The flash brought Vann away from the Telethink console and out of the quonset station to stare shakenly across the tangle of mangroved islands to the west. Weyman came out a moment later, on the run, when the teeth-jarring blast of the explosion woke him. They stood together on the moon-bright sand and Vann relayed in four words the total of his information.
“It fell over there,” Vann said.
A pale pinkish cloud of smoke and steam rose and drifted phosphorescently toward a noncommittal moon.
“Second key out,” Weyman said. “That would be Dutchman’s, where the hermit lives.”
Vann nodded, drawing minimal reassurance from the fact that there had been no mushroom. “It shouldn’t be atomic.”
The Gulf breeze was steady out of the west, freighted with its perpetual salt-and-mangrove smell.
“The Geigers will tell us soon enough,” Weyman said. “Not that it’ll help us, with Ellis out in the launch.”
They looked at each other in sudden shock of joint realization.
“The launch,” Vann said. “Ellis is out there with the portable Telethink rig. We were working out field-strength ratios for personal equipment—”