn’t enough; they wanted what we had too. There was fighting. That was when we lost Harry, along with a couple of others who’d stayed. They got away with the truck that we’d kept, so we were stuck here. So you can see why Joe was jumpy when you showed up in that circus truck. I mean . . . what kind of breaker’s yard did you find it in?”
“Don’t jest. It’s still your only ticket out,” Keene reminded her.
There was little more to be done when they had finished eating. Joe had made sure to have everything they needed to take sorted and packed in case a quick getaway was called for. They had also collected a supply of gasoline, which the troops transferred to the truck’s tank, with a reserve in the rear in cans. They took an extra half hour to sandbag the truck’s roof and fix spotlamps on the cab door pillars for the night drive. Mitch used an ax to cut a hole through the wall at the back of the cab to allow communication with the rear compartment.
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