The Old Mormon Fort in Freeside is the oldest building still standing in the New Vegas area. They built to last in the old days. The outer walls are stone, patched and repaired where possible. It's not always possible. This is Freeside- it's not always worth it. Julie Farkas pays one of the locals a few caps to go out every so often and survey all the walls for damage that's gotten too bad to ignore. It helps, usually.
Inside, the walls are different. Canvas, most of them. Tents can be made semi-permanent and reasonably comfortable, with a little effort. Steel, some of them- corrugated scrap metal taken from whatever scrap heap or wreckage pile someone could find. You don't want to store Med-X- you don't want to store any supplies- in an area where someone with a knife could slip around the back, slit one of the walls, and walk off with a week's worth of fixes under his arm. Supplies go in locked crates, locked crates go in sheds with locked doors.
And some of the inner walls themselves are made of stone, too. The Fort's still got an old tower standing. It's got a few interior rooms- nothing special, nothing fancy, but they're closed off from the blazing sun. That goes a long way for some things. Sleep, for the more exhausted Followers. Surgery, for people who're too badly off for stimpaks to fix. And research.
This is where Arcade works. He's got the use of half the surgical room. He keeps it painfully neat: equipment at one end, generator and light mounted over it, desk nearby, safe containing his experimental samples underneath. Papers are locked out of sight, not that anyone who comes in here looking to steal something is likely to walk off with paper. It's the principle of the thing. It's hard enough work as it is. Developing a viable replacement for old world stimpaks is deceptively complicated. They have the plants that ought to do it. They have what ought to be the equipment to do it. But he hasn't yet found how to break the plants down and combine them in the way that the old world did; his best compound leaves the patient unable to see straight for an hour. It's aggravating.
What's worse is that it's the best he's done so far. Thomas Edison said once that he hadn't failed, he'd only found ten thousand ways that didn't work. Well, Arcade's closing in on Edison's record, and he knows it. Between the stimpak experiments, the Rad-X work- at least they have a process that produces something that works nearly as well as old world Rad-Away- the production of Fixer...
There used to be people who could make medicine like this. Who had the knowledge, the supplies, the processes. Who had the knowledge of their past and improved on it. They knew what they were doing and they made everything they and their world needed, or at least they came close. He's all too aware of that. His own shortcomings make it painfully clear that he's no-
Arcade sighs, sliding his hands under his glasses and rubbing at his eyes. He doesn't need this. Thinking this way isn't going to help anyone, least of all him. He'll come back tomorrow and look at his work with fresh eyes, and who knows. Maybe he'll see something more.
Probably not. But maybe he will. Because if he doesn't do this, there's nobody else left who knows how.