“My God,” Gillian said. “That’s him!”
“It’s Robo Boy!” Matthew said. He was dimly aware that a woman with a digicam was filming them, but paid her no mind. “He’s the one! He left a message, we all saw it, we’ll all of us testify to that. I—”
But already, as if all that were needed was their nod, Robo Boy was being taken away, kicking and struggling, by the security people. “It wasn’t me!” he cried in a panicked voice. “I didn’t do anything!” He tried to bite one of them, and was punched in the stomach. He doubled over in pain, weeping, as they half-carried him rapidly toward the door. The camerawoman scuttled along, focused tight on his face.
“Thank you,” Tom Navarro said. “That will be all.”
Amy Cho leaned heavily on her cane. Her hip ached. She had put off her operation in order to be here, and now she regretted it. A martyr, however mistaken in his cause, should go sweetly to his fate. He should put his faith and trust in God, and consign everything else to the Devil. He should be an inspiration to the world.
Raymond Bois was a terrible disappointment to her.
She wasn’t as fast as she used to be. The best she could do was a kind of difficult and painful shuffle, no faster than a healthy person’s normal stride. Nonetheless, she hurried to intercept the security people. “Wait!” she demanded. “I have something to say.”
Jimmy Boyle recognized her voice, and stopped for her. Turning, his people held up their sobbing prisoner so she could see him. The camerawoman stepped back to get them both in frame.
Amy Cho had raised her cane wrathfully, as if she were about to bring its knob down upon the young man’s head. “Stop blubbering! Paul was arrested in Antioch and in Ephesus and in Rome and God only knows where else, and yet it only strengthened his faith. He endured persecution. He reveled in his suffering. Can you do less?”
Robo Boy gaped stupidly at her.
She shook her cane furiously. “You have murdered and you have deceived and you have been weak in your faith. You must pray, young man. Pray for forgiveness! Pray for redemption! Pray for the restoration of your faith!”
Amy Cho was a firm believer in the redemptive power of faith. God didn’t require that you read His will correctly in every particular in order to be accepted as His own. She could easily imagine a Crusader and one of Saladin’s knights being welcomed into Heaven together, Christian and Mohammedan both, though they had died at each other’s hands. “Tell me you’ll pray to the Lord, damn you. Tell me you will!”
Raymond Bois straightened in the arms of his captors. He squeezed tight his eyes, and then gave his head a shake to free them of tears.
Then, curtly, he nodded.
Amy Cho stepped aside, and the security people took him away.
Maybe, she reflected, there was hope for him after all. God never gave up on anybody, not even the least of His creations. Nor must she. She would visit Robo Boy in prison. She would explain a few things to him. She would show him where he had gone wrong.
Incarceration could well turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to the boy.
Daljit felt as if she were both here and someplace else entirely. Everything was strange to her. She was slowly coming to the realization that she didn’t belong in the modern world anymore. Not that she wanted to go back. Not really. Not yet.
Still… the greatest adventure of her life was over and done for. She had returned from Never-Never Land, from Middle-earth, from El Dorado. The dragons were slain, the treasures dug up and hauled away in wagons, the swords and bright banners packed in trunks and stowed in the attic. Nothing she ever did would ever be as vivid and meaningful again.
She couldn’t help but feel saddened by that.
She had been happy in the Maastrichtian. It had been a lot of work and suffering, sure. But there were satisfactions. Time and again, she had proved her own competence both to herself and to the others.
She might not be the jock Tamara was, but she had good survival skills. She knew how to make seven different kinds of snares and deadfalls. She could catch fish by hook, spear, or by hand. She could skin and butcher a fresh-killed hadrosaur and get away with as much meat as she could carry in less time than it took for the predators to arrive. She might not be the paleontologist Leyster was, but she could identify almost any dinosaur by sight or sound or, in some cases, smell. Most of the herbivores she could identify by flavor. She could pick up a shed tooth and identify not only its former owner, but where it had been in the jaw, and make a few shrewd guesses as to the creature’s age and health.
She could build a house and know it would stand up. She could sing a song in an entertaining manner. She had re-invented the loom, working from half-forgotten memories of a model she had made as a girl, and then she had taught herself and the others how to use it.
More than that, she had gone rafting down the Eden. She had faced down the largest animals ever to walk the Earth. She had tended to a dying woman in her final days and nursed an ailing man back to health. She had known tears and laughter, toil, love, sweat, and danger.
These were the primal satisfactions, the things that made life matter. What did Washington, D.C., in the twenty-first century have to offer that could compare with them?
Patrick came up from behind and linked arms with her.
“Come on,” he said. “This poor, deluded fool is my editor”—the man smiled and nodded—“and, being pig- ignorant of the drinking habits of paleontologists, he has rashly promised to buy us all the beer we want. There’s an Orioles game going on right now, and he tells me the bar has a wide-screen TV with state-of-the-art speakers. It just doesn’t get any better than that.”
She let herself be led away. “Do they have baskets of those little pretzels?” she asked anxiously. “It’s not really a proper game without them.”
“Not to worry,” the editor said soothingly, “If they don’t, we can always send out for some.”
Leyster had spotted Griffin standing against the far wall of the auditorium, and automatically taken the stone out of his pocket. Now, unobtrusively, he put it back. Whatever inchoate plan he might have had for vengeance had disappeared in an instant. He was in a different world now. That wasn’t how things were done here.
There were people everywhere about him, hands grabbing at him, voices making demands on his attention. It was hard sorting them all out. Somebody thrust a pen and an open copy of Science at him, and it was only after several had been signed and snatched away that it registered on him that he was autographing copies of the infrasound paper.
He needed air.
“Excuse me,” he said, moving toward the hall. “Excuse me, please. Excuse me.” He’d always hated crowds; how had he gotten away from them in the past? “I need to use the men’s room.”
“End of the hall to the left,” somebody said.
“Thanks.”
He fled.
There were people in the hall too, though not nearly so many as in the ballroom. Most were strangers. One, however, he recognized.
Salley.
He walked straight toward her, heart pounding, not knowing what he was going to do when he arrived. She stared at him, her eyes stricken, fearful, like a sacrifice waiting for the knife, or a woman who knows that someone is about to hit her.
Wordlessly, he took her hand and led her away.
