Titan

BOOK TWO Low Earth Orbit A.D. 2004 — A.D. 2008

“What did you think you were doing, Rosenberg?”

Marcia Delbruck, Rosenberg’s project boss, was pacing around her office, formidable in her Berkeley sweatshirt and frizzed-up hair: she had a copy of Jackie Benacerraf’s life-on-Titan article loaded on her big wall-mounted softscreen. “You’ve made a joke of us all, of the whole project.”

“That’s ridiculous, Marcia.”

“You let this woman Jackie Benacerraf get to you. You just can’t handle women, can you, Rosenberg?”

Actually, he thought, no. But he wasn’t going to sit here and take this. “All I did was speculate a little.”

“About life on Titan? Jesus Christ. Do you know how much damage that kind of crap can do?”

“No. No, I don’t really see what damage that kind of crap can do. I know it’s bad science to go shooting my mouth off about tentative hypotheses before—”

“It’s not the science. It’s the PR. Don’t you understand any of this?” She sat down behind her desk. “Isaac, you have to look at the situation we’re in. Think back to the past. Look at 1964, when the first Mariner reached Mars. It was run out of JPL, right here—”

“What has some forty-year-old probe got to do with anything?”

“Lessons of history, Rosenberg. Back then, NASA was already thinking about how to follow on from Apollo. Mars would have been the next logical step, right? Move onward and outward, human expansion into the Solar System.

“But Mariner found craters, like the Moon’s. They’d directed the craft over an area where they were expecting canals, for God’s sake.

“All of a sudden, there was no point going to Mars after all, because there was nothing there except another sterile, irradiated ball of rock. You could say that handful of pictures, from that first Mariner, turned the history of space exploration. If Mars had been worth going to, we’d be there by now. Instead, NASA was just wound down.”

“I know about the disappointment,” he said icily. “I read Bradbury, and Clarke, and Heinlein. I can imagine how it was.”

“NASA learned its corporate lesson, slowly and painfully.” She thumped the desk with her closed fist to emphasize her words. “Look how carefully they handled the story of the organic materials they found in the Martian meteorite…”

“Careful, yeah. But so what? They still haven’t flown a Mars sample-return mission to confirm—”

“It’s not the point, Rosenberg,” she snapped. “You don’t promise what you don’t deliver. You don’t yap to the media about finding life on Titan.”

“All I talked about was the preliminary results, and what they might mean. You can hear the same stuff in the canteen here any day of the week.”

She tapped the clipping on her screen. “This isn’t the JPL canteen, Rosenberg.”

“Anyway, what does NASA have to do with it? JPL’s an arm of Caltech; it’s organizationally independent—”

“Don’t be smart, Rosenberg. Who the hell do you think you are? Maybe it’s escaped your notice, but you’re just one of a team here.”

The team lecture, he thought with dread. “I know.” Rosenberg pushed the heels of his hands into his eye sockets. “I know about the line, and the matrix management structure, and my office, division, section, group and subgroup. I know about the organization charts and documentation trees.” It was true. He did know all about that; he’d had to learn. An education in JPL’s peculiar politics was like a return to grade school biology, learning about kingdoms and phyla and classes.

“Then,” she snapped, “you know that you occupy one space in that organization, one little bitty square, and that’s where you should damn well stay. Leave the press to the PR people; they know how to handle it right… Look, Rosenberg, you have to come to some kind of accommodation with me. I’m telling you there’s no other way to run a major project like a deep space mission except with a tight, lean organization like ours. And it works. As long as we all work within it.”

“Come on, Marcia. We shouldn’t be talking about organizational forms, for God’s sake. At the very least we’ve got evidence of a new kind of biochemistry, something completely new, out on the surface of that moon. We should be talking about the data, the results. About going back, a sample-return mission—”

“Going back?” She laughed. “Don’t you follow the news, Rosenberg? The Space Shuttle just crashed. Nobody knows what the hell the future is for NASA. If it has one at all.”

“But we have to go back to Titan.”

“Why?”

He couldn’t see why she would even pose the question. “Because there’s so much more to learn.”

“Let me give you some advice, Rosenberg,” she said. “We aren’t going back to Titan. Not in my lifetime, or yours. No matter what Huygens has found. Just as we aren’t going back to Venus, or Mercury, or Neptune. We’ll be lucky to shoot off a few more probes to Mars. Get used to the fact. And the way to do that is to get a life. I understand you, Rosenberg. Better than you think I do. Probably better than you understand yourself. Titan is always going to be out there. What’s the rush? What you’re talking about is yourself. What you mean is that you want to discover it all, before you die. That’s what motivates you. You can’t bear the thought of the universe going on without you, its events unfolding without your invaluable brain still being around to process them. Right?”

This sudden descent into personal analysis startled him; he had no idea what to say.

She sat back. “Look. I know you’re a good worker; I know we need people like you, who can think out of the box. But I don’t need you shooting your mouth off to the press. It’s not three months since Columbia came down. We’re trying to preserve Cassini, the last of the great JPL probes; you must know we haven’t secured funding for the extended mission yet. If you attract enough hostility, you could get us shut down, future projects killed…”

Slowly, he realized that she meant it. She was expressing a genuine fear: that if space scientists attracted too much attention — if they sounded as if they weren’t being “responsible,” as if they were shooting for the Moon again — then they’d be closed down.

In the first decade of a new millennium, a sense of wonder was dangerous.

Discreetly he checked his watch. He was meeting Paula Benacerraf later today. Maybe he could find some new way forward, with her. And…

But Delbruck was still talking at him. “Have you got it, Rosenberg? Have you?”

Rosenberg came to pick Benacerraf up, in person, from LAX. She shook Rosenberg’s offered hand, and climbed into the car.

Rosenberg swung through Glendale and then turned north on Linda Vista to go past the Rose Bowl. For a few miles they drove in silence, except for the rattling of the car, which was a clunker.

Rosenberg, half Benacerraf’s age, seemed almost shy.

Rosenberg’s driving was erratic — he took it at speed, with not much room for error — and he was a little wild-eyed, as if he’d been missing out on sleep. Probably he had; he seemed the type.

JPL wasn’t NASA, strictly speaking. She’d never been out here before, but she’d heard from insiders that JPL’s spirit of independence — and its campus-like atmosphere — were important to it, and notorious in the rest of the Agency.

So maybe she shouldn’t have been surprised to have been summoned out here like this, by Isaac Rosenberg, a skinny guy in his mid-twenties with glasses, bad skin, and thinning hair tied back in a fashion that had died out, to her knowledge, thirty years ago.

“This seems a way to go,” she remarked after a while. “We’re a long way out of Pasadena.”

“Yeah,” Rosenberg said. “Well, they used to test rockets here. Hence ‘Jet Propulsion Laboratory’…” He kept talking; it seemed to make him feel more comfortable. “The history’s kind of interesting. It all started with a low-budget bunch of guys working out of Caltech, flying their rockets out of the Arroyo Seco, before the Second World War. They had huts of frame and corrugated metal, unheated and draughty, so crammed with rocket plumbing there was no room for a desk… And then a sprawling, expensive suburb got built all around them.

“After the war the lab became an eyesore, and the residents in Flintridge and Altadena and La Canada started to complain about the static motor tests, and the flashing red lights at night.”

“Red lights?”

He grinned. “It was missile test crews heading off for White Sands. But the rumors were that the lights were ambulances taking out bodies of workers killed in rocket tests.”

She smiled. “Are you sure they were just test crews? Or—”

“Or maybe there’s been a cover-up.” He whistled a snatch of the classic X-Files theme, and they both laughed. “I used to love that show,” he said. “But I never got over the ice-dance version.”

He entered La Canada, an upper-middle-class suburb, lawns and children and ranch-style, white-painted houses, and turned a corner, and there was JPL. The lab was hemmed into a cramped and smoggy site, roughly triangular, bounded by the San Gabriel Mountains, the Arroyo Seco, and the neat homes of La Canada.

Rosenberg swung the car off the road.

There was a guard at the campus entrance; he waved them into a lot.

Rosenberg walked her through visitor control, and offered to show her around the campus.

They walked slowly down a central mall that was adorned with a fountain. The mall stretched from the gate into the main working area of the laboratory. Office buildings filled the Arroyo; some of them were drab, military-standard boxy structures, but there was also a tower of steel and glass, on the north side of the mall, and an auditorium on the south.

Crammed in here, it was evident that the only way JPL had been able to build was up.

Rosenberg said, “That’s the von Karman auditorium. A lot of great news conferences and public events took place in there: the first pictures from Mars, the Voyager pictures of Jupiter and Saturn—”

“What about the glass tower?”

“Building 180, for the administrators. Can’t you tell? Nine storeys of marble and glass sheathing.” He pointed. “Executive suites on the top floor. I expect you’ll be up there later to meet the Director.”

The current JPL Director was a retired Air Force general. “Maybe,” said Benacerraf. “It’s not on my schedule.” And besides, she’d had enough Air Force in her face recently. “I wasn’t expecting quite so much landscaping.”

“Yeah, but it’s limited to the public areas. I always think the place looks like a junior college that ran out of money half way through a building program. When the trees and flower pots appeared, the old-timers say, they knew it was all over for the organization. Landscaping is a sure sign of institutional decadence. You come to JPL to do the final far-out things, not for potted plants…”

She watched him. “You love the place, don’t you?”

He looked briefly embarrassed; it was clear he’d rather be talking at her than be analysed. “Hell, I don’t know. I like what’s been achieved here, I guess. Ms Benacerraf—”

“Paula.”

He looked confused, comically. “Call me Rosenberg. But things are changing now. It seems to me I’m living through the long, drawn-out consequences of massive policy mistakes made long before I was born. And that makes me angry.”

“Is that why you asked me to come out here?”

“Kind of.”

He guided her into one of the buildings. He led her through corridors littered with computer terminals, storage media and printouts; there were close-up Ranger photographs of the Moon’s surface, casually framed and stuck on the walls.

But those Moon photographs were all of forty years old: just historic curios, as meaningless now as a Victorian naturalist’s collection of dead, pinned insects. There was an air of age, of decay about the place, she thought; the narrow corridors with their ceiling tiles were redolent of the corporate buildings of the middle of the last century.

JPL was showing its age. It had become a place of the past, not the future.

How sad.

He led her out back of the campus buildings, to a dusty area compressed against the Arroyo and the mountain. Here, the rough-hewn character of the original 1940s laboratory remained: a huddle of two- and three-storey Army base buildings — now more than sixty years old — in standard-issue military paintwork.

Rosenberg pointed. “Even by the end of the war there were still only about a hundred workers here. Just lashed-up structures of corrugated metal, redwood tie and stone. See over there? They had a string of test pits dug into the side of the hill, lined with railroad ties. They called it the gulch. You had to drive to the site over a bumpy road that washed out in the rainy season… It was as crude as hell. And yet, the exploration of the Solar System started right here.”

“Why are you showing me all this, Rosenberg?”

He took off his glasses and polished them on a corner of his T-shirt. “Because it’s all over for JPL,” he said. “For decades, as far back as Apollo, NASA has starved JPL and space science to pay for Man-In-Space. And now — hell, I presume you’ve heard the scuttlebutt. They’re even going to close down the Deep Space Network. They’re already talking about mothballing the Hubble. And Goldstone will be turned over to the USAF for some kind of navel-searching reconnaissance work.”

“It’s all politics, Rosenberg,” Benacerraf said gently. “You have to understand. The White House has to respond to pressure from the likes of Congressman Maclachlan. They have to appear in control of their space budgets. So if they are throwing money at new launch vehicles to replace Shuttle, they have to cut somewhere else…”

“But when we all calm down from our fright about the Chinese, they’ll just cut the launcher budgets anyhow, and we’ll be left with nothing. Paula, when it’s gone, it’s gone. The signals coming in from the last probes — the Voyagers, Galileo, Cassini — will fall on a deaf world. Think about that. And as for JPL, those sharks in the USAF have been waiting for something like Columbia, waiting for NASA to weaken. It’s as if they’re taking revenge. They’re going to turn us into a DoD-dedicated laboratory. The NASA links will be severed, and we’ll lose the space work, and all of our research will be classified, for good and all. The Pentagon calls it weaponization.”

“Rosenberg—”

He looked into the sky. “Paula, in another decade, the planets are going to be no more than what they were, before 1960: just lights in the sky. The space program is over at last, killed by NASA and the USAF and the aerospace companies…”

No, she thought automatically. It’s more complex than that. It always was. The space program is a major national investment. It’s been shaped from the beginning by political, economic, technical factors, beyond anyone’s control…

And yet, she thought, standing here in the arroyo dust, she had the instinctive sense that Rosenberg was right. We’ve blown it. We could have done a hell of a lot more. We could have sent robot probes everywhere, multiplied our understanding a hundredfold.

Lights in the sky.That phrase snagged at her. She thought of the forty-year-old Moon photographs. At the LAX bookstalls she’d found rows of astrology books, on the science shelves. Was that the future she wanted to bequeath her grandchildren?

The sense of claustrophobia, of enclosure, she’d felt since returning to Earth increased.

“Rosenberg, what is it you want?”

He put on his glasses and looked at her. “I want you people to start paying back.”

“I’m listening.”

He guided her back towards the main campus. “If you had a free choice, which planet would you choose to go to? The Moon is dead, Venus is an inferno, and Mars is an ice ball, with a few fossils we might dig out of the deep rocks if we sent a team of geologists up there for a century.”

“Then where?”

“Titan,” he said. “Titan…”

He led her to his cubicle in the science back room. It was piled deep with papers, journals, printout; the walls were coated with softscreens.

He sat down. He cleared a softscreen and dug out a Cassini image; it showed the shadowed limb of a smooth, orange-brown globe, billiard-ball featureless. The Cassini-Huygens results have already taught us a hell of a lot about Titan,” Rosenberg said. “It’s a moon of Saturn. But it’s as big as Mercury; hell, it’s a world in its own right. If it wasn’t in orbit around Saturn, if it had its own solar orbit, maybe we would have justified a mission to Titan for its own sake by now…”

Rosenberg brought up a low-altitude image, taken by the Huygens probe a few hundred yards above the surface. The quality was good, though the illumination was low. It was a landscape, she realized suddenly, and Rosenberg expanded on what she saw.

…A reddish color dominated everything, although swathes of darker, older material streaked the landscape. Towards the horizon, beyond the slushy plain below, there were rolling hills with peaks stained dark red and yellow, with slashes of ochre on their flanks. But they were mountains of ice, not rock. An ethane lake had eroded the base of the hills, and there were visible scars in the hills’ profiles.

Clouds, red and orange, swirled above the hills and flooded the craters…

It was extraordinarily beautiful. Benacerraf felt she was being drawn into the screen, and she wanted to step through and float down through the thick air, her boots crunching into that slushy surface.

Rosenberg said, “Titan is the only moon in the Solar System with air, an atmosphere double the mass of Earth’s, mostly nitrogen, with some methane and hydrogen. The sunlight breaks down the methane into tholins — a mixture of hydrocarbons, nitriles and other polymers. That’s the orange-brown smog you can see here. Titan is an ice moon, pocked with craters, which are flooded with ethane. Crater lakes, Paula. The tholins rain out on the surface all the time; Huygens landed in a tholin slush, and we figure there is probably a layer, in some places a hundred yards thick, laid down over the dry land. Titan is an organic chemistry paradise…”

Benacerraf felt faintly bored. “I know about the science, Rosenberg.”

“Paula, I want you to start thinking of Titan in a different way: not as a site of some vague scientific interest, but a resource.”

“Resource?”

He began to snap out his words, precise, rehearsed. “Think about what we have here. Titan is an organic-synthesis machine, way off in the outer Solar System, which we can tune to serve Earthly life. It could become a factory, churning out fibers, food, any organic-chemistry product you like. Such as CHON food.”

“Huh?”

“Food manufactured from carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen. Paula, we know how to do this. Generally the comets have been suggested as an off-Earth resource for such raw materials. Titan’s a hell of a lot closer than most comets, and has vastly more mass besides.” She could not help but see how his mind was working, so clear were his speculations, so transparent his body language.

“So a colony could survive there,” she said.

“More than that. You could export foodstuffs to other colonies, to the inner planets, to Earth itself.”

She nodded. “Maybe. There must be cheaper ways to boost the food supply, though… What about a shorter term payoff?”

“Oh, that’s easy. Helium-3, from Saturn.”

“Huh?”

He said patiently, “We mine helium-3 from Saturn’s outer atmosphere, by scooping it off, and export it to Earth, to power fusion reactors. Helium-3 is a better fuel than deuterium. And you know the Earth-Moon system is almost barren of it.”

She nodded slowly.

He said, “And further out in time, on a bigger scale, you could start exporting Titan’s volatiles, to inner planets lacking them.”

“What volatiles?”

“Nitrogen,” he said. “An Earth-like biosphere needs nitrogen. Mars has none; Titan has plenty.” He looked at her closely. “Paula, are you following me? Titan nitrogen could be used to terraform Mars.” He started talking more rapidly. “That’s why Titan is vital. We may have only one shot at this, with the technology we have available now. If we could establish some kind of beachhead on Titan, we could use it as a base, long-term, for the colonization of the rest of the System. If we don’t — hell, it might be centuries before we could assemble the resources for another shot. If ever. I’ve thought this through. I have an integrated plan, on how a colony on Titan could be used as a springboard to open up the outer System, over short, medium and long scales… I’ll give you a copy.”

“Yeah.” She was starting to feel bewildered. My God, she thought. We can’t even fly our handful of thirty-year-old spaceplanes. We’ve sent one cut-price bucket of bolts down into Titan’s atmosphere. And here is this guy, this hairy JPL wacko, talking about interplanetary commerce, terraforming the bodies of the Solar System.

Future and past were seriously mixed up here, at JPL.

“Rosenberg, don’t you think we ought to take this one step at a time? If we’re going to fly to other worlds, wouldn’t it be smarter to go somewhere closer to home? The Moon, even Mars?”

“The old Tsiolkovsky plan,” he said dismissively. “The von Braun scheme. Expand in an orderly way, one step at a time. But hasn’t the history of the last half-century taught us that it just won’t be like that? Paula, the Solar System is a big, empty, hostile place. You can’t envisage an orderly, progressive expansion out there; it will be more like the colonization of Polynesia — fragile ships, limping across the ocean to remote islands. And when you find somewhere friendly, you stop, colonize, and use it as a base to move on. Titan is about the friendliest island we can see; it’s resource-rich, with a shallow gravity well, and it’s a hell of a long way out from the sun. And that’s not all.”

“What else?”

“Paula, we think we’ve found life down there.”

“I know, I read the World Weekly News.”

He looked offended. “It wasn’t World Weekly News. And it was your daughter’s report… Anyhow, this changes everything. Don’t you see? Titan is the future, not just for us, the space program, but for life itself in the Solar System.”

She looked, sideways, at his thin face, the orange light of Titan reflecting from his glasses. He didn’t look as if anybody had held him, close, maybe since his early teenage years. And here he was trying to reach out across a billion miles, to putative beings in some murky puddle on another world.

She’d seen people like this before, on the fringes of the space program. Mostly lonely men. Rosenberg was dreaming of an impossible future. She wondered what it was inside of him he was trying to heal by doing this.

She felt sorry for him.

“Let me get this straight,” she said. “You want me to back a proposal to send another mission to Titan. Is that right? More probes — maybe some kind of sample return?”

He was shaking his head. She sensed that this situation was about to get worse.

“No. You haven’t been listening. Not another probe. People,” he said. “We have to send a crewed mission to Titan. We have to send people there.” He turned in his seat and faced her, deadly serious.

“Rosenberg, if I’d known you were going to propose something life this—”

“I know.” He grinned, and suddenly his looks were boyish. “You wouldn’t have flown out. That’s why I didn’t tell you. But I’m not crazy, and I don’t want to waste your time. Just listen.”

“We don’t have the technology,” she said. “We probably never will.

“But we do have the technology. What the hell else are you going to do with your grounded Shuttle fleet?”

“You want to use Shuttle hardware to reach Titan? Rosenberg it’s crazy even to think of going to Saturn with chemical rockets. It would take years—”

“Actually, getting there is easy. So is surviving on the surface. The hard part is coming home…”

At a console, Rosenberg started showing her the preliminary delta-vee and propellant mass calculations he’d made; he was talking too quickly, and she tried to pay attention, following his argument.

She listened.

It was, of course, crazy.

But…

She found herself grinning. Sending people to Titan, huh?

Well, working on a proposal like this, if it could be made to hang together at all, would be a hell of a lot more fun than trawling around the crash inquiries and consultancy circuit forever. It would put bugs up a lot of asses. Including, she thought wickedly, Jackie’s.

In a satisfying way, in fact, her own involvement in this craziness was all Jackie’s fault.

And, what if it all resulted in something tangible? A Titan adventure would be a peg for a lot of young imaginations, in a future which was looking enclosing and bleak. JPL might be finished. So might the Shuttle program, all of America’s first space efforts. But maybe, out of their ashes, some kind of marker to a better future could be drawn.

Or maybe she just wanted to get back at Jackie.

She had a couple of hours before the flight back to Houston. She could afford to indulge Rosenberg a little more.

It would be a thought experiment. It might make a neat little paper for the Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets. Or maybe one of the sci-fi magazines.

She sat down and started to go through Rosenberg’s back-of-the-envelope numbers more carefully, trying to find the mistake that had to be in there, the hole that would make the whole thing fall apart, the reason why it was impossible to send people to Titan.

Nicola Mott did not want to go home.

She and Siobhan Libet, her sole crewmate on Station, had spent the last day packing the Soyuz reentry module as best they could with results from their work — biological and medical samples, data cassettes and diskettes, film cartridges, notebooks and softscreens. Then Libet dimmed the floods in the Service Module, the Station’s main component, and pulled out her sleeping bag.

But Mott didn’t want to sleep. She wanted to spin out these last few hours as much as she could.

So, alone, she made her way through the open hatch and down to the end of the FGB module, the Russian-built energy block docked on the end of the Service Module.

She stared out the window at the shining, wrinkled surface of the Pacific.

The shadows of the light, high clouds on the water grew longer, and the Station passed abruptly into night. She huddled by the window, curling up into a foetal ball. She could see the lights of a ship, crawling across the skin of the darkened ocean.

She — Nicola Mott, English-born astronaut — might be the last Westerner ever to see such sights, she thought.

She was too young to remember Apollo, barely old enough to remember Skylab and ASTP. She’d been eleven, in the middle of an English spring, when Columbia made her maiden flight, and it had been a hell of a thrill. But after a while she started to wonder why these beautiful spaceships kept on flying up to orbit and coming back down without ever going anywhere.

And when she’d come to understand that, she started to realize that she’d been born at the wrong time: born too late to witness, still less participate in, Apollo; born too early, probably, to witness whatever came next.

Still, she’d decided to make her own way. She’d moved to America and worked through a short career at McDonnell Douglas, where she’d worked on the design and construction of a component of Station called the Integrated Truss Segment S0, a piece that now looked as if it would never be shipped out of the McDonnell plant at Huntingdon Beach. She’d enjoyed her time at Huntingdon, looking back; the Balsa Avenue assembly area had the air of an ordinary industrial plant, no fancy NASA-style airlocks or clean rooms…

Anyhow, then she’d transferred to NASA. She’d worked as a payload controller in Mission Control, and then, at her third attempt, made it into the Astronaut Office. She’d paid her dues as an ascan, and finally been attached to a Shuttle flight — STS-141, Atlantis — and come flying up here, to Station, for a six-month vigil.

It turned out to be a question of just surviving in this shack of a Service Module, boring a hole in the sky for month after month. Russian and American crews, brought up by Shuttle, had been rotating up here on six-month shifts, struggling to do some real research in these primitive conditions, their main purpose to keep this rump of the Station alive with basic maintenance and housekeeping.

Even so, at first she’d been thrilled just to be in space, all these years after those Illinois dreams. And as her relationship with Siobhan Libet had matured, the experience had come to seem magical.

Then, after a few weeks of circling the Earth, she’d got oddly frustrated. She got bored with the stodgy Russian food and with the daily regime of exercise and dull maintenance. The Station blocks were so small compared to the huge spaces out there; it seemed absurd to be so confined, to huddle up against the warm skin of Earth like this.

Damn it, she wanted to go somewhere. Such as Titan, where those hairies at JPL thought they’d found life signs… But nobody was offering a ride.

It wasn’t really the great tragic downfall in human destiny that was bothering her, she admitted. It was her own screwed-up career.

Mott was thirty-four years old, and she wasn’t given to morbid late-night thoughts like these. She started to feel cold, and, suddenly, terribly lonely. Staying up all night no longer seemed such a great idea.

She pulled herself back through to the Service Module.

The interior of Station was cramped and crowded. The walls were lined with instrument panels, wall mounts for air-scrubbing lithium chlorate canisters, other equipment. These two modules had been serving alone as the core of the Space Station for too many years now, and as parts had worn out replacements had been flown up and crudely bolted in place, and new experiments had been brought up here and fixed to whatever wall space was available. As a result the clutter was prodigious; cables and pipes and lagged ducts trailed everywhere, and there was a sour smell, the stink of people locked up in a small space for too long.

She pressurized the water tank, and fired the spigot. A globe of water came shimmering through the air towards her face, the lights of the module sharply reflected in its meniscus. She opened her mouth and let the water drift in; when she closed her mouth around the globule it was as if the water exploded over her palate, crisp and cold.

If she couldn’t get back into space, she’d never in her life be able to take a drink like that again, she thought. Returning to Earth was going to be like a little death.

Her sleeping compartment was a space like a broom cupboard, with its own window, cluttered with bits of gear and clothing. Her sleeping bag was fixed straight up and down against the wall of the module, and she had to crane her neck to see out of her window, at the slice of Earth which drifted past there. With the Earthlight, and the subdued floods of the compartment, the Service Module was pretty bright, and the pumps and ventilation fans kept up a continual rattle. It was like being in the guts of some huge machine.

She pulled herself deeper into her sleeping bag, which soon became warm enough for her to be able to forget the endless vacuum a few inches away from her face, beyond the module’s cladded hull.

After an unmeasured time, she felt a hand stroking her back. She turned in her bag. Siobhan, naked, her hair floating around her face in a big burst of color, was silhouetted against the cabin lights.

Mott smiled and reached out. She brushed Libet’s hair back, revealing her fine, high brow. “You look like Barbarella,” she said.

“In your dreams. Are you going to let me in?”

The sleeping bags were too small for two people. But they’d found a way of zipping their two bags together. It was cold, the opening at the top liable to let in draughts, but their bodies would soon build up a layer of warm air around them.

“Anyhow,” Mott said, “I thought you wanted to sleep.”

“I did. I do. But I guess I can spend the rest of my life asleep. Down there, at the bottom of the gravity well. This seems too good an opportunity to pass up. The last time anyone will be having sex in space, for a long, long time…”

Mott clung to Libet.

Libet stroked her back. “Who was the first, do you think? The first orgasm in space.”

Mott snorted. “Yuri Gagarin, probably. Or one of those Mercury assholes fulfilling a bet. Maybe even old Al Shepard managed it.”

“Oh, come on. He only had fifteen minutes. Even Big Al couldn’t have done it in that time. Anyway, those Mercury suits were hard to open up.”

“Fifteen minutes. Well, we haven’t got much longer.”

Libet’s hand, warm now, moved over Mott’s stomach. “From first to last.”

“From first to last,” Mott said, and she closed her eyes.

She was woken by a buzzer alarm, at 4 a.m. It felt as if she hadn’t slept at all.

They prepared a hasty meal: tinned fish and potatoes, tubes of soft cheese, and a vegetable puree that had to be reconstituted with hot water. The rations were Russian standard, and, as usual, tasted salty and heavy with butter and cream to Mott. She drank sweet coffee from a plastic bag with a roll-out spout. She tried not to drink too much; she was going to be in her pressure suit for a long time.

Libet went down to the Soyuz to run a final check, and Mott got herself dressed in her stiff Russian-design pressure suit.

Libet suited up in her turn, and they pressurized each other’s suits, making sure they were airtight. Then Mott tested her pressure-release valve, a large knob on the suit’s chest panel.

She pocketed some souvenirs: her Swiss army knife, photographs.

By six a.m. they were both ready to leave.

A TV camera was mounted in one corner of the Service Module, all but concealed amid the equipment lockers and cables there. The camera was mute, no red light showing. It looked as if nobody wanted to record these last acts of the American manned space program, two unhappy astronauts clambering into Russian pressure suits.

Mott led the way for the last time out of the Service Module and through the FGB towards Soyuz. Behind her, Libet killed the lights in the Service Module.

The waiting Soyuz was stuck on the side of the FGB, nose-first.

She could see through blister windows in the FGB that the body of the ship was a light blue-green, an oddly beautiful, Earthlike color. The Soyuz looked something like a pepperpot, a bug-like shape nine feet across. Two matte-black solar panels jutted from its rounded flanks, like unfolded wings, and a parabolic antenna was held away from the ship, on a light gantry. Soyuz was basically a Gemini-era craft, still flying in this first decade of a new millennium. And today, Mott and Libet were going to have to ride Soyuz home.

The Soyuz was strictly an assured crew return vehicle, in the nomenclature of the Station project, a simple mechanism for the crew to make it back to Earth in case the Shuttle, the primary crew ferry, couldn’t make it in some emergency. The Mission Controllers, down in Houston and Kalinin, had decided that the Columbia incident and subsequent Shuttle grounding constituted just such an emergency.

The Soyuz’s Orbital Module was a ball stuck to the craft’s front end, lined with lockers, just big enough for one person to stretch out. It would be discarded to burn up during the reentry, so Mott and Libet had packed it full of garbage. Now Mott had to struggle through discarded food containers and clothing and equipment wrappers, many of them floating around, to get through to the Descent Module. It was like struggling through a surreal blizzard.

The Descent Module, the headlight-shaped compartment in which they would make their return to Earth, was laid out superficially like an Apollo Command Module, with three lumpy-looking moulded couches set out in a fan formation, their lower halves touching. There were two circular windows, facing out beside the two outer seats. Big electronics racks filled up the space beneath the couches, and a large moulded compartment on one wall contained the main parachute. Mott slid herself in, feet-first, wriggling until she could feel the contours of the right-hand seat under her. The seat was too short for her, and compressed her at her shoulders and calves.

There was a small, circular pane of glass at Mott’s right elbow. She peered out of this now, trying to lose herself in the view of blue Earth.

After a few minutes, Libet floated headfirst into the compartment. She pushed the last of the garbage back into the Orbital Module, and dogged the hatch closed. Then she somersaulted neatly and slid into the center couch, compressing Mott against the wall; their lower legs were in contact, and there was no space for her to move away.

The two of them began to work through a pre-entry checklist.

At a little after 9:00 a.m., it was time for the undocking. The clamps that held the craft together were released. A spring connector pushed at the Soyuz; there was a gentle thump, and the Soyuz drifted gently away from Station.

For an hour, Libet used the Soyuz’s crude hand controller to fly the ferry around Station. Mott was supposed to take a final set of photographs of the abandoned Station before the descent. She had to sit up out of her couch and wedge herself in the small porthole to get the shots.

Mott could see the whole assembly, floating against a curving horizon, with the meniscus of clouds masking the ground below. In the light of Earth, Station was brightly illuminated, a T-shaped melange of greys, greens, whites. It looked quite delicate and beautiful.

The unfinished Station looked pretty much like Mir had, in an early stage of its construction, she supposed. The two main blocks, both orbited by Russian Protons, were the Service Module, a three-crew habitat based closely on the Mir’s base block, and the FGB, based on the Mir’s Kvant supply module. The two modules were squat cylinders, docked end-to-end, punctuated with small round portholes, and coated with thermal insulation, a powdery cloth that was peppered by fist-sized meteorite scars. Small solar panels stretched out to either side of each module, like battered wings, with big charcoal-black cells and fat wires fixed in place with crude blobs of solder. A Progress unmanned ferry, another Soyuz variant, was docked to the Service Module’s aft port, on the other side from the FGB.

On the forward port of the FGB was docked the main American contribution to date, a small module called Resource Node 1, which had provided storage space for supplies and equipment, berthing ports, a Shuttle docking port, and attachment points for more modules and the Station’s large truss: a gantry that would have stretched all of three hundred and sixty feet long, with the huge photovoltaic arrays stretching out to either side.

But the assembly hadn’t got that far. Only the first piece of the truss, a small complex element called Z1, had been hauled up by Endeavour and fitted to the top of Node 1. Future flights would have brought up more truss segments, the comparatively luxurious U.S. habitation module, and the multinational lab modules, sleek, modern-looking cylinders the size of railway carriages which would have clustered closely around the Resource Nodes.

In fact, the completed Station would have looked, she thought, like a collision between the twenty-first century and the twentieth — the modern American design, components and concepts inherited from the billions invested in abortive Space Station studies since 1984, forced together with a second-generation Russian Mir.

It was all such a waste.

If they’d flown up one more mission, STS-94, at least they’d have had a serious science facility up here. STS-94 would have been the fifth U.S. assembly flight; it would have delivered the first U.S. lab module, complete with thirteen racks of science equipment, life support, maintenance and control gear. And they would have been able to do some real work up here, instead of the small-scale make-work experiments they’d had to run: monitoring herself for drug metabolism by taking saliva samples, checking for radiation health with miniature dosimeters strapped to her body, checking her respiration during exercises on the treadmill, investigating the relationship between bone density and venous pressure by wearing dumb little tourniquets around her ankle…

STS-94 had been scheduled for early 1999. Delays, funding cuts and problems with the early Station modules and operations had pushed back its launch five years. And now, it would never fly, and Station would never be completed.

Soyuz was passing over South America. Mott could see the pale fresh water of the Amazon, the current so strong it had still failed to mingle, hundreds of miles off shore, with the dark salt ocean.

The retro rockets fired with a solid thump. For the first time in four months a sensation of weight returned to Mott, and she was pressed into her seat.

When the burn was done, the feeling of weight disappeared. But now the Soyuz was no longer in a free orbit but was falling rapidly towards Earth.

There was something wrong with her eyes. She lifted up her hand, and found salt water, big thick drops of it, welling over her cheeks.

She was crying. Damn it.

“Dabro pazhalavat,” Siobhan Libet said softly. “Welcome home.”

Through her window now she could see nothing but blackness.

Jake Hadamard called Benacerraf. She was in her room in the Astronaut Office at JSC, poring over a technical reconstruction of the multiple failures that had destroyed Columbia’s APUs.

“Hi. I’m here at JSC. Look, I need to talk to you. Can you get away?”

When she heard the Administrator’s dry voice, she felt pressure piling up on top of her, a force as tangible as the deceleration which had dragged her down into her canvas seat, during that last reentry from space. What now? “Do you want me to come over?”

“No. Let’s get out of here, for a couple of hours. Meet me at the Public Affairs Office parking lot…”

It was a bizarre request, but Benacerraf sure as hell needed a break. She pulled on a light white sweatshirt and a broad-brimmed hat, and went out to the elevator.

It was three p.m. on a hot July afternoon.

She emerged into a Mediterranean flat heat — after the dry, cold air-conditioning it was like walking into a wall of dampness — and she was immersed in the steady chirp of crickets. She walked across the courtyard of the JSC campus towards Second Street, which led to the main gate.

The blocky black and white buildings of JSC were scattered over the landscaped lawns like children’s blocks, with big black nursery-style identifying numbers on their sides. Between the buildings were Chinese tallow trees and tough, thick-bladed, glowing green Texas grass; sprinklers seemed to work all the time, hissing peacefully, a sound that always reminded her of a Joni Mitchell album she’d gotten too fond of in her teenage years.

But JSC was showing its age. Most of the buildings were more than forty years old; despite the boldness of the chunky 1960s style the buildings themselves were visibly ageing, and after decades of budget cutbacks looked shabby: the concrete stained, the paint peeling. On her first visits here she’d been struck by the narrow corridors and gloomy ceiling tiles of many of the older buildings; it was more like some beat-up welfare agency than the core of a space program.

As he’d promised, Jake Hadamard was waiting for her at the car park close to the PAO. The lot was pretty full: old hands said wearily that there hadn’t been so much press interest in NASA since Challenger.

They piled into Hadamard’s car. It was a small ’00 Dodge, He drove out through the security barrier, down Second Street, and towards NASA Road One, the public highway. Hadamard grinned. “I have a limousine here I can use, with a driver,” he said. “But my job is kind of diffuse. I like to be able to do things personally from time to time.”

Benacerraf said, “So, you drive for release.”

“I guess.”

To the right of Second Street, which ran through the heart of JSC, was the Center’s rocket garden. There was a Little Joe — a test rocket for Apollo — and a Mercury-Redstone, looking absurdly small and delicate. The black-and-white-striped Redstone booster was just a simple tube, so slim the Mercury capsule’s heat shield overhung it. The Redstone was upright but braced against wind damage with wires; it looked, Benacerraf thought, as if it had been tied to the Earth, Gulliver-style. And, just before the big stone “Lyndon B Johnson Space Center” entry sign at NASA One, they passed, on the right, the Big S itself: a Saturn V moon rocket, complete with Apollo, broken into pieces and lying on its side.

A small group of tourists, evidently bussed over from the visitors’ center, Space Center Houston, hung about in front of the Redstone. They wore shorts and baseball caps, and their bare skin was coated with image-tattoos, and they looked up at the Redstone with baffled incomprehension.

But then, Benacerraf thought, it was already more than four decades since Alan Shepard’s first sub-orbital lob in a tin can like this. Two generations. No wonder these young bedecked visitors looked on these crude Cold War relics with bemusement.

Hadamard pulled out onto NASA Road One, and headed west. As he drove he sat upright, his grey-blond hair close-cropped, his hands resting confidently on the wheel as the car’s internal processor took them smoothly through the traffic.

They cut south down West NASA Boulevard, and pulled off the road and into a park. Hadamard drove into a parking area. The lot was empty save for a big yellow school bus.

“Let’s walk,” Hadamard said.

They got out of the car.

The park was wide, flat, tree-lined, green. The air was still, silent, save for the sharp-edged rustle of crickets, and the distant voices of a bunch of children, presumably decanted from the bus. Benacerraf could see the kids in the middle distance, running back and forth, some kind of sports day.

Hadamard, wearing neat dark sunglasses and a NASA baseball cap, led the way across the field.

Benacerraf took a big breath of air, and swung her arms around in the empty space.

Hadamard grinned at her, and his shades cast dazzling highlights. “Feels like coming home, huh.”

“You bet.” She thought about it. “You know, I don’t think I’ve walked on grass, except for taking short cuts across the JSC campus, since I got back from orbit.”

“You should get out more.” He scuffed at the grass with his patent leather shoes. “This is where we belong, after all. Here, on Earth, where we’ve spent four billion years adapting to the weather.”

“So you don’t think we ought to be travelling in space.”

He shrugged, and patted at his belly. “Not in this kind of design. A big heavy bag of water. Spacecraft are mostly plumbing, after all… Humans don’t belong up there.”

“Oh, come on.”

“Well, they don’t. You should hear what the scientists say to me. Every time someone sneezes on Station, a microgravity protein growth experiment is wrecked.”

Benacerraf said, “You’re repeating the criticisms that are coming out in the Commission hearings. You know, it’s like 1967 over again, after the Apollo fire.”

“Yes, but back then they managed to restrict the inquiries afterward to a NASA internal investigation. And that meant they could keep most of the recommendations technical rather than managerial.”

Benacerraf grunted. “Neat trick.”

Hadamard laughed. “Well, the Administrator back then was a wily old fox who knew how to play those guys up on the Hill. But I’m no Jim Webb. After Challenger we had a Presidential Commission, just like the one that we’re facing now.”

They reached the woods, and the seagull-like cries of the children receded.

Eventually they came to a glade. A monument stood on a little square of bark-covered ground, enclosed by the trees, and the dappled sunlight reflected from its upper surface. It was box-like, waist high, and constructed of some kind of black granite.

It was peaceful here. She wondered what the hell Hadamard wanted.

Jake Hadamard took a deep breath, pulled off his sunglasses, and looked at Benacerraf. “Paula, do you know where you are? When I first came to work at NASA, I was struck by the—” he hesitated “—the invisibility of the Challenger incident. I mean, there are plenty of monuments around JSC to the great triumphs of the past, like Apollo 11. Pictures on the walls, the flight directors’ retirement plaques, Mission Control in Building 30 restored 1960s style as a national monument, for God’s sake.

“But Challenger might never have happened.

“It’s the same if you go around the Visitors’ Center. You have your Lego exhibits and your Station displays and your pig-iron toy Shuttles in the playground, and that inspirational music playing on a tape loop all the time. But again, Challenger might never have happened.

“Outside NASA, it’s different. For the rest of us, Challenger was one of the defining moments of the 1980s. The moment when a dream died.”

He said us. Benacerraf found the word startling; she studied Hadamard with new interest.

He said, “Look around Houston and Clear Lake. You have Challenger malls and car lots and drug stores… And look at this monument.”

Benacerraf bent to see. The monument’s white lettering had weathered badly, but she could still make out the Harris County shield inset on the front, and, on the top, the mission patch for Challenger’s final flight: against a Stars-and-Stripes background, the doomed orbiter flying around Earth, with those seven too-familiar names around the rim: McNair, Onizuka, Resnik, Scobee, Smith, Jarvis, McAuliffe.

“We’re in the Challenger Seven Memorial Park,” Hadamard said. “You see, what’s interesting to me is that this little monument wasn’t raised by NASA, but by the local people.”

“I don’t see what you’re getting at, Jake.”

“I’m trying to understand how, over two decades, these NASA people have come to terms with the Challenger thing. Because I need to learn how to size up the recommendations I’m getting from you for the way forward after Columbia.”

Benacerraf said, “You want to know if you can trust us.”

He didn’t smile.

“NASA people didn’t launch that Chinese girl into orbit,” she said. “And that’s the source of the pressure on you to come up with some way to keep flying.”

“Is it?”

Benacerraf decided to probe. “You know, now that I’m getting to know you, you aren’t what I expected.”

He smiled. “Not just a bean counter, a politico on the make? Paula, I am both of those things. I’m not going to deny it, and I’m not ashamed of either of them. We need politicos and bean counters to make our world go round. But—”

“What?”

“I wasn’t born an accountant. I was seventeen when Apollo 11 landed. I painted my room black with stars, and had a big Moon map on the ceiling—”

“You?”

“Sure.”

“And you’re the NASA Administrator.”

He shrugged. “I’m the Administrator who was on watch when Columbia turned into a footprint on that salt lake.

“I’m going through hell, frankly, facing that White House Commission. Phil Gamble is getting the whipping in the media, but the Commission are just beating up on me. And then there’s the pressure from the Air Force. You know, over the years the Air Force has made some big mistakes chasing manned spaceflight. They wasted a lot of money on projects that didn’t come to fruition: the X-20 spaceplane, the Manned Orbiting Laboratory… In the 1970s they were pushed into relying on the Shuttle as their sole launch vehicle. That single space policy mistake cost them twenty billion dollars, they tell me, in today’s money. And now we got Columbia, and the fleet is grounded again. You can bet that if Shuttle never flies again, there will be plenty in USAF who won’t shed a tear.

“Now, facing lobbies like that, with institutional rivalries going back a half century, I sure as hell am not prepared to go into bat for any kind of shit-headed NASA insider stuff about how everything is fine and dandy, just another technical glitch we can get over with a little work. Did you know that the NASA management recommended just continuing with the Shuttle launch schedule in the immediate wake of Challenger? They had to be forced to take a hiatus while they figured out and fixed the problems. You will not find this Administrator making the same mistake.”

“I’ll tell you how we can minimize risk,” Benacerraf said hotly. “We just won’t fly. Jake, we’re flying experimental aircraft, here. You just can’t expect the public to see it this way. We’re the professionals. We understand the risks, and we accept them. That’s why there are no Challenger tombstones and memorials and plaques all over JSC. Jake, you have to have a little taste. You can’t keep looking back at some disaster, all the time. We have to move on. We’re looking at the future of humanity here, the expansion of the human race into—”

Hadamard waved her silent. “Let’s save the speeches, Paula. Besides, I think you are too smart to believe it. The truth is we are never going to move out into deep space. There’s nowhere to go. The Moon’s dead, Venus is an inferno, Mars is almost as dead as the Moon. And even if there was a worthwhile destination the journey would kill us. We’re not going anywhere, not in our lifetimes, probably not ever. It was always just a dream. People understand that, instinctively, in a way they never did in the 1960s, during Apollo. That’s why, I fear, they’re sick of spaceflight — Shuttle, the Station — and sick of the people who promote it.”

His words, though mildly expressed, seemed brutally hard. Benacerraf shivered, suddenly, despite the continuing warmth of the day. My God, she thought. He’s going to let it go. Is that what he’s brought me here to tell me?

Here in this nondescript wood, beside this slightly tacky memorial, she could be witnessing the death of the U.S. manned space program.

They turned and began to walk out of the wood, back towards the car.

“Why did you ask to see me, today? What do you want of me?”

“We’re going to be hit hard by Congress and the White House and the DoD over Columbia, Paula. Whatever I decide, I might not survive myself. And even if I do I’m going to have to shake up many levels of the management hierarchy, in all the centers. I’m trying to think ahead.

“I know I’m going to need someone to take over the Shuttle program. A fresh face. A management outsider, Paula, someone who’s untainted by all the NASA crap.”

She frowned. “You mean me?”

“You’ve the right qualifications, the right experience. I’ve watched how you’ve handled yourself in the fall-out from Columbia, and I’ve been impressed. And you have the right air of distance from the real insiders.”

She said, “My God. You’re asking me to oversee the dismantling of the Shuttle program.”

“Mothballing, Paula. That’s the language we’ll use. Look, it’s an important job.”

“To you?”

He grinned. “Hell, yes, to me. What did you think I meant?”

“But what about all the other programs? The stuff you started after Chinese-Sputnik panic, the RLV initiatives…”

“Frankly,” Hadamard said, “I don’t much care. If some damn Shuttle II ever flies, it will be long after I’m out of the hot seat. And if it ever does fly you know Maclachlan will just shut it down, when he takes the White House. All that matters to me is how to use up the Shuttle technology. That project, unlike RLV, will come to fruition during my term.”

Benacerraf got it. It could be that a judicious, sensitively handled wind-down of Shuttle would be the criterion on which Hadamard would be judged: on which the rest of his career might depend.

“Sure. So what about the components? What do we do with the three remaining orbiters?”

“You’ve heard some of the suggestions. You’ll hear more. The dreamers at Marshall want to respond to the Chinese, to go to the Moon. As ever. The USAF want nuclear space battle stations, or to practise sub-orbital bomb runs over Moscow. The Navy want to use the birds as target practice. And so on.”

“Do you have a preference?”

“Only that whatever you come up with fits the mood.” He smiled sadly. “Anyhow, JSC could use a new lawn ornament. The one we have now is getting a little rusty.”

“I understand,” she said sourly.

Lawn ornaments. Jesus.

She did understand. Hadamard wanted her to guide what was left of the Shuttle program through the current panic about the Chinese, all the way to the usual run-down and cancellations that would follow.

But, she thought, maybe it didn’t have to be like that.

If she took this job, she would move into a position where she could make things happen.

And there are, she thought, other possibilities than turning spaceships into lawn ornaments. Even if doing anything constructive would mean battling past the opposition of a lot of interests, not least the USAF. And even if it would all, it seemed, have to be a race against time, ensuring that whatever was set up was in place before Congressman Xavier Maclachlan became President and had a chance to shoot it in the head…

It was a hell of a challenge. But suddenly dreams like Rosenberg’s didn’t seem so remote. Suddenly she was in a position to move proposals like that out of the realms of thought experiments, even make them happen.

They emerged into the bright sunlight of the field beyond the wood. In the distance, the children continued to play, their calls rising to the sky.

For the first time since hitting the dirt at Edwards, she felt her pulse pick up a beat of excitement.

She said to Hadamard, “I’ll do the job.” But, she thought, maybe not the way you expect me to.

On Monday morning she moved into her new office at JSC. She called in her secretary and asked him to set up a series of meetings. George, a sombre but competent young man with his hair woven into tight plaits, took notes and began his work.

She needed a team. So she made a list for George: Marcus White, the stranded Moonwalker; Barbara Fahy, the woman who had tried to bring Columbia home; the young Station astronauts Mott and Libet; Bill Angel, the nearest thing to a competent pilot she knew. And Isaac Rosenberg, the dreamer, the crazy man who wanted to go to Titan.

George went off to set up meetings.

After a few minutes, she called him back in.

“Look, George, things are going to start popping around here,” she said. “I can’t tell you what it is right now, but I want you to keep a log of the people I talk to. And keep it in a secure directory.”

After all, she reflected, they could be making history here, in the next few weeks and months. Maybe historians of the future would care enough to understand how this decision had come about.

Or, she thought in her gloomier moments, not.

George seemed intrigued, but complied without questioning.

She got to work.

Rosenberg called Paula from Hobby Airport, ten miles south-east of downtown Houston. His plane, from Pasadena, had landed a half-hour late, after four in the afternoon.

“Get a cab to JSC,” she told him. “I’ll pick you up in my car at security.”

Rosenberg hadn’t been out this way before. He stood waiting by the security gate on NASA Road One, staring with undisguised curiosity at the ageing black-and-white buildings.

From JSC she drove east with the home-bound rush-hour traffic, further out from Houston, heading for Clear Lake.

Benacerraf said, “You ought to do the tourist bit, while you’re here. Space Center Houston. They’ve got a terrific Mars-walk immersive VR. I’m told.”

“I prefer RL.”

“RL?”

“You don’t get online much, do you?”

The road paralleled the north coast of Clear Lake, which was an inlet of Galveston Bay. They passed the glittering tower of the Nassau Bay Hilton, its glass walls coated with softscreen animated posters.

Rosenberg said, “We could be anywhere. Any coast area, anywhere. You wouldn’t think—”

“I know.” She stared at the shabby roadside buildings, the tough, scrub grass. “Erosion runs fast here,” she said. “And now that the space effort is receding—” and the wilder rumors now were that most of the NASA centers, JSC included, were to be mothballed “—all that erosion is going to have a field day. A hundred years from now, JSC will just be a cow pasture again.”

“But a cow pasture with immersive VR facilities.”

Benacerraf lived in Shorewood Drive, a small road that curved parallel to the shore of Taylor Lake, itself an inlet of Clear Lake, This was the smart residential community called El Lago. Rosenberg stared out the window, without commenting.

She tried to see the little community through his eyes. Home town America, circa 1961: garages and air-conditioners and bicycles and shining lawns, the houses neat and dark with hints of ranch style, or mock Tudor flourishes, or discreet Spanish designs. Uniformly ersatz. Even the trees were all the same age, she realized now.

Give it up, Benacerraf. He’s probably thinking how much he needs to pee. El Lago is a dormitory for the Space Age, planned and artificial, no more, no less.

They reached her home. There were four other cars already parked in a ragged row along the side of the road: her other guests, arrived ahead of her, the rest of her team.

She observed Rosenberg sizing up the house.

It was a ranch house, an individually styled bungalow, wood framed with stone cladding. The trees, pine and fern, looked manicured. The lawn was luminous green in the last light of the sun, its little sprinkler heads glittering. At the back of the house was a small private jetty, with space for a couple of boats.

“Nice,” Rosenberg said neutrally.

She searched for her key. “Astronaut country, 1960s style. Nice if you come from Illinois. Or if you like the water.”

“And you don’t?”

She shrugged. “I prefer Seattle. And I don’t sail. Anyhow this is rental only.”

“Smart.”

“Yes. Property prices have been falling like crazy around here, ever since Columbia.”

She fired the key’s infra-red beam at the door, and it swung open with a soft hiss of hydraulics.

Benacerraf’s housekeeper, Kevin, had let the rest of her guests in. When Benacerraf and Rosenberg arrived, the housekeeper served them drinks and began to lay out dinner.

The guests were gathered in the gazebo. It was a new kind of conservatory, connected to the house by a flexible joint, and mounted on a platform. It rotated to follow the sun, flower-like.

Rosenberg seemed to love it. “Bradbury,” he said.

“What?”

“Never mind. It’s just very appropriate.”

Everyone had turned up, Benacerraf noted with satisfaction: seven of them — Benacerraf herself with Rosenberg, Marcus White, Bill Angel, Barbara Fahy, and the two younger astronauts Benacerraf didn’t know so well, Siobhan Libet and Nicola Mott.

Marcus White grinned at Benacerraf. He was working through seven and sevens, and he looked oiled already. He grinned at Rosenberg, around a mouthful of peanuts, and the room’s candlelight caught the silvery stubble on his creased cheeks.

“So, Rosenberg. You’re the asshole who wants to go to Titan. Why the hell?”

Rosenberg didn’t seem awed; he looked back levelly, holding his drink up before him. “Suppose,” he said, “you tell me why you want to go.”

White snorted.

“He has a point, Marcus.” Benacerraf had already outlined the purpose of the dinner party. “Rosenberg thinks Titan is El Dorado, a treasure house of exotic chemicals, even life. But what about you? You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t interested yourself.”

White looked fleetingly embarrassed. To cover, he shovelled more peanuts into his mouth. “What the hell,” he said, his lips shiny with grease. “If this comes off, it’s the first human flight beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17. And probably the last. Who wouldn’t want to go?”

“Then there’s your reason,” Bill Angel said. “Titan as Everest. We should go because it’s there. Why the hell not?” Benacerraf watched him drain his glass again, his hand like a claw on the frosted surface.

She didn’t need to ask why Angel was here. He had no choice. He would find it easier to climb Everest, to go to Titan, than to face himself, alone in a room, with no goals left. She’d seen it before, a dozen times, in the Astronaut Office. The blight of the co-pilot. At least Marcus had the wisdom to know himself. The stories were Angel had been doing a lot of drinking since that Columbia incident.

But, she thought, he was competent.

The younger astronauts, Libet and Mott, seemed embarrassed: they dropped their eyes and worked steadily on their drinks.

Barbara Fahy cleared her throat. “The way I figure nobody is going the hell anywhere, let alone Titan.” She looked around, at a circle of glum faces. “I mean it. It’s just unworkable.”

Benacerraf said mildly, “How so?”

Fahy said, “I’ve done some back-of-the-envelope figuring. How do you fly to Saturn? Saturn is ten times as far from the sun as Earth, remember. A Hohmann orbit, a minimum-energy transfer — which is all we could manage with chemical technology, which is all we got — would be a long, skinny ellipse touching Earth’s orbit at one extreme, and Saturn’s at the other. It would take six years to get there. Then you’d have to wait out a year at Saturn, until the planets got back into their correct alignment, and ride out the other half of the ellipse, back home. Total mission time thirteen years. Now, what size crew are you talking about? Five, six? How the hell are you going to supply and sustain a crew for a thirteen-year mission — all of it isolated from Earth? Christ, the longest missions we’ve run in Earth orbit without resupply are only a couple of months—”

“ISRU,” said Siobhan Libet.

Fahy looked at her. “Huh?”

Rosenberg said, “She’s right. In-situ resource utilization. You wouldn’t carry food for the Titan stopover. We’re landing, remember? There’s carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen down there. All sorts of organic and carbohydrate compounds.”

“So that gets you through the year stopover. Maybe you could even resupply for the journey home,” Fahy said. “But the main point still stands. You’d need to carry fuel to slow into Titan orbit. And all that fuel has to be hauled up and launched, in its turn, from an initial low Earth orbit. The numbers just multiply.

“I figure you’re looking at millions of pounds of fuel to be hauled up to low Earth orbit. And the cargo capacity of the Shuttle to LEO is only sixty-five thousand pounds. Are you seriously proposing thirty, forty Shuttle missions?”

“But you’d use gravity assists,” Nicola Mott said. “Wouldn’t you? Like Cassini. You wouldn’t follow a simple Hohmann trajectory.

You’d play the usual interplanetary pool: bounce off Earth, Venus, Jupiter maybe, and each time steal a little of their energy of rotation around the sun.”

“Fine,” said Angel thickly, “but if you’re talking about going in to Venus you’d have to carry sun-shields, and—”

“Details,” Marcus White said. “Fucking details. You always were a windy bastard, Angel.”

Angel grinned. He said, “Okay. But even if you cut your initial mass in LEO by, say, fifty percent, you’re still looking at dozens of Shuttle launches. And there’s no way Hadamard would back such a mission.”

Barbara Fahy sighed. “He’s right, I’m afraid.”

“No, he isn’t,” Isaac Rosenberg said. “You’re making the wrong assumptions.”

Angel said, “Huh?”

Rosenberg said mildly, “What if you don’t come home?”

There was a long silence.

Kevin, the housekeeper, called them to eat.

The meal was set up in small china dishes on candle-heated plate-warmers, all arranged on a big rotating serving platform on top of Benacerraf’s favorite piece of furniture, her walnut dining table. There was hot and sour soup, spare ribs, chicken in ginger, quorn with spring onions, Szechuan prawns, and a variety of rice and noodle plates; there was water, beer and wine on the table.

Angel drained his glass again. “That kid of yours fixes a good drink,” he said.

“Yes. He’s a good cook, too.”

White said, “What is he, working his way through college?”

“…Something like that.” She left it there. She doubted that White, who’d spent his adult life in the monkish confines of the space program, would understand much more.

Kevin, from Galveston, was a pleasant, plump boy, twenty-three years old, already a college graduate. Actually he was earning his keep while he paid off his college debt, and pursued his art.

Benacerraf had given him a garage, to use as a studio. Once, Kevin had shown Benacerraf his work. It was sculpture. The main piece was a large block of rendered animal-fat, made into a half-scale self-portrait of Kevin. The statue showed Kevin lowering his shorts and stroking his own genitals. The statue hadn’t been carved; Kevin had gnawed it, crudely, with his teeth. The marks of the teeth were clearly visible, especially where Kevin had used his chipped left incisor. Kevin explained that this was only a sketch; the final version would be made of human fat liposuctioned from his own body. Or maybe his feces.

Benacerraf didn’t go back into the garage after that.

The thing of it was, Kevin didn’t have any other skills. He was a college graduate; his degree had been in recursive and self-referential art, with special studies of the greats of the 1990s: Janine Antoni, Scan Landers, Gregory Green, Charles Long.

Demographic projections for Kevin’s age-group — with modern medical care, preventative programs, reduced-calorie dieting and prosthetics — predicted a full century of active life ahead of him. That, thought Benacerraf, provided time for a lot of shit-gnawing.

At that, gnawing shit was better than creating nothing at all, which was to be the fate, as far as Benacerraf could see, of most of Kevin’s generation, as they lay in their VR-beds and pushed increasingly stale, second-hand information around the net.

Kevin, anyhow, was a satisfactory housekeeper. Benacerraf paid his wages, and tried not to think about his future. She didn’t see what else she could do for him, or the millions like him, unemployed and unemployable…

The seven of them gathered around the table and began to spoon food into their small bowls. Everyone but Marcus White opted to use chopsticks.

Benacerraf, looking around at the ring of relaxed, candlelit faces, felt pleased. There was a warm, friendly, domestic atmosphere here; they were seven humans, rooted to the Earth, enjoying a shared ritual that dated back to the emergence of humanity.

Her purpose, tonight, was to try to build this group into a team, who would have to work together to achieve something no other humans had attempted — and, if, impossibly, this proposal came to fruition, some of whom might soon depart the Earth forever.

She still hadn’t decided whether to put her weight behind this dumb-ass Titan proposal. Up to now, it had just been a hobby, something to take her mind off the hierarchy of Flight Readiness Review records from STS-143. The reaction of the group, tonight, could decide that.

They started talking about Titan again.

Nicola Mott said, “Let me go through this again. From the top. You’re seriously suggesting that we send a manned mission. That we travel one way, to colonize Titan.”

“Why not?” Rosenberg said. “Maybe we’re done with dipping our toes in the water and running.”

“Like with Apollo,” Marcus White said heavily.

“Like with Apollo.”

Rosenberg said, “Look, the whole point of this proposal is that we’re going to prove that a colony on Titan would be viable. More than that: it would soon become an actual economic asset to the United States, to Earth. How are we going to do that, if we aren’t prepared to put ourselves on the line, give up a few home comforts?” He sounded irritated, frustrated at his inability to communicate, their inability to see. “We go out there to stay for years, we build a home, we survive until a retrieval capability is put together. We cannibalize the ship that carries us, turn it into surface shelters. We use ISRU, as Siobhan says. We make Titan such an attractive place that resupply and retrieval missions have to follow.”

Marcus White said, ” ‘We’, Rosenberg?”

“Yes.” He looked uncomfortable, the candlelight shining from his glasses. “If there’s a ship going to Titan, I want to be on it. I’m best qualified. Isn’t that what this is all about?”

White grinned. “Hell, yes. I’d go myself.”

In the silence that followed, the others stared at him.

“When I walked on that lava plain south of Copernicus, with Tom Lamb, I sure as hell never figured I’d only get the one shot at it. There would have been an extended-Apollo program, with lunar orbital missions, and long-stay shelters hauled up by dual-launched Saturn Vs, and all the rest. And then more: flyby flights to Venus and Mars, the space station, permanent colonies on the Moon, eventually landing flights to Mars itself…

“But the whole damn thing shut down, even before Armstrong stepped out at Tranquillity.” He put down his drink, and the fingers of his big hands knitted together, restless. “I must have talked about my Moon trip a thousand times. Ten thousand. And the one thing I’ve never managed to put over is how it feels not to be able to get back. Ever.” He grinned at Benacerraf, embarrassed, uneasy. “They should shoot us poor fucking Moonwalkers in the head. Anyhow, it won’t be me. I realize that. Christ, I’m seventy-four years old, already. I’m a grandpa three times over. But I’ll tell you, I’d just like to see one more guy lift off out of the gravity well and go someplace — plant Old Glory on one more moon — before the last of us sad old Apollo geezers dies of old age.”

“And,” Mott pressed, “if we don’t succeed? — if Earth doesn’t jump for the bait? If we set out, and they just let the space facilities rust? What then?”

Marcus White leaned toward Mott over the table. “The question for you is, having heard that — would you go?”

Mott thought for a moment. She opened her mouth.

But, Benacerraf noted, she didn’t immediately say no.

White leaned back. “You know, they used to ask us a question like that, during our interviews for the Astronaut Office. Marcus, would you submit to a two-year journey to Mars? Suppose I tell you that the chances of surviving the trip are one in two. Do you go? Absolutely not, said I. One in ten, maybe.” He looked at Mott. “I got it right. The point was partly to see how dumb I was, how foolhardy. But also to find out if I had it in me.”

“What?”

“Wanderlust.”

Rosenberg said, “Being an astronaut on this mission won’t be just another job, a line on your resume. This will be about going somewhere, where nobody else has ever been. Making a difference. What the job used to be about.”

White laughed. “That,” he said, “and glory, and fast cars, and the women.

“I get it,” Siobhan Libet said. “This isn’t Apollo. It’s a Mayflower option.”

“Maybe,” Barbara Fahy murmured. “The Mayflower colonists went because they had to. They did it because they couldn’t find a place to fit, at home.”

Marcus White grunted. “There sure as hell has been little enough room on Earth for astronauts, since 1972.”

Rosenberg said, “The costs don’t have to defeat us. We don’t need any massive technical development. We use chemical propulsion, existing technology wherever possible. For instance, the Space Station hab module for the journey shelter.”

Benacerraf nodded confirmation of that. “The thing’s been sitting in a hangar at Boeing, intact, since 1999. It wouldn’t take much modification…”

Rosenberg said, “You’d wrap a cut-down Shuttle orbiter around it. With the hab module in the cargo bay, you’d use the orbiter’s OMS and RCS for course corrections, and the main engines for the interplanetary injections.”

Angel and White exchanged glances.

White said, “A Shuttle orbiter to Saturn? Well, why the hell not? It’s the nearest thing to a spaceship we got.” He turned to Rosenberg, grinning. “You know, I love the way you think.”

Angel said, “How are you going to get a Space Station hab module down to the surface of Titan?”

“Easy,” Rosenberg said, chewing. “Titan has a thick atmosphere, and a low gravity. You’d glide the hab module down, inside your Shuttle orbiter. Which is why you’d take the orbiter. The aerosurfaces would need some modification, but—”

“Holy shit,” Libet said. “You’ve worked this out. You’re serious, aren’t you, kid?”

Angel said, “Okay, so this is just a mind game, right? A bull session. Maybe you’re right, Rosenberg. Maybe you could do that quickly and cheaply. But not if you wanted a man-rated system.

Siobhan Libet said, “But we aren’t talking about the kind of assured safety we have in the current program, Bill. We know this whole thing would be risky as hell.”

Bill Angel said curtly, “I’m talking about some kind of entry profile that would actually be survivable.”

“It wouldn’t have to be,” Rosenberg said.

Marcus White groaned and helped himself to some more wine. “Oh, shit,” he said. “He has another idea.”

“Send the orbiter down to Titan unmanned,” Rosenberg said. Then it can land as hard as you like.”

“And what about the crew?” Angel said.

“All you need is a couple of simple man-rated entry capsules,” Rosenberg said. “Remember, we aren’t talking about any kind of ascent-to-orbit capability; it’s a one-way trip.” He grinned. “You still aren’t thinking big enough, Bill.”

“And you,” Angel snapped back, “are talking out of your ass. An entry capsule like that is still a billion-dollar development. We just don’t have that kind of resource.”

Rosenberg looked flustered, and Benacerraf realized that for the first time he didn’t have an answer.

She felt an immense sadness descend on her. Is it possible that this is the hole that destroys the proposal? That, after all, it ends here?

How sad. It was a beautiful dream, while it lasted.

They argued for a while, about requirements and likely costs. It started to get heated, with gestures illustrated by pointed chopsticks. Barbara Fahy held her hands up, palms outward. “Hold it,” she said. “I hate to say it, but I think I have a solution.”

Benacerraf frowned. “Tell me.”

Fahy looked around the table. “We use the most advanced entry capsules we ever built. Apollo Command Modules.”

Marcus White was laughing. “Oh, man. That is outrageous. Just fucking outrageous. It’s beautiful. Man, I love it.”

Fahy said, “All you’d have to do is refurbish the interior, maybe fix up the heatshield, reconfigure for a Titan entry profile.”

Benacerraf said, “Marcus, where’s the old Apollo hardware now?”

White was trying to be serious, but grins kept busting out over his face. “There were three series of Command Modules: boilerplates, Block Is and Block IIs. The Block IIs flew all the manned missions; they contained most of the post-fire modifications. The Block IIs is what you’d want to use.” He closed his eyes. “As I recall, Rockwell built twenty-five Block II CMs in all. Okay. Of those twenty-five ships, eleven flew on the Apollo Moon program. Three more flew manned Skylab missions, and one flew on ASTP. Fifteen, right?”

“Where are they?” Benacerraf asked. “Museums? Could we refurbish an Apollo that’s already been flown?”

Angel frowned. “I don’t see how. Those things were pretty much beat up by the time they were recovered. You got the ablation of the heatshield, thermal stresses throughout the structure, salt-water damage from the ocean recovery. The heatshield alone would be a hell of a reconstruction job.”

Benacerraf said, “Marcus, what happened to the ten spares? Do you remember?”

“I sure do,” he said ruefully. “Since they symbolized my career, as it went down the toilet, I followed the fate of those Moon ships with close interest.” He closed his eyes. “They used four for various tests: thermal vacuum and pogo, acoustic, pad checkout. And another three for Skylab tests. They pretty much took those babies apart, for the purposes of the tests.”

“That leaves three,” Angel said evenly.

“Yeah. First you got a Skylab backup. It sat on the pad on top of a Saturn IB as a rescue capability, through the whole Skylab program. And then there were two Moon-trip Apollos, never flown. ‘Requirement deleted.’ Three man-rated spacecraft, never flown, just mothballed.”

Benacerraf felt herself smile. “Maybe we’re about to undelete those requirements.”

There was another moment of silence.

Then they started to talk at once. “Where are those CMs?”

“All in storage at JSC, or Downey.”

“Three CMs. Two flight birds and one test vehicle, for verifying the redesign and refurbishment.”

“The electronics should be easy. Those old clunky guidance computers they had took up so much damned room. All that core rope and shit…”

Benacerraf let it run on.

It’s coming together, she thought. She felt a core of excitement gather in her gut.

Angel, still drinking hard, was doodling spacecraft configurations and shapes on a smoothed-out paper napkin. “Okay,” he said. “If we’re going to do this one-way shot, we ought to get away with a fuel load, in Earth orbit, of one and a half million pounds. And of that, around two hundred thousand pounds would be hauled out to Saturn for braking there.”

“That,” said Benacerraf, “is less than a single Shuttle External Tank.”

“Yeah,” White growled. “But you’re still looking at a couple of dozen Shuttle flights to put it up there.”

Siobhan Libet said, “But you wouldn’t need to use the full Shuttle system. You’re not carrying crew, except on one final flight to orbit.”

Benacerraf prompted, “So what do we do instead?”

“Shuttle-C,” said Libet promptly. “A stripped-down cargo-carrying variant of the Shuttle system. The payload capacity would be raised to a hundred and seventy thousand pounds.”

Mott nodded. “But the Shuttle-C is an expendable variant. Essentially you’d be using up the orbiter fleet.”

“But that doesn’t matter,” Libet said.

“She’s right,” White said. “Nicola, we’re working to different rules now. The damn things wouldn’t fly again anyhow. It’s a choice of putting them to work one last time, or stick ’em out in the rain as monuments.”

“Okay. But even so this is only a partial solution,” Angel said. “We have three orbiters left: Endeavour, Atlantis, Discovery. You’d want to retain one for the final crew launch, so you’re left with two Shuttle-C launches. That would only account for a quarter, maybe, of the total mass in LEO for Titan.”

Libet said, “There were two more pre-flight orbiters.”

“Yes,” said Benacerraf. “Enterprise and Pathfinder, Now, what the hell happened to them?” She went to a bookcase, and searched through her yellowing Shuttle training materials, “Here we go. ‘Shuttle Orbiter Enterprise: Orbiter Vehicle-101. Enterprise, the first Space Shuttle orbiter, was originally to be named Constitution, for the Bicentennial. However, Star Trek viewers started a write-in campaign urging the White House to rename the vehicle to Enterprise… blah blah… OV-101 was rolled out of Rockwell’s Air Force Plant 41, Site 1—’ ”

White shrugged. “They used Enterprise for the approach and landing tests. Then they decided it would cost too much to upgrade Enterprise for spaceflight. Tough on all those propeller-head Star Trek fans. So they stripped her. She’s a museum piece now.”

Libet asked, “What about Pathfinder?”

Benacerraf dug through her documents. “ ‘The Pathfinder Shuttle Test Article… Pathfinder is a seventy-five ton orbiter simulator that was created to work out the procedures for moving and handling the Shuttle. It was a steel structure roughly the size, weight and shape of an orbiter… Pathfinder was returned to Marshall and now is on permanent display at the Alabama Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville—’ ”

Libet said, “I imagine Pathfinder would be a lot more problematic to adapt for Shuttle-C than Enterprise, or the flight orbiters. But if we can do it—”

“Then,” Barbara Fahy said, “you’d have four Shuttle-Cs. But they still aren’t enough.”

“No.” Angel scratched numbers quickly on his napkin. “We still need twice the carrying capacity. What else?”

“The Energiya,” Rosenberg said. “The old Soviet heavy-lift booster. How about that? What was its lifting capacity?”

Three hundred thousand pounds to LEO,” Angel said.

“So,” Rosenberg said, “two or three Energiya launches—”

“I don’t think it would work,” Siobhan Libet said. “I’m sorry.” Benacerraf could see she was genuinely regretful. “I was shown around the Energiya facilities at Tyuratam when I was training for Soyuz Station return. Actually the Energiya facility was built on the site of their old N-1 launch facility, the Soviets’ attempt at a lunar-mission heavy-lift booster. The Russians have killed it. The integration hall is — spectral. Full of mothballed strap-on boosters, tanks, engines, other Energiya components, pretty much deteriorated; I don’t think it could be refurbished.”

“Damn waste of time and money,” White said. “I once saw one of their Shuttle flight models. They’ve set it up in Gorky Park, for kids to play at being astronauts.”

Angel blew out his cheeks. “So we’re stuck again. What else?”

“We could go to the Air Force,” Siobhan Libet said. “Use their heavy-lift boosters, the new Delta IVs.”

Benacerraf shook her head. “We could try an approach, but they wouldn’t buy it. Believe me, I’ve seen enough politics since Columbia. The USAF will hinder us, not cooperate. Anyhow, Delta can’t lift more than forty thousand pounds to LEO. The number of launches required would be prohibitive.”

“Then we’re screwed,” Angel said. He threw his pen down on the table, and crumpled up his napkin.

But Marcus White was grinning. He scratched his cheek; the stubble made a rasping noise against his fingernails. “Lawn ornaments,” he said.

Angel, his arms folded, looked at him. “What?”

“You know, there are NASA centers with Moon rockets lying around on their driveways, for dumb fucking kids to gawp at. JSC, Kennedy, Michoud, Marshall. Now, what if—”

“You’re kidding,” Angel said.

“I’m only talking about refurbishing the existing flight hardware, and a few test engines, not reviving the whole damn production line. All you’d have to do is bring the things in from the rain, scrape off the moss, give them a fresh lick of paint… I know they have some engines in bonded storage, down at Michoud. And I’ll bet there are still a few of those old bastards around who worked on the original development in the 1960s.”

Barbara Fahy frowned. “I guess it could be done. The old launch complexes at the Cape, 39-A and 39-B, are still operational. They were adapted for Shuttle.”

“Then they can be unadapted,” White snapped back.

Angel was figuring. “So to complement our four Shuttle-C launches, and allowing a margin for boiloff, assembly equipment — we’d need four launches.”

“And four birds,” White said, “is what we got, lying around.” He counted on his fingers. “There are two operational articles — AS-514 and -515, from the deleted Moon flights — at JSC and Michoud. Then you have two test articles, AS-500D and -500T, at Marshall and Kennedy. I guess bringing them up to specification would be more of a challenge, but I bet it could be done.” White looked triumphant, somehow vindicated, Benacerraf thought. “I’d love to see those birds fired off at last, after all these years. The idea of those spaceships just lying around in the rain has always bugged me…”

“And if we can do that,” Angel said, “then it’s feasible. We have enough heavy-lift capability.” He looked at Rosenberg and laughed. “Good grief, Rosenberg. I think we’ve done it; we’ve found a way to close the design.”

Libet looked confused, as this talk swirled around her. “What are you talking about?”

Mott took her hand and squeezed it gently. “Saturn Vs,” she said. “They’re talking about flying Saturn Vs again…”

“Oh,” said Libet. “Oh, my God.”

They talked on, debating details and approaches, as the candles burned steadily down.

The one topic they never approached — as if skirting around it was the risk.

If the risk of not returning from an Apollo flight had been something like one in ten — and most engineers agreed the risk on Shuttle was around one in a hundred — and given the distances and the extent of this venture outside of the experience base and the difficulty of maintaining political will behind a project spanning so many years — what was the risk of not returning from Titan?

A lot worse than fifty-fifty, Benacerraf thought. Each of them, here, was signing up for Russian roulette, with the barrels loaded against them. And each of them had to know that.

But they were prepared to go anyhow. They all had to be crazy, by any conventional definition.

They were a motley crew, Benacerraf thought: Rosenberg the dreamer, Fahy the tough, wounded engineer, Angel the burned-up, goal-oriented drinker, White the stranded Moonwalker, Libet and Mott younger, enigmatic, but still, she sensed, touched with the wanderlust. And herself: determined to do something with the rest of her life other than just survive Columbia.

Flawed people, all of them. And not one of them had anything to live for that was more meaningful than dreams of a jaunt to Titan.

Maybe that was necessary; maybe it had always been true. Who else would go on such a mission? Nobody happy with her life, that was for sure.

And who would come up with such a vision, she thought, but a misfit like Rosenberg? Rosenberg, with his sense of his place in the cosmos — a sense of depth, change, flux — that sense that he doesn’t belong here, that he’s a mere conduit of celestial matters and forces…

Yeah. A better sense of the Universe than of what’s going on in the heads of his fellow human beings.

Maybe NASA had been wise, all these years, to neglect the psychology of its space travellers. Maybe that was the only possible approach. In this room alone there was probably enough material for a three-day shrinks’ conference.

But what the hell. All that mattered was that she had her team.

And it was some dream. With a colony on Titan — even one scraping a precarious living from the slush — it just wouldn’t be possible for the folks here at home to slump back into some kind of flat-Earth mentality — The Universe would always be alive, with humans living on an island up in the sky.

Maybe, she thought, Rosenberg is single-handedly saving the future.

Now, she thought wryly, all they had to do was convince NASA, the Government, and the rest of the goddamn human race to let them do this. The real work started here.

Kevin, the housekeeper, came in to clear up the dishes and deliver coffee and more drinks. Benacerraf watched him as he worked, the heady talk of Titan and Shuttle-Cs and Apollos flowing around him. Kevin’s smooth, moonlike face was blank, incurious; Benacerraf doubted he heard a word that was said.

He had a new image-tattoo on his forehead, Benacerraf saw. The lozenge-shaped patch of glowing photochemicals cycled through images of smoky star-clusters, evidently downloaded from one of the Hubble picture libraries.

She found she’d made her decision.

Here, in this room, she thought, it starts. And it won’t end until we land on Titan.

As he left, Marcus White winked at Benacerraf. “Everest, El Dorado, Mayflower. I don’t know whether we’re going to Titan or not, or why the hell. But you sure do throw one great party, kid.”

The first task was to flesh out the mission profile.

Benacerraf set Barbara Fahy working on the feasibility of adapting mission control software and techniques to handle the Saturn and Shuttle-C launches, and the extended mission profile after that.

She quickly came back to Benacerraf with a schedule and costing. Fahy had shown how STS mission control techniques could be adapted with a little effort to run Shuttle-C and revived Saturn programs. Then, looking ahead for a feasible way to run a manned mission to Saturn, Fahy argued that you didn’t want to have a full team of controllers employed for all six or eight or ten years. Fahy’s projection showed how a scaled-down Mission Control operation would suffice to run the flight itself after the initial interplanetary injection sequence; hands-off techniques developed to run extended Earth-orbit operations aboard Station could be adapted. It would be necessary to rehire staff or attach contract workers during the later crucial mission phases, like a Jupiter encounter. But it could all be done for a containable cost.

Benacerraf was working to a timetable she hadn’t yet shared with many people. And to her, the setup schedule even for this ground-based aspect of the mission looked tight. But then, everything would be tight, pushing against the clock, until the last Shuttle lifted off the pad…

Benacerraf worked through Fahy’s case carefully.

Barbara Fahy was almost pathetically eager to work on this proposal, to find some way of redeeming her self-respect after being lead Flight on Columbia. It seemed to do no good to point out that Fahy was not responsible for the hardware and testing flaws that had led to the orbiter’s destruction, that no blame had been attached to her — that, in fact, her career had been done no perceptible damage at all.

As far as Fahy was concerned, it had been her mission. And she’d lost it.

Still, her judgement was unimpaired; her work on this issue looked good.

Benacerraf accepted the recommendation, but a seed of doubt lodged in her mind. A scaled down Mission Control would be fine, but if some kind of Apollo 13 situation blew up, halfway to Jupiter, the crew would need fast backup by experts on the ground: revised procedures, survival techniques, simulator proving… there mightn’t be time to hire up and train the people needed.

Anyhow, with that basic framework in hand, Barbara Fahy called in the senior members of her control team, and, with Benacerraf, talked them through the proposed flight.

They listened in silence — stunned, frightened silence, Benacerraf thought.

If NASA sent a spacecraft to Saturn, it would be these young, smart people — or their peers — who would have the responsibility for seeing that all the burns happened at the right times, for the right durations, with the spacecraft in the right attitudes; they would have to oversee navigation all the way to Titan, and prepare abort contingency plans.

There was a lot of scepticism. Even hostility.

“How do you think we’re gonna do this?”

“We can’t possibly. All our systems are designed for low Earth orbit missions.”

“How can you think—”

Fahy knew her people, however, and she let them run down. “Just chew it over for a few days,” she told them. “You don’t have to come up with all the answers at once. And talk to people. Talk to the Apollo old-timers, about the problems of deep space manned missions. Talk to the guys at JPL, about interplanetary navigation techniques. I know it’s one hell of a challenge, guys, the biggest since Apollo—”

“But,” said one languid young man — introduced by Fahy as Gary Munn — “those 1960s guys could look forward to some kind of career within NASA. More than one mission, a future. Not just a one-off stunt like this.”

Fahy glared at him. “We’re talking about going to Saturn, for God’s sake. The greatest adventure in human history. A journey that will be talked about as long as mankind survives. An exploration that even eclipses Armstrong’s. Don’t you care about being a part of that?”

But Munn just stared back, his expression unreadable to Benacerraf.

I really don’t understand this new generation, she thought.

After a couple of days, Benacerraf had Fahy and her planners host a wider meeting at which the details of the mission were explored. Big, powerful suites of trajectory-mapping software — primed with precise predictions of the planets’ positions for decades to come — were deployed by the planners, running through option after option, with mission duration and initial mass in Earth orbit numbers scrolling over spread-out softscreens.

The programs soon converged on an optimal trajectory. It was essentially similar to the complex path taken by Cassini to make the same trip, with the early part of the trajectory wrapped around the inner planets, slingshots off Earth and Venus, before unwinding towards the outer Solar System, and a final gravity assist from Jupiter. The meeting argued around the details and parameters, before settling on a recommendation:

To launch in January, 2008.

It would be, Benacerraf realized, one hell of a tight development schedule. Maybe even unachievable.

But it fit her internal timetable. It would be a whole year before Maclachlan was scheduled to take office and ground everything, and only a year for the bad guys in the USAF and beyond to find a way to close down NASA, and maybe not so far in the future that all of the current post-Chinese push back into space had worn off.

There really was no choice. The window of opportunity was closing quickly. If Americans were going to travel beyond the Moon, it would have to be in 2008. Or never.

Benacerraf studied the smooth trajectory curves scrolling across the softscreens. “We understand this stuff so well,” she said to Fahy.

“It’s astonishing how quickly we can produce material like this.”

“Oh, yes,” Barbara Fahy said sourly. “Our civilization has become expert at interplanetary navigation. It’s just that we’ve chosen to abandon the capability to do any of it.”

“Actually,” Gary Munn said brightly, “we can run the projections forward and back. Even as far back as the 1960s there were proposals to slingshot off Venus and fly to Mars, and so forth, in the near future of the time; it’s interesting to move the planets back to their configurations, in 1982, or 1986, and see how accurately those old guys got their predictions.” He worked his keypad briskly, and Benacerraf watched trajectory curves wrap around the sun, depicting the paths of spacecraft that never were, travelling to Mars in 1982, and 1986 and 1992.

To Benacerraf, this precise, beautiful, useless rendering of all those lost missions was painful, almost physically.

Munn whistled as he worked the programs.

Benacerraf called in Mal Beardsley, her assistant program manager responsible for flight safety.

Mal was a bluff old-timer who had come in from solid-booster supplier Morton Thiokol after the Challenger accident, and he thought she was crazy. They spent a half-hour Benacerraf couldn’t really afford debating the pros and cons of the mission.

Beardsley left the room, grinning and tapping his greying temple. It was a reaction that Benacerraf figured she was going to have to get used to, and she forced a smile.

Still, Beardsley had a report in her softscreen within two days.

Beardsley had tried to devise abort options for the Titan mission.

A key objective in NASA mission planning had always been to provide abort options. And that philosophy had borne a lot of fruit. Even the use of the Lunar Module as a lifeboat, after the Apollo 13 Service Module was crippled, had been practiced on an earlier flight. After Challenger, many more abort possibilities were built into the Shuttle mission profile, particularly the ascent phase. It all increased the survivability of the flights, on paper and in practice.

The flight to Earth orbit would be no real problem; standard Shuttle abort modes would be sufficient. And after the Titan ship left orbit, firing up its Shuttle main engines, abort options were still available: for instance, if the main engines malfunctioned, they could be shut down and the smaller OMS and RCS engines used to bring the craft around a huge U-turn and back to Earth. That would work up to a point, anyhow. Once the main engines had burned for long enough to apply more delta-vee than the OMS and RCS could compensate for, the crew would be committed to an interplanetary flight of some kind. But even here, aborts were possible. The craft could modify its trajectory and slingshot around Venus, back to an early rendezvous with Earth. Even a slingshot back home around Jupiter would be possible.

Of course the problems of reentry from such an interplanetary jaunt would be formidable. Beardsley figured that the Apollo Command Modules, which had been built to withstand a direct entry into Earth’s atmosphere from the Moon, would be the most survivable possibility for the crew, and he recommended strongly against weakening the Apollos’ heatshieids.

It would be one hell of an abort, however, Benacerraf reflected: the round trip to Venus or Jupiter would take months, even years, during which time the crew would presumably be struggling to survive in a crippled ship.

Past Jupiter, even Beardsley could find no meaningful aborts.

She started to make contacts with other senior NASA managers.

One of the first was with the JSC director, a tough, cost-conscious woman in her sixties called Millie Rimini. Benacerraf walked up two flights of stairs to Rimini’s office, and took in Barbara Fahy to give her pitch more technical plausibility.

Rimini’s job, as Benacerraf understood it, was — post-Columbia — to manage the rundown of JSC, to complete a part of Hadamard’s greater mission. So Benacerraf pitched the Titan mission as part makework, part cosmetic. Maybe the mission would actually save some jobs, at JSC. At worst, it would create a buzz of enthusiasm and raise morale; being able to work on a new program would sweeten the pill, for many, of the transfers and early retirements and layoffs that were to come. And so on. And the same applied to all the NASA centers.

Benacerraf had run big-budget engineering projects before; she knew how these things worked. People weren’t usually selfless; people sought to achieve their own personal goals, and treated projects as an arena in which to achieve those goals. In successful projects, the goals of the key players were in line with those of the project. Thus, managers like Rimini had to see benefits for themselves in the proposal, ways they could use it to achieve their own objectives, even as the Shuttles lifted off for Saturn. It was up to Benacerraf to figure out those benefits and present them.

It took a morning to convince Rimini that they should work seriously on this.

After that, Rimini encouraged Benacerraf to take the proposal to a wider group of NASA managers. Rimini set up a meeting at Marshall Spaceflight Center, in Alabama, of senior officials from Houston, the Cape, and Marshall, and from relevant NASA internal divisions. Rimini chaired the meeting.

Benacerraf was surprised to meet some opposition from the hardline space buffs in some of the centers. The Cape managers, primed by a sweet-talk approach by Marcus White, could see no show-stopper obstacles to refurbishing a Saturn launch complex, given the time and money. And the Shuttle-C flights would just be variants on STS launch procedures they’d already run a hundred and forty-three times — simplified variants, at that. But the old guys from Marshall, with their tough, conservative, confrontational approach to engineering that dated all the way back to Wernher von Braun, were more resistant. This stuff is only one chart deep, she was told. This is all way outside the experience base. Going to Saturn with chemical technology is a spectacularly dumb thing to do. What we have to do is revive the NERVA fission rocket program, and launch a set of nuclear stages into orbit in Shuttle orbiters, and, and…

It wasn’t hard to point out that nobody was going to endorse putting a nuclear rocket through the dangers of a Shuttle launch. Or, come to that, any near-future successor to the Shuttle. And besides, a program like NERVA, shut down in 1970, would cost billions to revive, if you were going to do it cleanly.

It was true. Going to Saturn with chemical was a dumb thing to do, dumb almost to the point of infeasibility. Like exploring Antarctica in a skiff. But it was the only boat leaving port, for the foreseeable future.

Slowly the Marshall people came round.

They all agreed to work on the proposal some more; it wasn’t yet time, they concurred, to take this to Jake Hadamard.

The work went on, sometimes around the clock. Benacerraf asked Millie Rimini to chair a critical review of the proposal, at JSC. It took two days of intensive briefings. Benacerraf had steeled herself to play devil’s advocate if she had to, to make sure all the tough questions were asked and answered. She found it wasn’t necessary; there was more than enough scepticism in the air, and the two days were long and hard.

Even so, the conclusion was that there was no technical obstacle to the Saturn flight.

Still Benacerraf wasn’t satisfied.

She had Beardsley run another safety review of the proposal, and she held a further briefing with senior Shuttle program executives and representatives of the principal contractors. Later, Rimini hosted a NASA management meeting at NASA Headquarters in Washington, to go over everything one more time. Then Benacerraf held a series of smaller, informal meetings with her key players, rehearsing and rehashing the arguments…

And on, and on.

Through all this, Benacerraf planned and replanned her campaign. It was going to take eighteen months, of figuring and investigating and re-evaluating. And all the time she was consciously building momentum, the Big Mo, behind her plan, working to persuade people that, yes, they could do this thing — that they should do this thing. If NASA could send Apollo 8 around the Moon on the first manned Saturn V, then surely, after five decades of Spaceflight, it could assemble the will for this one last effort…

On the whole, the response was good. But then, she hadn’t yet attempted to take the proposal outside NASA’s inner circles. And — ageing and stale as they might be — most people who worked for NASA, even now, were pretty much space nuts.

NASA insiders were just the type to love crazy ideas like going to Titan. And NASA’s overenthusiasm had, she knew, caused a kind of collective lapse in good political judgement many times before. NASA insiders had a vision that the rest of the world, she told herself brutally, generally didn’t share.

And, she thought, nor did Jake Hadamard, which was why he had been appointed.

She knew that Hadamard would perceive grave risks, for the Agency and himself, in taking such an extravagant option. Giving the Shuttle orbiters to the Navy for gunnery practice was cheaper, would cost no lives. And if failure were to come, she knew that the reaction would be that anyone should have known better than to undertake such a hubristic mission.

It would be Hadamard who would have to answer such charges. Working out her approach to Hadamard was the key part of Benacerraf’s planning.

She moved a camp bed into her office at JSC. Sometimes, she didn’t go home to Clear Lake for days on end.

From the air, Jiang Ling thought the Houston area looked like the surface of another planet, occupied and systematically bombed, perhaps, by malevolent aliens. The coastline was riddled with bays, canals, lakes, bayous and lagoons, all filled with oily water. A perceptible smog hovered over the glittering refineries around Galveston Bay.

Her NASA host pointed out Galveston Island, where she could make out a long, clear yellow slice of coastline: evidently a fine sandy beach, with what looked like a bulky oil rig, out to sea. The NASA person told her that the rig was there to dredge up sea-bottom sand, and pump it to the shore. The beach used to be stony, and the sand was only about eleven years old! Jiang was startled by the note of pride in the woman’s voice at this comical monument.

The plane — an ageing Cathay 747 — began its descent.

She was bustled off the plane and processed briskly through customs. The terminal building felt cool — chill, in fact. Jiang wore only a light jacket and trousers; she wished briefly she had brought something heavier. But when she emerged from the terminal building into the full strength of the July noontime Houston sun, the heat and humidity hit her as if she’d walked into a wall. The air was tangibly moist, the light intense, great polarized sheets of it bouncing into her eyes from the soft-looking asphalt surface, and the glinting metal carapaces of the cars which clustered here.

Waiting for her was a limousine, jet black, with a big softscreen panel, bearing a message which scrolled across the doors and wing. WELCOME JIANG LING, CHINA’S NUMBER ONE SPACEWOMAN. The message was repeated in Spanish, Chinese and English.

She clambered into the back of the limousine. It was like climbing through a long, padded corridor. There was a little drinks table, moulded into the upholstery, with champagne glasses and a decanter, and there were tiny TVs and softscreens. Waiting for her was a Chinese: Xu Shiyou, a senior Party official attached to the Embassy here, who would chaperon her. He was a fat man — American-diet fat, she thought — and his bald head was a round, sleek globe. Jiang was used to such meticulous planning and control; she was prepared to accept that she was a valued asset of the Party now, who required careful management.

It was a price she would pay, as she worked her way through these ceremonial duties, en route to space once more, some time in the imagined future.

The door was closed behind her, cocooning her in a little bubble of glass and new-smelling leather upholstery. The driver was sealed off by a partition; Jiang could only make out the back of the woman’s head.

The limousine pulled away. The windows of the car were clear, but Jiang became aware of a faint rippling effect, as the landscape slid past. The glass was thick, no doubt bullet-proof. She shivered, not just from the cold. Though she had circled the Earth in the Lei Feng Number One, she had never before travelled outside China. Now she wondered how she, as her country’s first space traveller, was going to be welcomed here in the home of Glenn and Armstrong.

The airport was on the northern outskirts of the Houston conurbation, and Jiang’s limousine, at the heart of a little cluster of cars, swept down the freeway towards downtown. The traffic was heavy, the smog thick in the air.

The land was hot, flat, the conurbation sprawling. The infrastructure — the layout of the roads — was clean and functional. And yet she had an impression — not of newness — but of middle age. Much of Houston’s growth, she knew, dated back to the space program growth period of the 1960s, and the oil boom of the 1970s. But those times were decades gone, and Houston was starting to age, to slump back into the plain.

Much of the time her view was obstructed by the roadside ads — huge, colorful, many of them animated — which battered at her senses, exploiting their slivers of competitive advantage. Most of the signs and ads were in Spanish.

There were water towers on the horizon, rusted, dominating. The land was greener than she had expected, but park-like, with orderly trees and thick-bladed grass; there seemed to be water sprinklers buried everywhere, many of them in full operation — even now at high noon, when much of the water would be wasted. Jiang looked at those glittering fountains, the shining green lawns, imagining the tons of water vapor being lost to the air each second, all over this baking city.

She remarked on this to Xu Shiyou. The contrast with the water shortages suffered in her own country was marked, she said severely. And it was a global problem: the growth in the population and the demands of the industrializing nations — including China — was poised to outstrip the planetary supply of fresh water which fell from the sky…

Xu smiled. “That is of course true,” he said. “But until we can build pipelines to link the aquifers of Texas with the parched gardens of Beijing, there is little we can achieve by complaining about it.”

Jiang had the disquieting sense that Xu was mocking her.

“You are nevertheless right in your perception,” said Xu Shiyou, comfortingly. He waved a hand at Houston, beyond the car window. “America is a crass, empty-headed culture. And — look at that! — in the middle of this shower of advertising, you have their God, great neon crosses and beaming preachers, sold with the same methods as hamburgers.”

She looked out of the window anew. Xu was right, she saw; the ads for hair products and soft drinks and face implants were punctuated with immense crucifixes, images of Jesus.

“Americans are free,” Xu Shiyou murmured. “No intelligent person would deny that. But freedom is the minimum. I have lived and worked here for three years, and it is obvious to me that the Americans don’t understand the world beyond their borders — that they fear it, in fact.” He looked through the window; animated electronic light glimmered in his eyes.

She stared out of the car as he lectured her. The office blocks of downtown Houston thrust out of the plain like a collection of launch gantries, grey in the mist and smog.

The Big S, JSC’s trophy Saturn V, was cordoned off from the public tours today and encased in scaffolding. Under Benacerraf’s instruction the bird was being surveyed, to see if it could indeed be made operational once more. But Marcus White had been asked to host the Chinese space girl, Jiang Ling, on her brief tour of JSC, and he couldn’t think of a better item to show her. So he got hold of a couple of hard hats and escorted Jiang inside the fenced-off rectangle that contained the booster.

Besides, he wanted to see the Big S for himself. He figured he may as well combine this makeweight ex-astronaut public relations chore with a little useful work.

The two of them walked along the three hundred and sixty feet of the fallen white-and-black-painted rocket, from its escape tower and Apollo capsule — both dummies — past the widening cylinders of the third and second stages, all the way to the gaping mouths of the five big F-1 engines of the huge first stage. The Saturn V — AS-514, built and ready to fly a late J-series Apollo mission to the Moon — was lying on its side, its stages and components separated. This was so the engines and other details of the mid-stages could be viewed, but it looked, White thought, as if the booster had shattered into cylindrical fragments on hitting the ground.

After three decades on the grass, the ageing of the Saturn was obvious. He could make out corrosion, cobwebs laced across the big wheeled A-frames which pinned the booster to the ground. The Stars and Stripes painted on the side of the second stage, the hydrogen-oxygen S-II, was washed out, with big red stripes of paint running down over the white hull. There was even lichen, growing on the fabric parts of the rocket engines.

They are not looking after this old lady well, he thought.

They weren’t alone in here; workers from JSC’s Plant Engineering Division were moving around the rocket, laboring through their detailed survey. One of them, attached to ropes like a mountaineer, was walking along the top of the big S-IC first stage, taking samples of the skin up there.

Jiang stood, slim and composed, looking up at the pressurization tanks of the second stage’s five J-2 engines, big silver spheres which glowed in the diffuse Houston sunlight. She said, “It is beautiful.” She smiled.

“Yeah,” White growled. “But the damn space program was more than a series of photo-calls.”

“Was it?” Jiang looked sad. “But this creature, General White, is a dream of the 1950s. So crude! — a painted monster of rivets and bolts and gloss paint—”

“To me,” White said, “it’s not rivets and bolts and paint. This baby was designed to fly to the Moon. But it’s having a tough time fulfilling the mission we finally gave it: lying for four decades horizontally, in the Houston climate.”

There was an access hatch open near the top of the second stage, the S-II. Jiang and White took turns peering in.

“You know,” White said, “when they first opened this up — for the first time in fifteen years — they found little skeletons, mice and small birds, a foot deep. And the base of the stage was coated in guano, from pigeons and owls, islands of it in lakes of moisture trapped in there. After all, the drainage of this damn thing was designed to be end to end, not side to side.”

“They made no effort to protect it from such erosion?”

“Oh, sure,” White said. “All the openings large enough to allow in birds were covered with screens; there were ventilation openings knocked in the hull… but none of that is going to work, if you neglect the upkeep for long enough. They did try coating the second stage with polyurethane foam for insulation. But the sunlight takes its toll. All the uv we get these days. There are whole chunks of the insulation missing, great big pock marks… If you went up to the top of the S-II, you’d think you were walking on the surface of the Moon. Even the paint work isn’t authentic. They use big decals, as if it was a Revell kit, to fake up the lettering and the flags. How about that. It’s like spray-painting the Sistine Chapel. This poor old lady is going to require one hell of a refurbishment project.”

Jiang looked at him sharply. “Refurbishment?”

White knew he shouldn’t say any more. But there was no point in living seven decades and flying to the Moon and back if you couldn’t shoot your mouth off to a young girl once in a while. So he said, “Sure. You know, manufacturing has come on a long way since the Saturns were put together. CAD/CAM techniques, total quality programs, composites and aluminum-lithium alloys that are a lot lighter and stronger than this old aluminum shit… If we were to rebuild this bird, we could upgrade her performance a hell of a way.”

Jiang laughed, but not unkindly. “Perhaps. It is a fine dream. Certainly I sense how angry you are at this, the condition of your ‘big S.’ ”

“I guess the bad guys did a pretty good job of killing off this old lady after all. All they had to do was let her lie here and rust. And they even got to show her off as their capture.”

Jiang grimaced. “Like a trophy from a hunt. Yes; humans are rarely logical, even within a space program. But it could have been worse. At least the remaining Saturn hardware is honored as a relic of a great triumph.”

White ran his hand along the corroded hull of AS-514. “A relic,” he repeated.

This kid seemed to understand. She’d picked the right word. Relic. Maybe. But not for much longer.

His anger dissipated as he thought about that. The technicians crawling over the rocket were busy, competent, bustling. They nodded to White, smiled at the girl.

Okay, there had been some savage mistakes in the past, and this poor broken bird was a symbol of them. And maybe NASA was never going to be the same again; maybe it even deserved to be bust up and subsumed into Agriculture or whatever. But he had the feeling that the old days were coming back, just once more, as it had been working on Apollo, when everyone worked a hundred and ten percent and the color of your carpet didn’t matter so much as what you knew and what you could do. For just a short time, maybe NASA was going to pull together again, to achieve the Titan mission, to achieve one more moment of greatness.

If it came off, it would be a hell of a thing.

The Houston Coliseum was a huge underground arena that reminded Jake Hadamard of nothing so much as a gigantic, hollowed-out car park. Today, the roof was hung with cute little models of the Lei Feng Number One spaceship. The air-conditioning, he thought, was typically Texan, which is to say the whole place was so chill you could have stored corpses in here. As they waited for the Chinese party, everybody seemed to be standing up, and Hadamard found himself shivering in his suit jacket.

There were hundreds of people here, standing in rows: bands, police and firemen and National Guard in neat ranks, politicians and industrialists in open-topped convertibles. And Hadamard himself had brought a little party of senior NASA people: Marcus White, Paula Benacerraf and her family, some of the managers from JSC.

On a stage at one end of the arena stood Xavier T. Maclachlan, the ambitious Texas Congressman who had engineered the event. He was a thin, jug-eared man of about fifty. Now he whooped noisily into a microphone, and waved his big ten-gallon hat in the air, and gladhanded his guests.

Hadamard, bored and cold, checked his watch; there were still some minutes to endure before the Chinese spacewoman arrived.

Al Hartle came bearing down on him, resplendent in his Brigadier General’s uniform. He was clutching a full tumbler of bourbon. Hartle was a power in the USAF Space Command; Hadamard had encountered him in briefings for the Cabinet. “This is some display,” Hartle said. “Some fucking display.”

Hadamard was amused; Hartle was upright and rigid, his head like a steel cylinder jutting up from his great box of a body. But he was clearly a little drunk, and anger seemed to be seething inside him, hot and deliquescent, like a pupa within its rigid chrysalis.

He prompted, “You think so?”

“In 1961 we sent John Glenn on a fucking world tour. Now we’re on the receiving end of the tours, and we have to kowtow to some damn Red Chinese.”

“Well, they have made it to orbit, Al.”

“For the same reasons we did,” Hartle growled. “Geopolitics. Just to prove their balls are as big as ours.”

“Space as the symbolic arena. Well, I guess you’re right. But they hardly need symbols, Al. China’s GDP passed ours years ago.”

“I know. That, and this woman in orbit, and this damn Shuttle crash, have sent us all into a fucking panic. I tell you, it’s like Sputnik all over again. And look what came out of the dumb decisions that were made when Sputnik went up. Apollo. Holy shit. A disaster that has reverberated for fifty years.” He eyed Hadamard. “So you still throwing money down the john for another Shuttle?”

Hadamard laughed. “I’ll tell you all about it when you tell me about your Black Horse program, Al.”

Hartle grunted, and took a deep slug of his bourbon. “And your space cadets haven’t responded to our L5 proposal yet.”

The L5 proposal was the Air Force’s official recommendation on what to do with the left-over Shuttle and Station technology. The Station should be completed, and converted to a surveillance station — maybe even some kind of weapons-bearing battle station — and towed out to L5, the stable Lagrangian point two hundred and forty thousand miles from Earth, at the third corner of a triangle including Earth and Moon.

Hartle stabbed a finger at Hadamard’s chest. “You heard the case. It’s the new heartland of space. Circumterrestrial space encapsulates Earth to an altitude of fifty thousand miles. Who rules circumterrestrial space commands Earth; who rules the Moon commands circumterrestrial space; who rules L4 and L5 commands the Earth-Moon system.”

Hadamard sipped his drink. “Maybe you’re right, Al. But—”

“The Red Chinese,” Hartle hissed. “The Red Chinese. Those bastards think this is going to be their century. They’re making expansionist noises all over, impacting ten countries, from Taiwan to Russian East Asia to the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea… Christ, even the Australians are worried.”

Hadamard murmured, “Is it really so bad? Our weaponry is still so far ahead of theirs that we can contain them for a long time to come. And—”

But Hartle wasn’t listening. “If we don’t take Lagrange soon, we’ll find the damn Red Chinese up there waiting for us. And then we’ll have lost, Hadamard. We’ll be paying tribute to the bastards for the rest of time. Just like the days of the Qing Dynasty. Read your history, boy.” He approached Hadamard, and thrust forward his hawk-like face, weathered by altitude and desert sun, and that inner anger burst to the surface. “Listen to me,” he said, his voice a thick rasp. “I know some of those assholes in the NASA centers are putting forward dumb-ass schemes about leveraging this Chinese-in-space stuff into some big new Flash Gordon adventure in space. They want to start the whole damn thing over again. But that’s bullshit. You hear me? You try to fly any such damn thing and we will shoot you down, boy.”

He backed off, fixing Hadamard with a final glare, and sulked off into the crowd.

Good grief, Hadamard thought. He found himself trembling. He took a slug of his own drink, to regain his composure.

What anger. But we’re not at war, he thought, cowed by Hartle’s intensity. For all his political antennae, he couldn’t tell if Hartle’s anger was representative of the thinking inside the closed doors of the military, or if Hartle was some kind of ageing maverick, frustrated because he was unable to get his case accepted.

In fact Hadamard still had to make his decision, about disposing of the Shuttle assets.

Nobody wanted to go back to a regular flight schedule with the three remaining orbiters — the cumulative risk was just unacceptable — but some kind of one-off mission was still plausible, politically. And besides, he was still waiting for Benacerraf’s recommendation.

Anyhow, Hartle was threatening the wrong guy. Hadamard was no space buff. He was interested, he told himself, solely in managing budgets; if NASA never flew more than another July 4 skyrocket he could care less.

…But, oddly, against his expectations, he found himself leaning more towards proposals like the ones coming out of Marshall, about fantastic jaunts to the Moon or Mars or Venus, rather than building some monstrous Buck Rogers space battle station in the sky.

He couldn’t get the image of the crashing orbiter out of his head, the idea of the grizzled old Moonwalker at the controls to the last.

He found Paula Benacerraf, who was here with her daughter, and a kid: a boy, who looked bored and restless. Maybe he needed a pee, Hadamard thought sourly. On the daughter’s cheek was an image-tattoo that was tuned to black; on her colorless dress she wore a simple, old-fashioned button-badge that said, mysteriously, “NED.”

Hadamard grunted. “I’ve seen a few of those blacked-out tattoos. I thought it was some kind of comms problem—”

Jackie Benacerraf shook her head. “It’s a mute protest.”

“At what?”

“At shutting down the net.”

“Oh. Right.” Oh, Christ, he thought. She was talking about the Communications Decency Act, which had been extended during the winter. With a flurry of publicity about paedophiles and neo-Nazis and bomb-makers, the police had shut down and prosecuted any net service provider who could be shown to have passed on any of the material that fell outside the provisions of the Act. And that was almost all of them.

“I was never much of a net user,” Hadamard admitted.

“Just to get you up to date,” Jackie Benacerraf said sourly, “we now have one licensed service provider, which is Disney-Coke, and all net access software has built-in censorship filters. We’re just like China now, where everything goes through the official news agency. Xinhua; that poor space kid must feel right at home.”

Benacerraf raised an eyebrow at him. “She’s a journalist. Jackie takes these things seriously.”

Jackie scowled. “Wouldn’t you, if your career had just been fucked over?”

Hadamard shrugged; he didn’t have strong opinions.

The comprehensive net shutdown had been necessary because the tech-heads who loved all that stuff had proven too damn smart at getting around any reasonable restriction put in place. Like putting encoded messages of race-hate and smut into graphics files, for instance: that had meant banning all graphics and sound files, and the World Wide Web had just withered. He knew there had been some squealing among genuine discussion groups on the net, and academics and researchers who suddenly found their access to online libraries shut down, and businesses who were no longer allowed to send secure encrypted messages, and… But screw it. To Hadamard, the net had been just a big conduit of bullshit; everyone was better off without it.

Jackie was still droning on, in the sanctimonious way that might have been patented by serious young people. “This is the greatest reverse in free access to information since Gutenberg, The net was never meant to be sanitized and controlled. The shutdown will hit technological development, education, jobs…”

Hadamard was quickly bored. His glance was caught again by Jackie’s button-badge — which sat, he couldn’t help notice, over her breast, which was small and firm. Her little boy clung to her leg.

“NED. Who’s that, a rock star?”

“New Luddites,” Paula Benacerraf said.

“Oh. I heard of them.”

“Believe me, Jake, you don’t want to get into that either.”

Maybe I do, Hadamard thought.

He knew Xavier Maclachlan had picked up on some of what the Luddites were arguing for. The Luddites had attracted a broad band of the younger generations who responded to a core anti-science message with, it seemed to Hadamard, their guts, not their heads. And that gut response was what Maclachlan was tapping into.

In his heart, Hadamard was uncomfortable with Maclachlan: his protectionism, his fundamentalist Christianity. But Hadamard had to concede that Maclachlan was hitting popular nerves among the electorate. It was, he thought, entirely possible that Maclachlan would indeed become the next President, just as the polls said. And if that happened, Jake Hadamard would be going to him for a new job.

Maybe I do need to figure out what’s going on inside the head of the likes of Jackie Benacerraf, he thought.

Benacerraf said, “Speaking of Luddites, I hear we lost the Mars sample-return mission.”

“Yeah.” Now, there was a pisser, even for a space cynic like Hadamard. “You know how they stopped it in the end? We had to apply to register the returned Mars samples with the Department of Agriculture in the state we planned to land. Just in case there was life aboard, like in that meteorite a few years ago. But you could crashland anywhere, so we were forced to apply in every state in the Union. And then we had to start applying for similar permits abroad. All that damn paperwork, the legal tangles. And when the first refusal came in, that was pretty much it.”

Benacerraf shook her head. “So we lost another fine mission, and any chance of confirming the biological stuff from the meteorite. Damn, damn. Once, we sent spacecraft to Jupiter, the rings of Saturn, out of the Solar System altogether. Now, we’re too scared to bring home a handful of Martian dust… You know, our attitudes don’t seem to be shaped by the rational any more.”

Hadamard shrugged. “It was predictable. The slightest suggestion of bugs from Mars was always going to raise a panic. It’s the times we live in.”

But now Jackie started in again, arguing with her mother.

Hadamard tuned out. He was still bored and cold, and he was getting no closer to Maclachlan like this. He made his excuses and moved on, abandoning Benacerraf to her dysfunctional family.

Up on the stage, Maclachlan started making a short, crass speech of welcome; evidently the Chinese party was on its way.

It seemed to Hadamard that Maclachlan was working his audience here almost greedily, as he stared into the camera lights. It was ironic that Maclachlan, the great protectionist and anti-space campaigner, was here to welcome a spacegirl from China. But it was politics. Maclachlan was turning this event, like everything else he touched, into just another part of his populist build-up towards what everyone expected would be a winning bid for the Republican nomination for the White House in 2008.

Hadamard glanced around the crowd, sizing up who was here, figuring how he could get to maximize his own contact time with Maclachlan.

There were ragged cheers. Hadamard turned. The Chinese party was arriving in their hard-top limos, rolling smoothly down the ramp from the overground. Led by Maclachlan, the waiting hundreds broke into noisy applause.

The limos did a brief turn around the Coliseum floor. Before stopping at Maclachlan’s feet the cars came close to Hadamard; he found himself looking into the pretty, oval face of Jiang Ling, from no more than ten feet. She looked young, he thought, and scared. As she had every right to be.

When she got out of the car, accompanied by some fat Chinese official, she turned out to be slim, about thirty-five, delicate-looking in what looked like a peach-colored Chairman Mao jumpsuit with a neat little jacket over the top. She climbed the few steps up to meet Maclachlan, who grabbed her possessively and stuck his ten-gallon on her head.

Hadamard tried to imagine this fragile girl being launched into space, in the mouth of one of those huge, unreliable, 1950s-style Chinese boosters. Not for the first time the idea of spaceflight seemed monstrous to him: like a human sacrifice, to serve geopolitical ends.

But, he thought ruefully, as the head of the Agency which had just crashed a Space Shuttle he had no grounds for complacency.

Maclachlan, holding onto Jiang, finished up with a Chinese phrase, clumsily delivered. “Ni chifanie meiyou?” Jiang looked disconcerted; Maclachlan laughed and hugged her anew. “I said to her, “Have you eaten yet”? Exactly what I’d be asked if I visited your home. Right, Jiang?” The slim Chinese girl smiled nervously. “Well, you sure as hell will eat fine here in our home — Texas-style! Enjoy, folks!” He whooped, the amplified noise ear-splitting.

And now the covers were taken off ten big barbecue pits, set up in the middle of the arena, and suddenly the air was full of the rich, cloying stink of burned cattle flesh. There was an eruption of applause. The girl astronaut looked utterly bewildered.

Maclachlan, holding tight onto his human Sputnik, clambered down off the platform and began to work his way through the crowd. Hadamard stepped forward, discreetly, towards the platform.

A year after the crash, Benacerraf’s daughter, Jackie, came to stay for a couple of days. She brought her two children, Ben and Fred, four and five respectively. The boys seemed to fill Benacerraf’s ranch house at Clear Lake with light and noise, and she spent as much time as she could with them. She got into a routine of working through the day at JSC, spending the early evenings with the children, and staying up nights to work on drafts of her recommendation to Hadamard.

One night, Jackie disturbed her. She came padding barefoot across the kitchen floor to where Benacerraf sat with her softscreen spread out over the big walnut dining table, at the center of a pool of scattered notes and documents.

“Mom, you must be crazy,” Jackie said gently. She went to the refrigerator, and returned with glasses of apple juice. “Do you know what time it is? Three a.m.”

“So it is,” Benacerraf said. “I don’t know where the time goes.” She rubbed her face; the balls of her eyes felt gritty, the muscles aching and sore.

Jackie sat at the table. “So how long has this been going on?”

“Oh. Ten, eleven months or so.”

“Ten months? My God, Mother.”

“It isn’t so bad. I travel a lot. I catnap on flights or in the car. And there’s an end in sight. I’m working on a project. When it’s done I’ll be able to rest.”

“Mom, you’re not as young as you were.”

Benacerraf sighed. “I guess it’s a daughter’s job to say things like that. Well, neither are you.”

“But I know it. And you won’t catch me working like that.” Jackie smiled, vaguely. “Life’s too short, Mom. After all, what job is worth wrecking your health for? Seriously, you shouldn’t let them push you so hard.”

Benacerraf reached behind to rub the muscles at the back of her neck. “There is no ‘them.’ Or I’m part of ‘them.’ I’m a senior official in the national space program. I have to try to make things happen. Besides, what doesn’t seem to occur to you is that maybe this work makes me happy.”

“If that’s so, why are you so prickly?”

“I’m not prickly, damn it—” Benacerraf subsided, and Jackie grinned at her.

It was a familiar argument to Benacerraf. What is it with you young people? What in hell happened to the work ethic? Don’t you take anything seriously…?

It was a long time since Jackie had tried to push ahead with her journalism. At times Benacerraf felt she couldn’t stand to see Jackie drift through her life like this, like so many of her age group, floating from one career option to another, passing through relationships that coalesced briefly — sometimes leaving behind kids, as had Jackie’s brief marriage — and on to the next vague destination.

It wasn’t the structure of Jackie’s life that bugged her, but her casualness, her lack of seriousness. There seemed no need to struggle, to take responsibility — no attempt to build things.

She suppressed the impulse to snap. Now, of all times, wasn’t the moment to pick a fight with her daughter.

Anyhow, she thought, maybe Jackie and her generation are right. Look at me, slaving here in the small hours, over this huge Titan boondoggle. Maybe my day is done. Maybe this project is the last spasm of whatever drove us, in the last century, to our great, ambitious endeavors. Perhaps when this is over — when my generation has gone, the last great rocket ships fired off — the world will sink back, lapse into a kind of high-tech pastoralism.

Jackie got up and walked to Benacerraf’s back, and took over rubbing her neck muscles for her.

“That feels good,” Benacerraf said.

“Just like when I was a little girl, huh?”

“Even then you always had good hands.”

“All that tennis I played.”

“You could have been a surgeon. A physiotherapist—”

Jackie laughed. “A carpenter, like Jesus. Come on, Mom; you’re sounding like a cliche again.”

“Sorry.”

Jackie pointed to the softscreen, which Benacerraf had folded over. “You going to tell me what you’re working on?”

I’m not supposed to, Benacerraf thought. But you deserve to know.

“Here.” She unfolded the softscreen and smoothed out its creases.

Jackie sat down again, pulled the softscreen to her, and ran her finger over its smooth fabric surface, a reading habit she’d developed as a child.

…The purpose of this memorandum is to obtain your approval to use Space Shuttle and ancillary technology to fly an open-ended manned mission to Saturn’s Moon, Titan, in the short-term timeframe, with a resupply and retrieval strategy in the medium-term based on new-generation Reusable Launch Vehicle technology.

My recommendation is based on an exhaustive review of pertinent technical and operational factors and also careful consideration of the impact that either a success or a failure in this mission will have on the future of the Agency.

My objective has been to bring into meaningful perspective the trade-offs between total program risk and gain. As you know, this assessment process is inherently judgemental in nature. Many factors have been considered during a comprehensive series of reviews, conducted over the past several months, to examine in detail all facets of the considerations involved in planning for and providing a capability to fly a crew of five or six on a Titan landing mission. A key benefit for the Agency is the motivation such a mission provides for maintaining funding and commitment for the upcoming RLV program.

In conclusion, but with the proviso that all open work against the open-ended Titan mission is completed and certified, I request your approval to proceed with the implementation plan required to support an early launch readiness date.

Turning to details of the—

Jackie pushed the softscreen back across the table to her mother. “You can’t be serious,” she said.

Benacerraf sipped her apple juice. “Never more so.”

“Is this to do with all that JPL shit? My God, the arrogance. You can’t even fly to orbit and back without crashing all over the place. How do you imagine you can send people to Saturn?”

Benacerraf shrugged. “Do you really care? You’ll learn all about it when it gets made public, if you’re interested.” As, she thought sourly, you probably won’t be.

But Jackie was staring at her. “Oh. Hold up. Hold it right there. I think I’m just starting to figure this out.”

“Jackie, I—”

“You want to go. Don’t you? To Titan, on this ridiculous one-way jaunt.” She slammed the table. “Mother, you are not going to Saturn.”

Benacerraf was taken aback by her anger. “Jackie—”

“Don’t you know what it’s like for me, when you fly in space, in that ludicrous old technology? Every moment you were off the ground in Columbia, I could think of nothing but the danger. And when Columbia went through the crash, I was convinced I wouldn’t see you again. Right now the kids are too young to understand, but soon… And now you talk about this, about leaving the Earth altogether?”

“It isn’t like that. There’s a retrieval strategy, based on—”

“You don’t understand, do you?” Jackie’s eyes were dry, her expression hard. “Listen to me. Flying into space is meaningless. It always was. The technology is antiquated and unsafe, and there’s nowhere to go, and all your language of risk reduction is just a play with words. And for what? The whole thing is just a selfish stunt.”

Benacerraf felt her own anger building in response. “I won’t be called selfish by you. I’m more than just your mother, damn it. I’ve raised you, as best I could. And now you’re grown, my life is my own—”

Jackie snapped, “Why don’t you put that in your report?” She walked out of the kitchen.

Benacerraf sat for long minutes.

Then she pulled the softscreen towards her.

Hadamard hauled on the thermal meteoroid garment. It was a heavy, floppy, deflated balloon made of tough white Beta-cloth. There were sockets over the front, where he plugged in his backpack umbilicals for oxygen, water and telecommunications.

Alongside him, Buzz Aldrin — thirty-nine years old, bald as a coot, and eager as a virgin — was climbing into his own suit.

The Moon suit, authentically rendered, was unbelievably primitive, Hadamard reflected. To think you actually had to assemble it, here on the lunar surface. It was incredible none of the Moonwalkers had been killed, betrayed by leaky plumbing.

When his suit was closed Hadamard flicked a switch, and the pumps and fans in his backpack started. He heard the hum of machinery, and oxygen whooshed across his face.

The veracity of the experience was extraordinary, right down to the sensation of increasing pressure in his ears.

He gave Aldrin a thumbs-up, and through his shining bubble helmet, Aldrin grinned back at him.

The first line in the script was Hadamard’s.

“Houston, this is Tranquillity. We’re standing by for a go for cabin depress, over.”

Tranquillity Base, this is Houston. You are go for cabin depressurize, over.

Aldrin opened the valve that would vent Eagle’s oxygen to space. The pressure crept downwards, much more slowly than Hadamard had expected, despite his detailed knowledge of the timeline. It took all of three minutes to get down to four-tenths of a pound.

“Everything is go here,” Hadamard said. “We’re just waiting for the cabin pressure to bleed, to blow enough pressure to open the hatch…” Hadamard could hear a stiffness in his own tone, as he pronounced the scripted words.

The events of the Moonwalk — at any rate the few minutes surrounding the first footstep itself — had become utterly familiar, through a thousand reproductions and adaptations and digitizations and dramatizations; it was thought that a copy of this script resided in every home with online access, which meant most of mainland U.S. The rest of Apollo — the later flights, even the rest of the Apollo 11 mission — had been largely forgotten now. But, Hadamard thought, the story of these few minutes of the first footstep was probably as familiar, in the public mind, as the story of the Nativity.

It was one hell of a legacy to manage.

“Let me see if it will open now,” Aldrin said. Clumsily, he reached down for the hatch handle. He tugged on the thin metal door, but it stayed firmly shut. Aldrin pulled vigorously, and Hadamard feared he might rip the thin metal shell of the Lunar Module. Finally Aldrin peeled back one corner of the door to break the seal.

The next part of the litany was Hadamard’s. “The hatch is coming open,” he said, and he heard, spontaneously, excitement creep into his voice.

As if it were all real.

A flurry of ice particles gushed out into the lunar vacuum beyond the hatch, the last of the LM’s atmosphere.

Aldrin held the hatch open, and Hadamard sank to his knees and carefully moved his suited bulk backwards through the opening. It was awkward, confining, more like struggling to escape from the neck of a sack than leaving an aircraft.

The Aldrin simulation gave him running guidance. “Jake, you’re lined up nicely. Towards me a little bit. Okay, down. Roll to the left. Put your left foot to the right a little bit. You’re doing fine…”

Hadamard crawled out onto a large platform called the porch, which bridged the gap between the hatch and the ladder to the surface. He groped backwards with his boots, and found the top rung. He got hold of the porch’s handrails and raised himself upright, cautiously.

“Okay, Houston, I’m on the porch.”

Before him was the blocky, shadowed bulk of the LM. Beyond that, reaching all the way to the close horizon, was a pocked, rock-strewn, tan brown surface. There were craters everywhere, of all sizes, right down to the little micrometeorite pits on the sides of the rocks that the astronauts had called zap pits. On some of the rocks he saw an exotic sparkle, like a glaze. The colors, though, depended on which way he looked, on the angle to the sun, as if he was looking through a polarizing filter.

He knew this representation had been beefed up from the original photographs with fractal technology. Those zap pits weren’t real, for instance. But it looked pretty convincing to Hadamard. He could well believe this place had been gardened, pulverized by meteorite strikes, for billions of years.

The land, he saw, actually curved, gently but noticeably, all the way to the horizon, and in every direction from him. He was standing on a rocky sphere, no more and no less. This was a small world indeed. The sky was utterly dark, save for the blue Earth, which was almost directly overhead, visible only if he tilted back his head…

“What do you think of it?”

He turned. An astronaut had come bounding around the far side of the LM, her suit glowing white.

“Paula?”

“Hi, Jake.”

He felt an odd reluctance to come out of the illusion. “Disney-Coke have done a good job.”

“Yes,” she said. “Maybe this was what it was all about in the first place, do you think? Circus stunts, entertainment? And maybe in a few more years these visitors’ centers will be all that’s left…”

“Oh, how symbolic. And that’s why you’ve dragged me here today, Paula. Correct?”

“Did you read my recommendation?”

“Not past the management summary. No.”

“Then,” she said coolly, “you’re going to have to. Like it or not that recommendation is the result of eighteen months’ study, and it comes with a lot of management weight behind it.”

“Paula, I just couldn’t believe what I read. I don’t see how I’m going to be able to justify the costs, even of defining the proposal fully. It’s ridiculous. You’re talking about a manned mission to Saturn, for God’s sake. Who’s going to take that seriously?”

“There are costs associated with everything we do,” she said. “Just mothballing the orbiters is going to cost. Probably we’ll even make a loss out of scrapping the launch complexes, turning the VAB into a jungle gym… Jake, this is your job. But I know you’ve retained unexpended funding from the shut-down manned space program, from the last couple of fiscal years. Funding that’s still at your discretion; funding above and beyond what you disclosed to me when I took on this job.”

“You’re aware of that, huh.”

“It’s not so hard to trace. We can cover this financially. It’s just a question of whether you want to do this, or not. Whether you’ll back it… You’re getting behind your timeline.”

“Oh, yeah.” A prompter scrolled discreetly across the base of his visor, with his next few lines. The next part of the sequence was to pull a D-ring on the side of the Eagle. “I’m going to pull the camera out now.” An equipment storage tray lowered on its hinges, bearing a small TV camera. “Houston, the MESA came down all right.”

Hadamard could hear the capcom, Bruce McCandless, exclaim: Houston, roger, we copy and we’re standing by for your TV. Man, we’re getting a picture on the TV!

“That’s a little gruff,” Benacerraf observed. “McCandless was just a rookie astronaut in 1969. That sounded a lot older.”

“Disney-Coke brought the real McCandless out of retirement, and got him to overdub his contributions. So I guess you have a clash of authenticity measures,” Hadamard said drily. “Of course, McCandless went on to fly Shuttle. He was actually more expensive to get than Buzz Aldrin.”

There’s a great deal of contrast in it and currently it’s upside down on our monitor, but we can make out a fair amount of detail… Okay, Jake, we can see you coming down the ladder now.

Hadamard began to descend the ladder, one rung at a time. His primitive suit, inflated like a big white balloon around him, was so stiff he had trouble bending his legs, and he found he had to just let go and drop from rung to rung.

When he got to the bottom rung he was still more than three feet off the ground. He could see the big dish of the foil-covered footpad beneath him. He dangled one foot, trying to build up the courage to take this final step. Then he pushed himself away from the ladder, gently.

He went into a slow-motion fall. It took maybe a second to drop to the footpad, but on Earth it would have taken less than half that. The difference was pleasingly noticeable. He couldn’t feel the invisible harness supporting him at all.

He was in deep shadow here.

“I’ve also been receiving more proposals from the USAF for disposing of the Shuttle fleet,” he said to Benacerraf.

“Proposals that went straight to you, over my head,” she said mildly.

“I guess so. Well, that’s the way it works, Paula. Those guys play for keeps.”

“The USAF proposals are entirely destructive.”

“I don’t think that’s entirely fair,” he said. The USAF had given up on their grandiose L5 schemes. Now they proposed to use the remaining orbiters as unmanned testbeds, on suborbital flights inside and outside the atmosphere, probing hypersonic, high-altitude flight regimes which were still only partially understood. “We could get some good data out of there.”

“For what purpose? The data, such as it would be, would sit locked away in big USAF databases. And for that dubious benefit they would destroy the orbiters, a national treasure.”

But it would get Al Hartle off my back, he thought. “Give me a single good reason why I should recommend we go to Titan,” he said.

“Because it represents the true high ground,” she replied immediately. She turned, and started to Moonwalk; she drifted across the glowing lunar ground, dreamlike.

“That’s a worn old phrase.”

“But in this case, I think it applies,” she said. Titan is the key to the rest of the Solar System. You’ve seen Rosenberg’s detailed plan—”

“Yes.”

“It’s almost like a business plan,” she said. “On the surface it seems fantastic. But in fact it’s orderly, logical.”

“It’s a dream,” he said. “You’re talking to an accountant, remember. It’s not a business plan at all.”

“Jake, we’re overdue for a breakthrough in booster technology. That’s been obvious for a couple of decades. The Shuttle system uses technology that goes back to Goddard in the 1920s. The Shuttle is just a V-2 with air conditioning. Somebody’s going to make the breakthrough, sooner or later, to routine, cheap access to space. And once that happens, there will be an explosion off-world. You’ll see factories, farms, power stations in LEO… and the next words spoken on the surface of the Moon will be Chinese. Or Korean, or Vietnamese. Soon after that, those guys will make it to Mars, the asteroids. We aren’t investing in the right stuff, the core technologies. Any Americans who want to go will have to book passage.

“We’re about to lose out on an historic opportunity, Jake. We’ve already lost the inner Solar System. Despite the panic, the rush to invest in space since the crash, I don’t see any way to avoid that. We’ve spent too long looking inward, retrenching, cutting back, to change now.”

Actually he agreed. Decadent, he thought. That’s what we are now. We deserve to be overtaken, by younger, more vigorous economies.

She said, “But, right at this moment, we have the ability to get to Titan. And if we do that, we’ll have control of a world of resources that are scarce in the rest of the System. Do you get it, Jake? We’ll have just that one little island in the sky, but it will represent the high ground. As a nation we will still be in the game, in the medium and far future.”

He grunted, unimpressed. “Is that all you have? This visionary crap?”

“No. I have a lot more visionary crap.”

“Such as?”

“Jake, here you are on the surface of the Moon. Or as near as damn it. I’ve brought you here for a reason.”

He laughed. “To sway me with flashy Disney-Coke virtuals.”

“No. Well, maybe. Look, Jake, there are whole generations out there much too young to remember Apollo. If we don’t give them this, they’ll be left with nothing more than the memory of a Shuttle crash. We’ll deserve to sink back into all the anti-rational garbage that’s threatening to drown us. But if we act, now… You could be a hero, Jake.”

Her voice, over his VHP loop, was thin, persistent, scratchy.

A hero. In fact, that had already occurred to him.

He wasn’t about to tell Benacerraf this, but he hadn’t in fact dismissed the Titan proposal out of hand, when it first came across his desk. On reflection, he’d calculated, it was possible that a lot of constituencies could be brought to unite behind this bizarre proposal: for instance there would be plenty of work, at least in the short term, for the NASA centers, which were engaged in their usual turf wars over the latest set of cutbacks. This last project could help in the management of the final decline and shutdown much of NASA faced.

The USAF would be more problematic. But even they — or most of their internal warring factions anyhow — could be brought into line, Hadamard thought, if it was pointed out that this exercise would at least destroy the Shuttle fleet, just as surely as using the orbiters for destructive tests or advanced-weapons target practice.

And meanwhile, inside the White House, there was — he had perceived — some pressure to keep NASA flying. Unusually, this Administration was trying to think ahead, beyond its own expected political death in 2,008, They feared for the future of the country if — when — Xavier Maclachlan came to power, a future in which it seemed America was likely to lapse into fundamentalism, and isolationism, and a kind of high-tech Middle Ages.

A huge technological program already underway when Maclachlan took office — an immense deep space mission lasting years, perhaps even spanning beyond Maclachlan’s term — might be a way to keep the spark of rationalism alive. Surely even Maclachlan wouldn’t be able to justify closing down the new launcher program if it meant stranding astronauts among the moons of Saturn.

And, Hadamard reflected, he himself could indeed become some kind of popular hero. When this was over — even if the mission failed in space, even if it failed to get off the ground altogether he could present himself as more than a cost-cutter, a man who could combine the fiscal targets of his employers, even the final run-down of NASA, with a genuine sense of vision.

He could move from NASA, afterwards, to his pick of jobs.

Benacerraf’s proposal, all this crap about the higher ground, was just a ridiculous power fantasy to him, one in a long line of such dreams to emanate from the centers of NASA. But maybe he ought to back it, even so; maybe it could even be made to serve his own personal objectives.

And maybe it would even work. Maybe it would turn a few young heads back towards engineering, instead of aromatherapy or goddamn homeopathy.

And by the time it all failed, as it surely must, he would be long gone.

A part of his mind wondered if Benacerraf knew what he was thinking, if she wasn’t as naive as she seemed. Maybe she was manipulating him on some level he didn’t recognize. If so it didn’t matter; all that counted, when it came to his decision, was the coincidence of this proposal with his own interests.

And, he sensed, the decision was shaping inside him, as the various factors slotted into place in his subconscious.

Perhaps Benacerraf would never know how. But, he suspected, she had won her argument today.

He, Jake Hadamard, was going to send astronauts to Saturn.

Good God. He’d come a long way since he took this job.

A soft chime sounded in his ears, reminding him that he was holding up the VR immersion. For a moment he forgot his lines; then the prompter scrolled across the bottom of his visor. “Uh, I’m at the foot of the ladder now. The LM footpads are only depressed in the surface about one or two inches. Although the surface appears to be very fine, fine grained, when you get close to it, it’s almost like a powder. Down there it’s very fine…”

Eagle looked like a gaunt spider, looming above him in the glaring sunlight, a filmy construct of gold leaf and aluminum, standing on this broad, level plain. He found it hard to concentrate, with Benacerraf standing there, tilted slightly forward under the weight of her backpack, watching him. A grandmother on the Moon was definitely not a part of Armstrong’s original experience, he thought.

He got hold of the ladder with a gloved hand, and turned to his left and leaned outward. “I’m going to step off the LM now.” Carefully, he raised his left boot over the lip of the footpad, and lowered his blue overshoe to the dust. He felt his heartbeat rise, and he felt foolish, knowing he was being monitored by invisible techs just a few feet away.

He felt as if he had stepped onto snow; the surface seemed to crunch as it took his weight. But then, a fraction of an inch in, he reached firm footing.

There he was, one foot on this angular machine from Earth, the other on the Moon itself.

It was time for the line.

“That’s one small step for a man…”

Christ, he thought. He had a lump in his throat.

If only it hadn’t been Armstrong, he thought. If only it had been someone less thoughtful, a bullshitter like Pete Conrad, who would have cracked a joke and whooped as he somersaulted down the ladder of the LM. Then we could all have dismissed the whole thing for what it was, a stunt, and got on with the rest of our lives.

Damn Neil Armstrong.

The lunar surface dissolved. The blocky walls of the immersive VR tank — the centerpiece of the visitors’ center here at Kennedy — coalesced around him, breaking through the dark lunar sky. The harness suspending him relaxed, and his full weight descended on his shoulders once more, heavy and eternal. That feeling of buoyant lightness dissipated, and he was trapped on Earth.

So, he thought, it had all been a dream.

He felt a deep, sharp stab of regret, of loss.

Benacerraf called them all to a meeting at JPL. Rosenberg wanted to review landing sites. In the end, such were their commitments to the accelerating refurbishment and training programs, only Mott and Benacerraf could make it.

To Benacerraf, Rosenberg seemed more isolated than ever from his JPL colleagues. She’d expected some kind of excitement here at the heart of planetary exploration, now that Hadamard had announced the Titan program formally. But as they made their way through JPL’s corridors, lined with pictures of Mars, hardly anyone acknowledged Rosenberg — though some of the natives, ageing hairies, stared curiously at Benacerraf herself, the most media-friendly survivor of Columbia.

No wonder Rosenberg wants to leave so badly, Benacerraf thought. There is nothing here for him, even at JPL, his spiritual home.

Rosenberg had booked them a meeting room, a plain box with a big wooden table, over which he’d spread out a gigantic soft-screen. A multicolored map filled the softscreen. It was a Mercator projection, of the surface of a world, pock-marked by craters.

It might have been a map of the Moon — or Mercury, or the southern hemisphere of Mars, or any of the small bodies of the Solar System. But this was Titan. Much of the map was coarse-grained, and it featured long white strips where no terrain was shown at all, particularly towards the poles.

Rosenberg said, “This map was assembled from radar images returned by Cassini. Cassini is using Titan’s gravity well to provide assists to climb on to other targets, but on each approach the radar sends back a noodle — a strip of the map, as it surveys a swathe of surface — and each time Cassini is occulted we study its radio signals, squeezing out a little more data about the nature and structure of the atmosphere…”

Mott said, “Why the radar? Why can’t we see the ground?”

“Because of the smog,” Rosenberg said. “Titan has virtually no magnetic field of its own — unlike Earth — so the solar wind and the magnetospheric plasma from Saturn can get at the upper atmosphere directly. Beams of electrons, plus ultraviolet light from the sun, fall on the upper air of Titan, and drive a lot of chemistry.

“The uv destroys upper-atmosphere methane, which then combines with nitrogen to form complex molecules like ethane, benzene, hydrogen cyanide, other nitriles. The hydrogen cyanide combines in big multimolecular groups to form adenine, a constituent of nucleic acids. The uv manufactures the simplest hydrocarbons, electrons, the rest…

“The hydrocarbons cluster in complex organic solids called tholins. The tholins make up the smog in the upper atmosphere, and they rain steadily down onto the land. And they’ve been doing it for four billion years… Now, Titan’s deep cold has a number of subtle effects. To begin with, once molecules are synthesized down there, they are going to stick around: the higher the temperature, the faster molecules fall to pieces. On Titan, even the oldest molecules might still be there, in the deepest slush layers. Like deep-frozen primeval soup.”

The map was color-coded for relief; one whole hemisphere was, Benacerraf saw, significantly brighter than the other. “Here’s the dominant surface feature on Titan,” Rosenberg said. “It’s a plateau, the size of Australia, sprawled across one whole hemisphere. Two and a half thousand miles across. A continent of ice. The mapmakers at the U.S. Geological Survey called it Cronos.” He looked at them for response and got none. “Mythology. The leader of the Titans. Now, Titan is tidally locked to Saturn; as it completes its sixteen-day orbit of Saturn, just like the Moon around the Earth, it keeps the same face turned to its parent all the time. And this Australia-sized lump, Cronos, is on the leading edge, as Titan pushes around its orbit.”

Benacerraf studied the map more closely. The whole surface of the moon was covered with craters, up to a couple of hundred miles across. Some of the crater floors were filled in with a pale blue color, up to a certain contour. And some had central peaks, which protruded from the washes of blue. The continent, Cronos, had less filled-in craters than the other, trailing hemisphere.

Rosenberg said, “The cratering is a record of Titan’s history. Cronos appears to have an older surface, with a peak crater size of about ten miles — maybe a thousand of those — but also a handful of craters up to two hundred miles wide — big, old, eroded walled plains, their ice walls subsiding back into the landscape. The mapmakers call them palimpsests. Shadow craters. On the lowlands the cratering density is much less, and there is a peak size of crater of around forty miles diameter. That’s consistent with a young surface — renewed by ammonia-water vulcanism — with the larger, older craters, and the smaller ones, pretty much wiped out by the geology…”

The meaning of the craters’ blue coloration was obvious.

Benacerraf pointed. “Filled-in craters. Right?”

“Right, Titan is what you’d get if you flooded the Moon with paraffin: circular seas and lakes filled with liquid hydrocarbons.

“The nature of this hidden surface was the biggest mystery before Cassini got there. You see, the air should be depleted of methane in ten million years, by the photochemical processes that destroy it in the upper atmosphere. Titan’s a lot older than that, and it has methane. So the methane must be replenished.”

Mott asked, “Are the oceans made of methane?”

“No. It’s too hot. But there should be a lot of liquid ethane down there. The oceans are liquid hydrocarbon — seas of paraffin — with methane dissolved in them. That is the source of the methane. But there’s still a problem.

“The orbit of Titan isn’t a perfect circle. It’s elliptical. So, even though Titan rotates to keep the same face to Saturn, any surface liquid is going to slosh back and forth: tides. Which means a dissipation of energy by tidal friction, which means the circularization of the orbit. Like the Moon around the Earth. So you need an ocean to get the methane; but with a big ocean, you should have a circular orbit. It was a paradox. Oceans, or no oceans? Because of that mystery the planners didn’t know what they were sending Huygens into. They designed that little probe to float, or sink in a less dense ocean, or to land in slush…”

“But now we know the answer,” Benacerraf prompted.

“Now we know the answer.” Rosenberg twisted to look at his map. “Those crater seas are big enough to serve as methane reservoirs, with maybe twenty percent of the fluid bulk provided by the methane. But in bodies of fluid that size the tidal friction should be negligible.

“Besides, it now looks as if Titan may have a partially liquid interior. That ought to dissipate the orbital energy even more quickly than the surface reservoirs, so the whole question of the tidal constraint is still open. Anyhow, so there you have the solution to the puzzle. The answer was obvious all along; we just weren’t thinking Titan…”

As she stared at the map, Mott tried to smile. “And this smoggy bombsite,” she said, “will be home.”

Benacerraf touched her shoulder. “Hell, if you’ve lived in Houston long enough, a little smog is nothing.”

Mott said, “What’s it going to be like for us down there, Rosenberg?”

“Different,” Rosenberg said bluntly. “Titan is an ice moon, like Pluto, Triton, Ganymede. The difference is, it’s overlaid by that fat atmosphere. At the core is a ball of silicate, overlaid by a shell of ice, six hundred miles thick. And on the surface, over a water-ice crust, lies that slush of complex organic compounds.

“You have to understand that Titan is not like Earth, Its “bedrock” is water ice, with a little silicate. We may see plate tectonics, for instance, and even volcanoes. But if so they are driven by ammonia-water vulcanism, deep in the icy mantle. We call it cryovulcanism. We’re going to see a lot of unfamiliar processes… And the weather is shit,” he said. “Cold. And overcast. Smoggy, as you can see.”

“How cold?”

“Co — o — old. At the surface, we’ll find a temperature of about ninety-four K — nearly two hundred degrees below the freezing point of water. And that’s with a boost from a greenhouse effect; it could actually be worse. But the deep cold is the reason such a small world has been able to cling onto its air. And, under the smog, it’s dark. We should pack flashlights, Paula.”

Mott said, “Can we see Saturn?”

“From the surface? No. Sorry.”

“Jesus.”

“So, landing sites,” said Benacerraf. “We have to choose an equatorial landing site, because that’s all we can reach.”

Rosenberg said, “Correct. But wherever we land it’s going to look superficially the same. The atmosphere is so thick that the temperature scarcely varies, from pole to pole. What we need to find — for the science, and so we can supply our own needs — is an interface between geologic units. An area where several different types of terrain come together.”

“You have a suggestion?”

“Yeah.” He stabbed a finger at the map, near the center, close to the “coastline” of the continent, Cronos. “There’s a mountain range here, sprawling right across the equator. And a few degrees to the south of the equator, just here, is the highest mountain on Titan. The Survey called it Mount Othrys.”

Mott asked, “More mythology?”

“Yeah…”

Benacerraf said, “Why do we need to be near a mountain?”

“I told you everything is covered in slush, in tholins. We’re going to need water ice, however. But there is rain. Ethane and methane rain,” he said. The rain evaporates before it reaches ground level. But it should wash the tholins off the elevated ground. So the peak of Othrys will be exposed bedrock.”

“Bedrock,” Mott said, not following.

“Think Titan,” Rosenberg said.

“Oh. I get it. Exposed water ice.”

“All right,” Benacerraf said. “So we come down somewhere near this mountain.” Just to the north of the mountain, she saw, there was a large crater, maybe twenty miles wide, filled with a cashew-nut shaped lake. “How about here?”

Mott studied the map. “The crater has no name.”

Rosenberg shrugged. “The USGS didn’t name anything much below a hundred miles across…”

“Then we’ll have to,” Benacerraf said decisively. “Niki, you got any suggestions? This is going to be home, after all.”

Mott smiled. “A dingy stretch of fluid, overlaid by twenty-four-hour smog, and stinking of petrochemicals? Paula, as you say, it’s just like Houston. We’ll call it Clear Lake.”

“Clear Lake it is.”

They fell silent, then, and looked at each other, here in the muggy Californian warmth, the bright light of the meeting room.

Clear Lake.

Benacerraf thought, What the hell are we doing?

She tried to imagine how it would be down there, on the surface of Titan. In the pitch dark, laboring through freezing, sticky slush. Completely alone, without resource, save for the companions she took with her and whatever they could land.

Possibly, probably, for the rest of her life.

It would be a cold version of hell.

But her heart was beating, fast, and she smiled.

Jackie’s right, she thought. She was being selfish. Who could turn down an adventure like this?

The moment broke. The three of them pored over the map, picking out more features, assigning tentative names, on the world that awaited them.

Gareth Deeke, Air Force officer, drove steadily north on Colorado Highway 115. He drove with the windows down and his sun-roof open, despite the crisp chill of the autumn air. The sun, high and small, beat down on his scalp from the immense blue sky; but his eyes were shielded by his mirrored glasses, and visibility was good — in fact he could see for miles, as if the air was glass.

Deeke loved the mountains: the emptiness, the huge sweep of the landscape, the sense of scale and frozen geological drama opening out all around him. He relished the feeling that he was embedded like a fly in amber, in this flashbulb moment of time.

He reached the right turn for Cheyenne Mountain with regret.

He could see the car park. It was the tabletop of a plateau, which jutted out massively from the side of the mountain. The steel bodies of cars glittered on its surface, in their neat rows, like ranks of insects.

The plateau was artificial. It had been constructed by piling up the granite which Air Force engineers had scooped out of the heart of the mountain.

He really didn’t want to descend into some hole in the ground, not on a day like this.

But he had his duty.

He was pretty sure the reason he’d been summoned here today was to do with the new NASA announcement, the incredible news that they were planning to send astronauts to Saturn.

Deeke, like many within the USAF, was no fan of NASA.

He was of the same vintage as the early astronauts, but his own career had run orthogonally to the Moonwalkers’. He was an old lifting-body man: after Patuxent, he’d flown the X-15, the youngest pilot to do so. When Shuttle came along, his X-15 experience paid off. The X-15 was an unpowered glider, when it landed. Just like Shuttle.

A still-young Air Force officer, Deeke had taken the first test orbiter, Enterprise, on captive flights — where it had been strapped to the back of a 747 — and later on its first free landing tests. Then he’d flown on the third orbital flight, one of the system’s shakedown cruises.

Later, when STS had become operational, Deeke had flown exclusively Department of Defense missions on Shuttle.

Deeke and his buddies had launched reconnaissance satellites, and tried out some techniques for orbital manned reconnaissance; they’d even tried out core technology for some of the more exotic anti-satellite weaponry system proposals, like lasers and particle beams, which had come out of SDI.

Nobody outside the military knew exactly what he’d got up to on those missions. But Shuttle was, after all, a military vehicle.

But after Challenger, the military missions had dried up, and it looked as if Deeke wasn’t going to get to fly again.

Since then he’d assumed responsibility for advanced projects, in the USAF and outside. For instance he was an observer on NASA’s RLV program. It was interesting, varied, senior work.

But it wasn’t like flying. And as the years wore on, even as he got older and slowed up, he got steadily more frustrated.

But now NASA was launching this ludicrous jaunt to the outer Solar System, and he’d had the call to come here to Cheyenne from his old commander, Al Hartle, and his instincts were telling him something pretty exciting was coming down.

So here he was.

A neat little electric vehicle like a golf buggy took Deeke along the glowing length of the central tunnel, deep into the heart of the mountain. Then there was a left turn, through big blast doors — each of them steel plates three feet thick, like battleship hull — and into the heart of the command post itself.

He worked through the elaborate security clearances. He even had to pass through a series of chambers, like airlocks; at the heart of the mountain the incoming air was stringently filtered against chemical, biological and radioactive agents.

He’d been prepared for the delays; he sat patiently in the echoing, blue-painted, boxy rooms.

This complex, dug out of the granite core of the mountain, covered more than four acres. The rooms were all steel shells, supported on big metal springs which would act as shock absorbers, in the event of the nuclear attack which had never come. From this base, any aerospace battle over the U.S. would have been coordinated, and there were hot line links to the Pentagon and the White House. The place was designed to survive. It was hardened against EMP. Blast and heat from any explosion would have been channelled through that big entrance tunnel and vented on the other side of the mountain…

There was no reading matter in the waiting rooms, but there was public net access. He logged onto Time, and found himself staring at an image of the thin, serious face of Jake Hadamard, the NASA Administrator. The accompanying article lauded Hadamard and his team; the proposed Titan project was striking a chord, right now, with the public — although there was opposition, from the Luddites and various religious groups — and the project was turning out to be a “fitting capstone” to the U.S. manned space program. Far better to remember a final great triumph to conclude forty years of endeavor, than the sour memory of the Columbia fiasco. And so on.

Hadamard was clearly using the Titan proposal to propel himself from the relative obscurity of his previous accounting background to the front rank of national figures. Once the Titan mission was launched, and NASA’s final affairs wound up and devolved, Hadamard would have his pick of jobs, in industry or politics. Hadamard, the article said, had every chance of becoming man of the year.

Deeke had to grin at that. Hadamard was one shrewd guy if he could turn a Shuttle crash into a good career move.

Somehow it was typical NASA. All bullshit.

At last an aide — a young MP — collected him, and walked him to the office of Brigadier General Albert Hartle.

Hartle came out from behind his desk, and shook Deeke’s hand vigorously. “Gareth. It’s good of you to come out here.”

The MP brought Deeke a coffee. It was good quality, potent and rich. Then the MP left, closing the door behind him.

Hartle smiled thinly. “I’d offer you a drink. Baltics, that’s what you Edwards boys used to drink, right?”

“I understand, sir. Not here.”

“No. Not here.”

Deeke sized up his surroundings. The office was just a box, like all the chambers in the complex. Hartle had left the walls unpainted; the bare steel shone in the harsh fluorescent strips. The biggest item of furniture was Hartle’s desk, a severe battleship-grey affair that looked like it had been welded together out of gun metal. Its surface bore a blotter, a fountain pen, and a small old-fashioned computer terminal.

The only item of adornment on the walls was a North American Air Defense Command crest, behind Hartle; the NORAD badge was a shield, with a sword and eagle wings upraised before the North American continent, sheltering it from the lightning strikes above.

Hartle was approaching sixty. The Brigadier General was small, trim and upright in his decorated uniform, his strong hands folded up before him.

He looked, Deeke thought, like part of the room, an extension of its severity.

This was Hartle’s habitat. As far as Deeke knew Hartle had no family: nothing in his life but the Air Force, and what he saw as his mission. It was hard to imagine the old Cold Warrior anywhere else but here.

They’ll probably have to bury him here, Deeke thought.

Hartle was studying him, his blue eyes predatory.

“I think you’d better tell me why I’m here, sir.”

“Gareth, I want you to indulge me. I want to go over a little history with you. Because if we don’t learn from the past, we’re condemned to repeat it. Right? And by the end of the story, I think you’ll agree with me that we need to take action now. A single, affirmative, decisive action. There are others who will support us…”

“Action, sir?”

“Bear with me.”

Hartle started to tell Deeke how he had gotten involved in America’s space activities as far back as the 1970s, after Apollo.

“Of course you know the truth about Apollo. McNamara — the Defense Secretary — supported the lunar thing to President Kennedy. Why the hell should the DoD support a big civilian man-in-space boondoggle? But in retrospect it’s clear. McNamara had wider goals. With a big new program like Apollo, outside the reach of the USAF, McNamara could please the aerospace lobby and Congress, taking the pressure off himself, so that he could get on with budget-paring defense programs. Our programs.

“You must understand this point clearly, Gareth. The civilian space program, and its Agency, were actually used as bureaucratic weapons against the USAF. And hence, of course, against the national interest.”

So, Deeke thought, our interpretation of history is that the U.S. went to the Moon in order to beat up on the USAF. Deeke suspected it wasn’t as simple as that; he knew the USAF’s space programs had been riven by infighting within the Air Force from the beginning. But it wasn’t a bad theory.

Maybe old Al Hartle has been down this damn hole in the ground too long.

…But Deeke found he wanted to hear more. It all fit in, he realized, with his own instincts.

It had been years since Deeke’s last visit to the complex.

Deeke was surprised by the subdued atmosphere. He remembered a buzz about the place, a sense of purpose and vigor. If the Big One had ever come, this might have been one of the last outposts of civilization, as the bright young people here monitored the launching of nuclear-tipped missiles across the planet. They could have survived down here for weeks, months even; there were big steel reservoirs, for instance, storing six million gallons of cool, uncontaminated Colorado Springs water.

The sense of mission, of power, had been palpable. Deeke missed it all, damn it.

But now it was different, right across the country, even the world; now, in hardened Minuteman silos that had cost millions to develop, farmers were being allowed to store grain.

Sometimes, Deeke thought, he just couldn’t recognize the world, this odd, fragmented future into which he was slowly sliding, helplessly. None of the old certainties seemed to hold any more.

He could understand how Hartle felt, with his recitation of forty-year-old history, of historic crimes for which retribution was coming.

“Go on, sir.”

“We had to accept the Moon, but at least we were able to stop those assholes flying to fucking Mars…

“I worked on the study group that came up with the Shuttle recommendation. We forced NASA to accept a delta-winged orbiter, to give the bird a low angle of attack atmosphere entry — more heating, but greater cross-range abilities. And that big cargo bay was built for anti-sat work. The Shuttle was a military vehicle, no doubt about it. Then we started work on the Vandenburg launch site. We even essayed an orbital bombing run, over Moscow. But we were faced with nothing but delays and overruns. And then came fucking Challenger.

Think how far back we’ve slipped, since the X-15 you flew. A fucking museum piece, but still the fastest aircraft in the world. Do you remember what we planned? The X-20, the B-70 — a Mach 3 bomber — and the F-108 — a Mach 3 fighter — all cancelled by 1968. My God, they even cancelled the Supersonic Transport because of the fucking environmentalists who said the human race would become extinct if it ever took to the air. Right now the USAF does not have a plane to catch the Russians’ Foxbat…

“Gareth, NASA has been a thorn in our flesh ever since it was founded, by Eisenhower. Even when it hasn’t been used as a positive weapon against us, it’s acted to disrupt our programs and limit our capabilities. My God, if I had my way there would be NASA managers hauled into the courts to answer charges of treason, such is the damage they’ve inflicted.

“But it’s been a long game. NASA has been weakening since 1969. It’s been a slow decline but it’s been steady. And now, at last, we’re in a position to kill it.”

“Kill it, sir?”

“Listen to me now. This damn Titan stunt is one last throw of the dice by those NASA assholes. If it succeeds, they’re figuring, maybe they’ll get back in the public eye, start clawing back some of the power and prestige and funding they’ve blown. We can’t let that happen, Gareth.

“Look, we’re working at many levels to stop this. We’re pulling strings in the Pentagon and up on Capitol Hill. I’m calling in every favor I can. And, frankly, we can count on Xavier Maclachlan’s support. If we can just delay the damn thing until Maclachlan gets into the White House in ’08 we’ll have won…

“But anyhow, this is an historic moment, and we must have the courage to act, to shape the future. Otherwise, we might have no future to shape. The Red Chinese, Gareth. Asia is stirring from its thousand-year sleep. Red China will soon be on the march. Think about that.”

“You talked about action, sir.”

Hartle came forward, and rested his thin hand on Deeke’s uniformed shoulder. His face was a mask, the wrinkles in his cheeks pulled straight by his severe frown, and his shock of crew-cut white hair was like a metal helmet. “I think we can stop this before they get to a launch. But we have to plan for the worst. You’re going to be my linebacker. My last line of defense. I want you there in that hole, if that runner tries to break through…”

Deeke thought, Hartle has gone rogue. But he has backers. And a vision.

He felt adrenaline spurt in his system, as if he were once more in the cockpit of a rocket plane, readying for ignition.

Holy God, he thought. I’m going to get to fly again.

Hartle looked into Deeke’s face, and nodded, as if satisfied.

Marcus White wanted to fly himself straight into Edwards for the F-1 test fire. But he couldn’t get hold of a T-38. Like a lot of other NASA resources, the little needle-nosed supersonic trainers, used by the astronauts like sports cars and taxis, were being quietly withdrawn from service.

It was deeply shitty, White thought; there was a stench of decay about the whole enterprise. The sooner we get this damn Titan mission assembled and away the better.

Anyhow he had to get a commercial flight into LAX; from there he hired a car and drove north out of the city. The car was a late-model Chevy with a lot of smartass electronic features he couldn’t switch off; it just seemed to go where it wanted to go, like a dumb old mule.

The F-1 was the big main engine that powered the S-IC, the Saturn V first stage. White knew the F-1 refurbishment program was going badly, and — as Benacerraf had told him when he’d gone along to bitch at her about the T-38s — his presence up there at Edwards would be a morale boost for the guys.

Not that he could do anything constructive, of course. He was an aviator, not a rocket scientist. He was just a kind of symbol, a presence, who still meant something to the guys working on this unlikely project. Maybe. But this was the last of it. After Titan was gone, his usefulness would be done.

He figured he’d have himself stuffed and mounted and stuck in the Smithsonian. Hang me up there with the Wright Flyer, boys.

The evening was coming on. The sky was cloudless, but the horizon was ringed with the sulphur-orange glow of Los Angeles, masking the stars.

At last he reached the desert. He could see it all around him as a flat, pale white crust in the starlight: the salt flats, like an immense runway, where they used to test the X-15.

He spent the night in the bar with Don Baylor, the old-time Rocketdyne engineer who had invited him to Edwards.

He woke up with a banging head. You ain’t got the tanker capacity you used to have, boy.

But he pulled on his shorts and went for a run around the base.

The sun was barely above the horizon, and the cold of the desert night was lingering, making the air sharp as a blade as it cut into his lungs. He used to run until his heart was pumping, burning all the alcohol and toxins out of his system. But today he tired quickly.

He had to walk back to his room, the world greying around him, limping and wheezing like the old geezer he had become.

The test stand viewing bunker was just a couple of rows of seats behind a big picture window, with telemetry on the engine fed into little softscreens. When he arrived the bunker was already half-full, of managers and senior technicians; White knew that this was just a viewing point for the senior staff — managers and VIP types like White himself — and the real work would be done by technicians controlling the test from elsewhere.

It was mostly men in the bunker, mostly in rumpled suits. They were uniformly fat and aged. Many of these guys had been pulled out of retirement, to work on Saturn technology once more. White hair and bald scalps glowed in the low desert sunlight.

We all let ourselves get so damn old, White thought gloomily.

A countdown was proceeding, delivered by a smooth woman’s voice. It sounded like the announcements in an airport departure lounge.

Donny Baylor was sitting in the front row of the stand, pale as a ghost, with his face half-covered by the biggest, thickest pair of sunshades White had ever seen.

White laughed and clapped Baylor on the back; Baylor blanched further.

“Asshole,” Baylor said.

“Not as young as you used to be, Donny.”

“Neither are you.”

White settled into a seat beside Baylor. “I’ll tell you the best damn hangover cure I ever knew. You’d take up your bird after a night of throwing them back, with all that alcohol still sloshing around your system. All you’d have to do was pull a few Gs and suck in oxygen to flush all that crap away…”

Baylor was a short, stocky man, and his face was a round, wizened button. He rubbed his forehead and scratched at the grizzled frosting that was all the years had left of his hair. “Things have changed, Marcus. When you think about it, it was pretty much you and me on our own last night.”

“Too damn true,” White said. In fact, he had a theory you could correlate the nation’s decline with the growing adversity of these younger generations to a few cold ones.

Baylor checked his watch. “Ten minutes to the firing.”

White looked out of the picture window. The sun was low and in his eyes, but the glass was polarized somehow. There was a small pair of binoculars in front of his seat, not much bigger than opera glasses. But when he lifted them to his eyes some kind of electronics in the optics started to work, and the test stand leapt into his view, as detailed as if he was standing next to it, the image as steady as a rock, the glasses somehow compensating for the shake of his hands.

The test stand itself was just a big square block of scaffolding, sitting on concrete trestles over a flame pit, anchored deep in the desert. The stand was maybe forty feet tall, and it was topped off by the two big silvery spheres which held oxidizer and propellant, RP-1 kerosene, for the test fires. There was frost, sparkling over the shell of the liquid oxygen tank.

The single F-1 engine under test today — a complex tangle of feed lines, electronics and gimbal bearings — was pretty much hidden by the test stand structure. But he could see the nozzle, protruding out beneath the scaffolding, and he could see the fat kerosene pipes wrapped around the bell; the fuel passed around the combustion chamber and engine bell, to cool them, before it was fed into the combustion chamber.

That single nozzle was all of twelve feet across. And a Saturn first stage would have no less than five of those mothers, in a neat cluster, all burning at once, every one of them five times as powerful as the Atlas rocket that had thrust John Glenn to orbit.

Even the test stand itself had had to be refurbished for this program, he knew. Most of the Saturn test facilities around the country had long been deactivated or converted to other uses. The Rocketdyne engine stands at Canoga Park had been converted for tests of the Atlas and Delta expendable boosters, for instance, and the stands here at Edwards had been used for Shuttle solid rocket motor tests. The Marshall facilities had been turned over to Shuttle main engine tests. And so on.

Well, to make the schedule, this reverse refurbishment had been brisk, he could see now. The desert sand around the test stand had been churned up, and left in great untidy heaps.

Beyond the stand, a line of worn, rocky hills shouldered over the horizon; the sky was high and blue, with a few wisps of cloud in layers. There was a great sense of emptiness, of bigness; White knew there wasn’t a human being within a mile of that stand.

“So, Donny,” White said. “That damn thing going to light on schedule?”

White was expecting the usual confident good-guy bull back from Baylor, and he was surprised when Baylor didn’t respond in kind. Instead Baylor glanced at him, evidently troubled, despite that big mask of his sunglasses. “I’ll tell you the truth, Marcus,” he said. “We got ourselves one hell of a beast out there.”

“You don’t sound too confident.”

“I’m not. Christ, Marcus, it’s been like archaeology. We had to tear down one of the old flight spares for the component evaluation, and to get some experience of assembly and checkout. We had to buy fresh tooling and checkout equipment, and activate the old turbopump checkout facility. We had to adapt the thrust chamber assembly equipment we use for Shuttle main engine production. Only about half of the old suppliers are still in business, so we had to find new approved suppliers, for the heat exchanger duct assembly, the lox mating ring, the fuel pump housing, the pump housing machining… A dozen things. Some of the tools we needed we had to make. We had to redraw the tooling drawings, rework all the process and material specifications; they weren’t compatible with the manufacturing processes we use now…

“I’ll tell you what’s really screwing us, though. Instability in the combustion chamber. See, the pumps bring the lox and kerosene to the injector plate. That’s a metal slab, a disc a yard across and four inches duck. The point is to get a nice smooth flame front, where the propellants burn at a uniform temperature, right across the face of the injector plate, all three feet of it…” Baylor started going into a lot of detail about how the lox and kerosene were brought into the chamber as fans, which impinged on each other. Pre-burners ignited the propellants at those points of impingement. Baylor mimed the little fans of lox and kerosene with his engineer’s hands, his gnarly fingers splayed out, as brown and hard as wood carvings.

“And if you don’t get a smooth flame front,” Baylor said now, “you’re fucked. Suppose one side of the plate has a slightly higher oxygen content than the other. Then that area will get hotter, and produce higher pressures on that side. Then, in an engine the size of the F-1, you get a racetrack, where you have a high-pressure wave rushing around the perimeter of the combustion chamber. Then — it only takes milliseconds — the heat flows inside the chamber get disrupted and start bouncing back and forth. You get positive feedback, and before you know it your combustion process is out of control. That’s combustion instability, Marcus.”

“So why are you telling me about it?”

“Because it’s killing us. The slightest thing seems to trigger it: cavitation in the pumps, thermal shocks as the engines heat up, acoustical shocks at the moment of ignition.”

“But that kind of instability can’t have been a new problem, even in 1961,” White said.

“Hell, no. The Germans had instability problems all the way back to the goddamn V-2. Each generation of rocket required new fixes. But all of the fixes were pretty much ad-hoc, Marcus; nobody really had a handle on it. And with the F-1 you had this immense size of engine to compound the problem. Maybe,” he mused, “if we’d left well enough alone, and not fucked about with the configuration… but we didn’t. We’re trying to upgrade, to reach eighteen hundred K thrust, up from fifteen hundred. So we’ve made a whole stack of modifications: we increased the oxidizer inducer diameter, strengthened the gimbal seat and the cross block, strengthened the high pressure ducts and the thrust chambers, beefed up the turbine exhaust manifold, improved the heat exchanger, increased the power of the turbine… All of that screwed the stability of the flight configuration, basically. And we’ve had to try to fix it.”

“Come on, Don. Those old guys in the 1960s, from Rocketdyne and Marshall, got the instability problem licked in the end. I mean, with due respect, I’m looking at one of those old bastards right now.”

Baylor looked mournful. “That’s just it, Marcus. I arrived too late. I came into propulsion engineering at Marshall in 1965, just about in time for the Saturn flight testing. I missed all the fun, from the early days, when the core team — the Combustion Devices Team — was working to solve the instability problem.”

“Don’t we have any members of that team left?”

Baylor looked grim. “Marcus, they even sent me around the old people’s homes. Most of those guys are dead, and the rest are eating baby food and complaining about their catheters. Hell, you’re talking about a project that’s nearly fifty years gone. I was just a junior member of the team — and I joined late — and now I’m the most senior guy we have here.” He shook his head. “If only we’d thought to do this twenty years ago — even ten…”

The count reached its final seconds. Baylor turned to the test stand, and picked up his binoculars.

In the last moments, tons of water cascaded down, into the flame deflector pit at the base of the stand. White could hear the roar of that miniature Niagara even from here, even through the glass.

Baylor didn’t seem aware White was here any more; his eyes, behind their big shades, were focused on that test stand.

White could picture what was happening inside the F-1.

The combustion chamber, the tough heart of the engine, was a barrel a yard wide and a little less long. Right now, a few seconds before ignition, four small pre-burners inside that chamber — pilot lights — had lit up, providing a flame at the points where the sprays of lox and kerosene from the injector plate hit each other. The burning of exhaust gases from the turbines produced a thick orange smoke, which burst out of the nozzle and bounced off the flame deflector under the launcher, busting out to either side. The pumps were running up to speed, the valves were opening, and now the propellant poured in: a ton of kerosene, two tons of lox, in the first second alone, and in every second thereafter.

The gases produced by their ignition shouldered out through the nozzle throat at the bottom of the chamber. In these few seconds, as the engine built up to full power, the interior of the combustion chamber went from room temperature to as hot as the surface of the sun; pressure went from zero to a thousand pounds per square inch.

The flame directly under the engine turned to an incandescent white, and the orange smoke billowed outward and upward, enveloping the base of the nozzle. A pillar of pure white light exploded into life under the engine bell.

It was the brightest thing in White’s view, brighter than the sun. His binoculars dimmed themselves down, compensating for that surge of brilliance, obscuring the rest of the test stand structure and dimming the bright blue sky to a muddy grey. The water gushing into the flame pit flashed to steam, and great clouds of it billowed out around the stand, unable to dim the brilliance of that light.

The noise reached them now, a great crackling explosion of nonlinear wave fronts that burst across the desert. The picture window rattled, visibly bowing, and in the depths of his gut White could feel a bass rumble.

White felt his lips pull back into a feral grin, and he whooped. He just let all that pure rocket light wash over his face. This was the way a rocket was supposed to be, he thought: pure liquid fire, none of that dirty yellow-orange shit that came spewing out of the solid-propellant firecrackers they strapped to the side of the Shuttle.

But then the torrent of fire sputtered, as if the engine was being throttled back, or was stalling. White thought he could see the whole test stand shudder.

The nozzle softened and deformed.

It happened in an instant: thick, high-strength steel plate burning through in a quarter of a second, guttering like candle wax. The metal just gushed down into the flame pit, swept away by the energy of the torrent of fire. And then that torrent, without the shaping of the nozzle, turned from a controlled explosion into an uncontrolled one.

Light gushed out of the test stand in a ball, flaring; steam billowed furiously. He thought he could feel the heat of the bang on his face, even across a mile of desert, even through the toughened glass. It was like a nova, White thought, a star exploding on the Earth.

The explosion lasted no more than a second. Then the test stand shut itself down, cutting off the flow of kerosene and oxidant to the failed engine.

The light faded, leaving the test stand exposed, huge clouds of steam still billowing up out of the flame deflector.

Baylor lifted his glasses and rubbed his face; White could see that his eyes were red-rimmed and rheumy, glossy with water. The eyes of an old man.

“Fuck,” said Baylor. “See what I’m saying about the instability.”

All around them, in the viewing bunker, the technicians and managers were moving out, with much gloomy talk and shaking of heads.

Now’s the time for a bit of inspiration, Marcus. This is why you’re here. Sprinkle a little of the old Moondust on them, and get them all fired up to go out there and take that motor to pieces, and go over it again and again until they get it right.

Like they used to in the old days.

But right now, damn his soul to hell, he couldn’t think of a thing to say.

Outside, around the ruined test stand, the steam clouds continued to billow out of the flame deflector. Mojave sand was scattered around the test stand in rays: dead straight and maybe thirty feet long, reminding him of the raying on the lunar surface, around his LM descent stage, after the landing.

This wasn’t like preparing for any other flight, Siobhan Libet found. This wasn’t just routine, just another element in the assembly-line of Shuttle missions.

It wasn’t just that it was the last. With this flight, she was entering realms of mythology. People looked at her differently.

And everywhere she went she faced the classic, unanswerable question. What’s it like to fly in space?

She went up to Boeing’s Shuttle orbiter assembly facility, at Palmdale, California.

Libet tried to remain inconspicuous as Billy Ray Jardine of Boeing conducted his tour. That wasn’t too difficult at first; the little ten-strong group, of astronauts, NASA Shuttle and Titan program managers — including Libet and Barbara Fahy — were anonymously clad in bunny suits, long, crisp-white coats and hygiene-conscious caps. They looked, Libet thought wryly, like a group of food hygiene inspectors descending on a McDonald’s.

The Palmdale assembly facility was huge, cavernous, a place of light and rectangles. The floor was a layer of some blue-grey resin, utterly flat, threaded with yellow demarcation lines and scarred with rubber skid marks from the little electric carts that rolled everywhere. The walls were painted with corporate red, white and blue stripes and huge Stars-and-Stripes. Around the edge of the floor were big, cuboid offices, like independent buildings spawned inside the gut of this monster, and the floor was littered with massive, anonymous machinery.

Billy Ray Jardine was the President of Boeing’s space transportation division. Jardine looked every bit the corporate senior executive, with his grey suit jacket stretching over his ample, comfortable belly. He would have fit in just about any era since the Second World War, Libet thought; his type had been running the country for much longer than she had been alive. Only the full-color images cycling across the surface of his softscreen tie — of old successes in space, Rockwell’s Saturn V second stage, Apollo, Shuttle itself, not to mention Boeing’s own Saturn V first stage — gave any concession to modernity.

The facility was clean, bright, every metal surface shining and unscuffed. The assembly and manufacturing equipment around her looked state of the art. Here — by Rockwell, before the Boeing buyout — all five of the billion-dollar spacecraft of the Shuttle fleet had been assembled, from Columbia to the Challenger replacement Endeavour, which had first flown in 1992. And Boeing had evidently maintained this facility to the highest standard. Any time NASA had asked for a revival of the Shuttle construction program, Boeing would have been able to respond, ready to accept all those fat billion-buck NASA contracts once more.

But Libet felt depressed by all this sparkling readiness. Because this facility was never going to be used to build an orbiter again.

In fact, Boeing had adapted its facility to tear spacecraft apart.

The party was taken to a metal balcony which overlooked a sectioned-off part of the assembly area floor. Here, the Shuttle orbiter Atlantis had been brought for its hasty modification. The orbiter’s boattail — the aft fuselage assembly — was facing Libet, with the nozzles of the three big main engines thrusting out of the scaffolding. The rest of the orbiter, foreshortened by perspective, was encased in scaffolding and protective sheeting. A little swarm of white-coated workers was busy all over the spacecraft; the air filled with the whine of drills and the ozone stink of oxy-acetylene burners. Atlantis looked, Libet thought, as if it was being deliberately crippled.

At first glance, the orbiter itself still looked much as it had done before. But, slowly, Libet made out differences.

For instance, the crew cabin — the nose of the orbiter — had been dismantled. Now, a simple aerodynamic cone fairing was being fixed to the orbiter’s frame. And Atlantis’s payload bay had been lengthened, into the space vacated by the crew compartment, to more than eighty feet: a third more than the baseline design of the Shuttle system. The boattail, with the main engine assembly, was being left almost unmodified. But the smaller engines of the orbiter’s orbital maneuvering system had been removed. Those engines brought the ship out of orbit at the end of its mission. And there was no need for a system to bring Atlantis home again.

And Atlantis had no wings.

Atlantis no longer needed wings, or a tailplane, or retro engines. Atlantis was no longer an orbiter. She had been reduced to a Shuttle-C Cargo Element, a so-called SCE, consisting of little more than a payload carrier bay and an aft fuselage, with engines. And SCEs were expendable. Atlantis would never again carry a crew. No effort would be made to return Atlantis to Earth after her final flight; its cargo delivered to orbit, Atlantis would be slowed by its reaction control thrusters, and allowed to burn up over the Pacific.

Libet could see the big delta-shaped wings, their leading edges battered by their multiple reentries, taken away from the orbiter hulk and stacked against a wall of the facility. Looking at the severed joint of each wing she could see their internal structure; the wings were just a skin of stiffened aluminum alloy over a framework of internal ribs and stringers. Detached from the orbiter, the wings looked crude, primitive. Something Howard Hughes might have recognized. The wings had been manufactured by Grumman, at their Bethpage plant in New York. Grumman had been the people who had manufactured the Lunar Module for Apollo. She wondered what the old-timers there thought of this day’s work.

“…Of course,” Billy Ray Jardine was saying, “what you have here is an extension of the original Shuttle-C concept, which would have relied on the manufacture of wholly new SCEs — Shuttle-C Cargo Elements — rather than their adaptation from existing orbiters. Not that the manufacture of new SCEs would have presented in any way a challenge. But you have to understand that we have to pretty much take apart each orbiter to adapt it to serve as a Shuttle-C SCE. Naturally the modification of the old test articles is generally somewhat simpler than the flight articles.

“We have to make required modifications to the shroud and stringback, a new aluminum skin, and enhanced stringer and ring-frame construction. We will deliver a fifteen feet by eighty-two feet useable payload space, of which fifteen by sixty is capable of changeout on the pad. Avionics and guidance, navigation and control systems are adapted from those on the orbiter; systems relating to manned life support, long duration orbit, descent, and landing are deleted…”

Jardine’s accent was Texan, his voice brisk, clipped and competent; it depressed Libet even more to think that this man could show equal professional enthusiasm about taking apart his orbiters as assembling them.

Barbara Fahy was standing beside Libet. “That smooth corporate bull does have a way of putting you to sleep, doesn’t it?” Fahy pushed back her hat and scratched her forehead. “Damn this thing.”

“You don’t look too happy,” Libet said.

Fahy fixed her hat back in place. “Should I be? I looked up the original proposal for Shuttle-C, from the 1980s. They were asking for five years to complete the development, including six months for proposal evaluation and contract award, four years of design, fabrication and assembly, a comprehensive test program, and a couple of test flights before going operational. For better or worse Boeing are rushing through their modifications in half that time. And we’ll be going straight to operational, without a chance for a single test flight. The same is true of the Saturn refurbishment program. I’m a big supporter of this program, Siobhan, this vision of Paula’s to get us to Titan. But we just aren’t giving this damn thing enough time.”

“We don’t have much choice. The bad guys are closing in, remember. In fact, Boeing are already behind schedule.” It was true; it was the reason for their visit today.

“I know, I know. But all we need is one of these flights to fail, just one, and we won’t have the lift capacity we need. And I might be the person who has to deliver one of those flights. And carry the can when it blows apart.”

They were taken to the floor of the facility now, and walked underneath the still-graceful chin of the orbiter. The smooth, shaped surface of Atlantis’s belly loomed over Libet, dark and sheer, and she could see the complex mottling of the tiles and blankets of the thermal protection system.

Those tiles, all thirty thousand of them, had absorbed thousands of man-hours of development and testing. And then every one of them, shaped for a particular location on the orbiter’s complex surface, had had to be fitted individually, by hand. It was a monumental, medieval labor.

But now, teams of technicians were again working on the belly of Atlantis. They were on moveable platforms, and they reached up and scoured and painted and dug; each of them looked like Michelangelo working in the Sistine, she thought vaguely. But what they were doing was far from creative: they were detaching those painfully-applied tiles, one by one. All in the interests of saving weight; on her last mission, Atlantis didn’t even need her thermal protection any more.

Discarded tiles lay around on the floor of the facility, some of them streaked and discolored by Atlantis’s final atmospheric entry.

The tiles on the underside of the craft were coated with a black, reflective glass patina. The shaped surface returned complex highlights from the bright working lights of the Boeing facility. The effect of the ceiling of tiles above her, with its subtle contours, was quite beautiful, she thought; it was like the roof of some modern church.

Libet shook her head. “My God. It’s an act of vandalism. We’re taking fully operational spacecraft, all this mature technology — national treasures, for God’s sake — and stripping them down to serve as garbage scows.”

Fahy smiled at Libet. “We’ve been through this. The only alternative to Shuttle-C is to turn the damn things into cafe bars, like the Russians did to Buran. You can’t tell me you’d prefer that.”

“Hell,” Libet grumbled. “It’s just—”

“What?”

“It’s just, being an astronaut is all I ever wanted to do. Flying in space, travelling to new worlds. To Nimbar, or Vulcan, or Bajor, or through that damn wormhole… But here in the real universe I got nowhere to go, except Titan, and that’s a lethal ice-ball, and we’re having to burn up everything to get there. I keep on feeling I was born in the wrong universe.”

Fahy laughed. “But you’re lucky, Siobhan, At least you are heading out. And there ain’t nobody who’s going to follow you, not in my lifetime, or a long time afterward.”

The party moved on.

They were taken to a balcony overlooking another area of the assembly facility floor. Here — Libet hadn’t been expecting this — Boeing employees, maybe a couple of hundred of them, had gathered. They were standing in their white coats and plastic overshoes, looking up at their visitors.

Jardine started giving them a pep talk. “…We’re scheduled to begin power-on systems testing in a couple more months,” he said. He beamed out at his workers from under the brim of his white hat. “And that puts us significantly under budget and only a month behind schedule, which we will recover. I attribute that to a mature Shuttle program expertise, careful planning and foresight by Boeing and NASA, and, most importantly, the hard work of thousands of people. I mean you people, right here, and I have never worked with a better bunch of quality workers in all my years in this business…”

He got a ripple of applause for that.

Then, to Libet’s horror, Jardine said something about how they were honored to have with them one of the people who this program was all about, the latest chapter in Boeing’s long and proud space tradition… And Libet found herself being pushed forward, until she reached a discreet black microphone on a stand in front of her.

She looked back at Fahy, appealing. Fahy shrugged, apologetically, and held her palms out flat. Take it easy.

Libet looked out over the little pool of faces. Like so many in the space industry, the workers here weren’t young, on average; there were plenty of grey hairs pushing out from under those gleaming white hats. This last effort probably meant the end of their careers, she realized. And they were all looking up at her from the assembly facility floor.

Their faces were — empty. Shining.

I fascinate them, she realized.

Holy shit, she thought. Astronauts nowadays weren’t prepared for this stuff. All her PR training had been about playing down the wonder stuff. Being an astronaut was just a job, right?

But this was different. It was as if she was John Glenn, ready to go off to the high frontier. Maybe to die. Evidently Paula had been right in her hunch that this Titan mission would, one last time, grab the imagination of the people.

But, Libet thought, what in hell do I say?

Then the question came, called up from the floor. What’s it like to fly in space?

There was a ripple of nervous laughter.

She held the microphone and tried to reply. “…It’s like nothing you can imagine. The photos, the IMAX films, the VRs, nothing captures it. I feel like a child. I feel like I’ve been to a secret place. And now you guys are sending me back…”

They were watching her, expectant, silent.

She remembered stories of early astronauts as they’d toured similar facilities, fifty years ago. And she remembered what Grissom, or Cooper or Glenn or Shepard, had said in one such place, at Convair or McDonnell Douglas or Boeing.

She leaned forward to the microphone, and said: “Do good work.”

There was a long silence.

Then applause started rippling around the assembly area floor, vigorous, laced by a couple of whistles.

Billy Ray Jardine’s heavy hand clapped her back.

Deeply embarrassed, she retreated.

Barbara Fahy approached her, grinning. “Welcome to the space program,” she said.

Marcus White kept track of the modifications Don Baylor and his team tried, to lick the instability problem in that balky old F-1 engine. They put baffles into the combustion chamber, copper plates that extended down from the injector plate, that would interrupt those rebounding instability waves. But the baffles just bent over like blades of grass in a breeze. So they put in massive dams, slabs of two-inch-thick copper, cooled by a kerosene flow. That helped some, but the worst instabilities still overcame the damping effect of the baffles.

Eventually, sparked off by obscure test results from the old documentation, Baylor tried another approach. He changed the impingement angle of the propellant streams coming through the holes in the injector plate. That way the fans of lox and kerosene were formed further down inside the chamber. There was a cost to this, because the engine efficiency was reduced; the further down the streams met, the less completely they burned before being expelled from the chamber. But with that new angle of impingement, Baylor and his team managed, at last, to reduce substantially the occurrence of instability.

So they went to work on that basic design, fine-tuning it, shaving thin slices off the engine orifice, until at last they weren’t getting the instability at all.

“Fucking A,” White told him. “You ought to take your guys out and get oiled up and—”

“Marcus, you don’t understand. For us there’s no splashdown party. We never know for sure that we’ve won. Look, it’s not as if we wrote out equations and ran computer models to show that we’ve removed the instability. All we’ve done is modify the design until it went away. And we don’t for sure know how. That instability is lurking in there, you can be sure about it. All I can do now is hope that it doesn’t find some way to strike before we finish firing off those four birds.”

“You’re a pessimist, Baylor,” White snapped. “Look, in the Apollo program they fired thirteen flights, sixty-five F-1 engines, and never a failure. So there, you got yourself a hundred percent reliable engine.”

Baylor had laughed. “The logic doesn’t work like that, Marcus. History is a poor indicator of reliability. Read Feynman.”

“Who?”

“Never mind. You know, we ransacked the documentation they left behind from the 1960s but there’s no real clue about how they mastered this in the end. There’s a rumor they just got a bunch of craftsmen at Canoga Park to drill holes at random in the damn plate, until they found something that worked. Maybe it wasn’t just a sea story…”

Baylor just wouldn’t lighten up, to the end.

Anyhow, the F-1 refurbishment was done, for better or worse. And now it was time to launch.

Marcus White packed his bags for the Cape.

It was going to be the first Saturn V launch since 1973. And Barbara Fahy was going to get to direct it.

She followed the components of booster AS-514 through their refurbishment and assembly. The third stage, the S-IVB, was delivered to KSC from McDonnell by a “Super Guppy,” a fat transport aircraft, one of the few of its type still flying. The two other stages arrived by barge, the S-II second stage from Boeing’s facility at Seal Beach in California, and the S-IC from NASA’s Michoud facility in Louisiana.

Fahy watched the S-IC arrive on a barge called Neptune, at the refurbished Saturn unloading facilities on the Banana River. The stage, a prone cylinder a hundred and forty feet long, was wrapped up in plastic like some bizarre piece of modern art. Teams of technicians descended on the stage, checking to make sure that the various wrappings and protective devices had not been damaged during the long transit. The techs were youngsters supervised by a handful of grizzled old heads who remembered this stuff from the last time they’d done it, in the 1970s.

The S-IC alone was gargantuan. Most of its cylindrical length was taken up by its fuel and oxidant tanks. The five F-1s, gleaming as if new, were fixed to a massive thrust structure, twenty-four tons of it. And beyond them the stage’s fins flared above the technicians, spanning sixty feet.

Actually this S-IC had benefited from considerable rebuilding; much of the intertank, engine fairings and the fins had been replaced with new composite materials and lightweight aluminum-lithium alloys. The other two stages had been similarly reworked.

The S-IC was taken to the Low Bay of the Vehicle Assembly Building, where it was checked over prone for the final time. Then it was taken to the High Bay, where lines were attached from the crane overhead, and the S-IC lifted upright and settled gently into place aboard the mobile launch platform.

The second stage, the S-II — itself all of ninety feet long — was hauled three hundred feet into the air and set delicately atop the S-IC. It was like watching a skyscraper being assembled, in giant prefabricated chunks.

Back in the 1960s, the guys who ran the VAB cranes would boast that they could rest the hooks of their gigantic machines so delicately that they could touch an egg without breaking it. But those days were gone; now the cranes were fully automated and controlled to within fractions of an inch by sonar and infra-red systems. The job of humans now was to watch the machines perform more precisely and reliably than they ever could.

When the two stages were aligned, technicians moved in to join them. Three big twelve-inch pins were set at equal spacings around the cylindrical geometry of the join, and over two hundred one-and-a-half-inch fasteners were fixed at six-inch intervals. It took three days to stitch the stages together. The guys in the ’60s could do it in eight hours, the old timers said.

Next the S-IVB was lifted over the second stage and joined up similarly. And finally the payload — a cylindrical tank, swathed in insulation, that would hold a hundred and eighty thousand pounds of propellant for the Titan mission — was mated to the S-IVB.

Walking around the base of the assembled Saturn, Fahy peered at its upper stages, so remote they seemed lost in the misty air above. AS-514 was the operational Saturn which had for three decades sat on the lawn outside JSC in Houston, after its requirement as a lunar mission launcher was deleted. There was hope that this bird, which had at least been of operational standard back in the 19705, would give them all fewer problems than the two upgraded test articles they would have to fly later.

Maybe. Fahy was expecting trouble.

This would be her first flight since Columbia. She wasn’t the lead director for the mission, but she had been entrusted with the ascent phase, the most dangerous and complex phase of any flight.

She’d gone through the events of that final, fatal landing so many times that she could recite the mission logs. STS-143 had grown in her mind, until it was as if the particular circumstances of that mission were the only way any Shuttle mission could ever have been flown, as if the whole thing had been fixed and unalterable, its deadly script written into history even before Columbia had lifted off the pad.

But then, along had come Paula Benacerraf, with her bizarre and wonderful visions of a mission to Titan…

When she’d been offered the chance to work on this flight, Fahy had jumped at it.

It was just what she needed, she figured. Maybe she could prove to herself that she could act, make decisions, influence the unfolding of events — prove that she wasn’t just a victim of some blind predetermined fate.

Then, perhaps, she could get on with the rest of her life.

And anyway, she reflected more cynically, a good performance here could be a way of restarting her damaged career, within the shrunken, emasculated NASA that was going to emerge from this mess.

…But the Saturn V overwhelmed personal considerations like that. The Saturn was so damned big.

Fahy had grown up with Shuttle. But the Saturn V was just about twice as tall as the Shuttle stack. And those balky F-1s, which had given the guys at Marshall so much trouble, could each develop the power of four Shuttle main engines.

The Saturn, assembled, was like some dinosaur, returned to stalk the Earth. She began to feel intimidated by the booster, as if it would be impossible for her, a mere human, to control it.

Testing and cheek-out went on. There were hundreds of tests of the completed booster’s electrical networks, fire detection, telemetry, tracking, gyroscopes, computers, pumps, transducers, valves, cables, plugs, hydraulics. That took four months alone. Then there was a further set of integrated tests of the booster with its payload and the ground support equipment. There were tests of contingency procedures in case of a malfunction at launch — for instance, if an umbilical swing arm failed to disconnect. There were integration tests to check the hundreds of wire and cable pathways connecting the stages and payload, tests of each of the hundreds of pins in the umbilicals’ electrical interfaces with the vehicle.

Slowly, painfully, Fahy could see progress being made; verification seals and sign-offs started to accumulate, immersing the vehicle in a kind of invisible scaffolding of paperwork.

And, eventually, the booster was rolled out to Launch Complex 39-A.

At the pad, the technicians began more layers of tests: a plugs-in test of all the system’s components, a flight readiness test, a full simulated launch and mission, and a Countdown Demonstration Test, a crucial checkout for the bird’s preparation for launch. In the days of Apollo, CDTs would take maybe four days — sixty hours of testing, and thirty-six hours of planned holds. Fahy hoped they’d get away with not much more than that — say, six or seven days.

The test took seventeen days.

None of the equipment — either the stuff modified from Shuttle operations, or old Saturn gear dug out of storage and refurbished — seemed to work the way it was supposed to. The regulators which controlled the flow of propellants into the Saturn’s stages kept throwing up problems; they simply weren’t designed for such heavy flows. The Saturn V’s own Instrument Unit — the brains of the bird, stuffed full of antique 1960s electronics which nobody dared tear out and replace — couldn’t keep the electronics boxes as cool as they needed to be. Cable connections on the S-II shorted out, in the humidity and moisture around the pad; when they were checked they were proved to be corroded, damage missed by the refurbishment teams.

Everything took much longer than planned.

Even when propellant loading began, the process took hours, as more than a hundred truck-loads of kerosene, lox and liquid hydrogen were pumped into the Saturn’s three stages. And every time the countdown test hit a problem and had to be stopped, the propellants guys had to stay in the Firing Room and detank, a process even more tedious than tanking.

The various teams became exhausted as the test dragged on. Eventually the managers ordered a two-day break.

But still the test limped on, eroding through its checklist. The team got through to the twenty-six-minute mark, the completion of the test of power transfer. Then they began the process of prechilling the thrust chambers in the second and third stages.

Then, amazingly, they reached the start of the automatic count sequence, at minus three minutes and seven seconds. Fahy watched as the final automatic procedures cycled through, controlled by 1960s software re-engineered to run on computer hardware vintage 2007…

The clock stopped, as planned, at minus fourteen seconds.

Now, forty years late, AS-514 was at last a fuelled, checked-out, fully operational vehicle, and the team had done everything it would do on the launch day except light the igniters.

There was a burst of ragged applause.

Good God almighty, she thought. We’re really going to do this.

On the last day, Fahy walked among the crowds at the KSC visitors center. She heard grandparents pointing out the needle-slim Saturn on its pad. They tried to tell their grandchildren about how they’d watched the launch of Apollo 11 — or 12, or 13, or 14 — when they were little kids themselves.

The kids looked on, bemused, asking questions — they’re really going to throw all of that away? how much junk did they leave on the Moon? is the Moon really as messed up as they say?

Fahy rode up the gantry elevator to the payload check-out room at the top of the stack. The elevator was an open metal cage, and it rose with bumpy rattles and clangs; she climbed past steel beams, cables, work platforms.

When the elevator stopped, she stepped through the gate onto a railed catwalk. It spanned the gap between the elevator and the curving flank of the booster, with its open access panels. She looked down the complex, curved flank of the Saturn to the huge steel platforms far below, the flaring skirts over the big F-1 engines, diminished by perspective.

An ocean breeze picked up, and there was a ponderous creak of metal. The catwalk seemed to tilt, and she had to grab a handrail for support. This huge mountain of steel was swaying.

When she looked away from the booster, she had a panoramic view of the Atlantic coast. It was early evening, and the coastal towns strung out along the edge of the land sparkled like jewels. But the land itself looked flat, muddy, primeval, barely poking above the water, and the water of the ocean and marshes and canals shone like beaten metal. It was like, she imagined, the place where the first amphibian had crawled painfully, the air like fire in its new lungs, its belly and tail working at the sand, striving to get back to the water…

In a few years, she reflected — when the pads and gantries were torn down and hauled away at last — maybe the sea, the ancient swamp, would swallow up this place once more.

Marcus White got to the Launch Control Center of KSC in the predawn, a couple of hours before the launch.

The Firing Room was a big hall, a third the size of a football field, with eight rows of consoles. White took his place in a glassed-in viewing area set off at an angle at the back of the Firing Room, and looked out through the big picture windows over the pads.

AS-514 was bathed in a cone of light, set up by big searchlight beams that met at the tip of the stack, and the lights of its gantry gleamed like a ship’s lamps.

The daylight started to come up. From the Firing Room, White was looking east, into the gathering dawn; soon Launch Complex 39-A was silhouetted against the sky. The breeze was blowing debris around the pad, and the wind meter at the top of the tower was spinning around. But the forecast said the windspeed would be within weather rules at launch time.

The paintwork of the refurbished Saturn gleamed, and the booster, slim beside the blocky orange tower, looked oddly feminine, delicate. White felt a lump, unwelcome and painful, gathering in his throat. To hell with Titan. It was all worth it, he thought, just to see that old lady fixed up and with the lichen and moss and streaked paint scraped off, raised up to where she belonged.

He followed the slow evolution of the count, under the control of the KSC Firing Room staff. Events were accelerating, as the tanks in the various stages went through their cycles of precool, fill and replenish. It seemed inconceivable that AS-514 was going to lift on time. But there were no holds today. He sensed the buildup of the indefinable momentum that gathered about a mission, as it prepared for a crucial new phase.

At ten minutes before the launch, the thrust chambers in the second and third stages, both powered by lox and liquid hydrogen, went into chilldown. Pyro devices were armed. Some of the gantry access arms were withdrawn.

Still there were no holds.

At T minus three minutes and seven seconds the firing command was given, and the tanks in all three stages breathed in the helium they needed to force their propellants into the pumps. At minus fifty seconds, the Saturn’s internal power took over; the bird was detaching itself from its dependence on the ground. With half a minute to go, the big turbine that drove the five engines of the first stage powered up.

At minus nine seconds, an electrical signal was sent to the igniters, and four small flames lit within the combustion chamber of each of Don Baylor’s F-1s.

In the Firing Room, the spectators in Management Row swivelled around and lifted binoculars to their eyes, and peered through the row of windows at the back of the Launch Control Center. White knew they could close protective louvres over the windows if the booster blew up. If it did, the explosion would be equivalent to a three- or four-megaton nuclear bomb. But he figured that if that happened, the guys in here would just keep watching anyhow.

The familiar F-1 ignition process cut in. That rich flood of thick orange smoke burst out of the nozzle and bounced off the flame deflector under the launcher.

Then the main fuel valves opened.

The flame directly under the engines turned to an incandescent white, and the orange smoke billowed outward and upward, enveloping the base of the booster.

The thrust of the engines reached ninety percent of maximum. Still AS-514 hadn’t moved.

To White, the spectacle was unfolding in an eerie silence; the noise of the burn had yet to cross the miles to the Firing Room.

The booster shuddered. An ice shower fell steadily, sheets and flakes of ice pouring away from the walls of the stages’ cryogenic tanks, vaporizing as they hit the smoke and flames billowing below.

The booster lifted off the pad, its huge weight barely sustained by the thrust. It seemed impossible for anything so huge to move anywhere; it was like a building taking leave of the ground.

Now five umbilical swing arms had to get out of the way. First the outermost section of each arm retracted, and the arms themselves began to swing, to get away from the flanks of the booster. It was a complex and unlikely mechanical ballet.

The sound reached out across the marsh, and rammed into the windows of the viewing area: a series of staccato crackles, profound, physical, powerful. The glass shuddered in its frame, violently. Plaster dust from the roof showered down over him.

It was a sound White hadn’t heard in thirty-five years, a noise he’d half-forgotten.

The booster climbed, but the trail of flames just continued to lengthen, all the way down to the pad. It wasn’t until the booster was several hundreds of feet above the ground that the huge plume of flame lifted from the launch platform.

He felt as if his rationality was softening, guttering; the understanding he thought he’d developed of the forces shaping his age fell away from him.

How could we build a monument like this, and then turn our backs on it, let it rust on the lawn? Damn, damn. It made no sense. Maybe it never did.

The booster hauled after it a spear of fire eight hundred feet long. Shock waves danced along the flanks of the rocket, blurring its outline in White’s binocular view. A mist of ionized gas expanded above the engines, a broad plume of flame in the thinning atmosphere.

When the S-IC died, it was as if the sky dimmed.

White could see the burst of light from the first stage’s retro-rockets, and then the flare as the second stage ignited. The Saturn seemed to recede quickly now, heading east, diminishing to a star.

It was visible, he knew, for five hundred miles around.

White turned to follow the trajectory of the discarded first stage on the Firing Room’s big display screens.

Tumbling, battering against the air, the S-IC quickly lost most of its forward momentum, and fell back to crash into the Atlantic, still carrying all of Don Baylor’s beautifully restored engines, its story finally concluded after four decades.

White grinned. It was just, he thought, fucking unbelievable. Now, all we got to do is survive five more launches, and we can all retire for good…

Rosenberg’s training for the mission began in earnest a year before the launch.

He had to move to Houston. He had to become an astronaut, in fact, an employee of NASA, and hence of the government.

Benacerraf put him up for a while in her house at Clear Lake, but they didn’t get on too well, and Rosenberg started to look for an apartment.

But he gave that up, and moved into a room at the Nassau Bay Hilton. It was going to cost, and after a couple of months he began to run up a debt, but what the hell. He figured his money wasn’t going to be much use any more anyhow. He squared it with the hotel management that they would be paid out of the government salary he would collect, in the years of his flight.

At the start of his training, Bill Angel took him to a regular Monday morning meeting in the Astronaut Office at JSC. This was a plain-looking room populated by hard blue chairs, and with Shuttle mission plaques, more than a hundred of them, crowding the walls.

There were more than a hundred astronauts in the corps, he learned. But only a couple of dozen showed up today. Nobody would speak to him. Or Angel, come to that.

The thing of it was, nobody was going to get to fly again — except for a couple of dull missions delivering components of the Titan mission to orbit — save for the Titan five themselves. And of those, one was a Brit — British-born, anyhow — and another was Rosenberg, a pony-tailed double-dome, who wasn’t even in the fucking corps.

The resentment in that room was tangible, a living thing.

The training was split between Houston and the Cape. The crew, working together, progressed through hierarchies of trainers, all the way to the full-scale simulators. At first Rosenberg enjoyed the sims — the crew zipped into their orange pressure suits and their white helmets inside the simulators themselves, the controllers in the FCR, and the competing team of simulation supervisors, throwing at them every combination of defect, training them all to cope. It was fun. Like a computer game.

But the novelty soon palled, as they went over the same routine, over and again, toiling through jargon-laden checklists, jammed inside their stuffy suits.

They flew to the Cape in T-38s, the neat little needle-nose two-man trainers the astronauts used. Pilots, like Libet and Angel, were expected to put in at least four hours a week of flight experience. Piloted by Angel or Libet, Rosenberg was whisked back and forth between JSC and Cape — over eight hundred miles, an hour and a half each way — three or four times a week, encased in a flight suit and with a parachute on his back, as if he was a jock hero astronaut himself, for God’s sake.

He got his first view of the Cape from the air, in fact, from the cockpit of a NASA T-38. It was a place of shining water, spits and isthmuses of low, dredged-up marshy land, concrete splashes of pads and crawlerways, the whole remarkably primitive, like the slow recovery from an immense bombing raid.

He was taken to see Shuttle orbiters in the Orbiter Processing Facility — People Making Dreams A Reality,read the motto on the door — and in the Vehicle Assembly Building, and on the pad. He was stunned by the VAB, sitting in its car park like some immense department store, fifty storeys high. It was big enough to have assembled four Moon rockets at once, and it had doors tall enough to accommodate the Statue of Liberty. Inside was an industrial complex of riggings and girders and cranes, whole floors suspended like drawers in some immense piece of furniture, capable of being rolled forward and back as needed. And, suspended in the smoky, dim-lit air amid all this clunky scaffolding, he could see the shape of a Shuttle orbiter, unexpectedly graceful in this volume of right angles and pipes and tubes, upended and pinned like some huge white moth.

He was stunned by the scale of it all, his first gut understanding, perhaps, of the huge energies and efforts that would be assembled under him to hurl his own fragile body into space.

The staff who worked here, preparing spacecraft for launch, were a type of human being he hadn’t encountered before, either in the circles of scientists with whom he’d spent his working life, or among the closeted NASA engineers at the other centers, or even among the astronauts. These were people used to heavy work: dealing with millions of gallons of high-explosive fuel, with the slow controlled explosions of Shuttle launches, and doing it every few weeks, year in and year out. They must have a lot in common with oil-workers, he thought, or deep miners: hard-working, confident, muscled people.

All the crew went through an abbreviated program of training on Apollo systems, at JSC and Kennedy. A basic curriculum was rapidly developed for them, based on 1960s material dug out of the archives. The simulations they were offered, working through key mission phases with teams of flight controllers in the FCR, were thorough, but they were fixed-based. The cost of adapting the motion-based simulators — which, with their six degrees of movement, afforded some of the sensations of spacecraft motion — was, it was said, too high. Rosenberg heard, however, that the real reason was that the motion-based sims were tagged to be a key attraction at the JSC visitors’ center, bringing in revenue long after the Titan mission was history.

They were given briefings on the science aspects of the mission: the studies of the Sun, Venus and Jupiter they were expected to perform en route, what was being learned from Cassini and Huygens about the Saturn system, Titan itself.

Carl Sagan came out of retirement to give them a pep talk about the studies he’d made, as far back as the 1980s, on synthesizing the organic haze on Titan. And he talked to them about cosmology: how the Solar System had formed, the planets coalescing from concentric rings of rock and ice, how the sun would blossom into a red giant at the end of its life, shedding warmth — briefly — over the chill worlds of the outer System. Sagan was in his seventies, and he was a little bent, that famous voice even more gravel-filled, and his hair white as snow; but he was still as handsome as all hell. The science was baby stuff, of course, for Rosenberg. But Sagan’s talk, brief as it was, turned out to be one of the highlights of the whole training program for him.

Then there was all the surgeon stuff.

A key objective for this mission, as far as the ground-based experts were concerned, was to find out once and for all how the human body adapted to long-duration spaceflight. Or not.

Of course the experienced astronauts might already have suffered much of the harm to which they were susceptible; some studies of past astronauts suggested that the major damage to many of the body’s major systems happened in the first few hours of a spaceflight…

Anyhow, to achieve a sound study the surgeons had to have some kind of baseline, an understanding of what condition their various bodies had been in before being subjected to the rigors of the flight. So the crew were put through a comprehensive medical study. They had to submit, every two or three days, to electrocardiograms, seismocardiograms and measurements of their breathing rates and volume; and once a week they had to spend a whole day on a much more thorough check-out, which included sampling of body fluids, measurements of the phases of cardiac contraction, heartbeat volume, venous pressure, vascular tone in different parts of the body, blood circulation in the head, lung ventilation.

After a few weeks of this Rosenberg figured that by the time he was launched there would be more of his body mass in test tubes in the labs around the country than aboard that Shuttle on the pad. And all the checkups meant a whole day lost out of every week, time which Rosenberg had no choice but to give up, but which he had to drag out of his continuing research, and other commitments…

In all, eighty percent of his training time was taken up with Shuttle emergency procedures: mostly to do with problems during launch, or a forced landing.

Apparently as part of NASA’s post-Challenger adjustment, the crew families were encouraged to come in and observe the emergency stuff, so they could understand what was happening, if and when it all unravelled. So here were Nicola’s ageing parents from England, the mother with her prion-ruined face, and Paula’s grandchildren, two boys who watched with baffled incomprehension as their grandmother clambered out of windows and hatchways and shimmied down ropes and slid down wires to the little green car that would whisk her away in case the Shuttle blew up on the pad.

There was nobody to come see Rosenberg, and he was more than glad of that.

Some of the preparation was chilling, then. But some was mundane, almost comical, and yet delivered with the usual NASA cheerful high-tech gloss. The crew was taken to the Food Systems Engineering Facility, for instance, where they were given samples of Shuttle food packs to try out, so they could select their own preferences. No salmon, Angel insisted. The stink of fish, in the enclosed places of a Shuttle, was just unacceptable. And then there was the john: the Waste Management Compartment trainer, where Rosenberg was trained, in all earnestness, how to go to the bathroom. It was an affair of rubber gloves he had to use to clean himself, and little plastic scraper tools, and fans that whirred noisily. There was even a little camera situated in the bowl, peering up at his ass, so he could tell if he was positioning his orifice correctly…

But in the midst of all that, the stuff that was so easily mocked, he came across signs and symbols that showed him where he was: here, at the heart of NASA, the Agency that had put men on the Moon. Bits of 1960s technology, capsules and rockets, that looked so primitive they might have come from the 1930s. Pictures he hadn’t seen before, of Americans bounding across the surface of the Moon, working and joshing as if it was a field hike in Arizona.

And the astronauts: the hard core of them, the big-boned, blue-eyed WASPs of the earliest recruitment rounds, many of them greying now, few of them still active, but still fit and tanned and with faces like craggy lunar rock. Before these men — who had, after all, been the first — Rosenberg felt intimidated, weak and insignificant. But every time one of them walked past there was a powerful stink of male deodorant which wafted after him down the narrow corridors, all human scents suppressed, his surface somehow shining and impenetrable, as if he was already half-way to orbit just standing there, as if his purpose, the purpose of his race, had been to guide humanity to the stars.

Of his own crew, it was clearly Angel who aspired to membership of this elite group — which was, of course, impossible, for the role of hero astronaut had vanished long before Angel had joined NASA. But, anyhow, Angel walked through the space centers, mean-looking and tall, his muscles honed and hard, his language full of the dread-reducing jargon of contingencies and aborts. He even looked like them, with his blond-WASP hair and blue eyes, and he was almost schizoid, it seemed to Rosenberg, in his lack of reaction to the peril of his Columbia flight — and yet, despite that, there was a certain desperation in his empty eyes.

On it went, and Rosenberg became steadily more enmeshed in the procedures and practices and jargon of this huge organization. And yet, he thought, if you looked at it sideways, the whole Titan program was a remarkable event: here was a bureaucracy, dry and sane, devoting itself to the surreal: a gigantic adventure which everyone was committed to, but whose purpose and logic and meaning nobody could agree upon.

The hulking form of the B-52 sat on its runway in a puddle of light cast by a circle of big portable floods. Trailers and carts were clustered around the bomber. A fog of crisp liquid oxygen vapor shrouded the contours of the big plane, and people moved through the mist, speaking to each other calmly, working on the aircraft.

The X-15 itself hung from bomb shackles under the wing of the B-52, black and sleek, dark even in the glare of the floods, as if it actually absorbed the light.

There was a pungent stink of ammonia, which reached Gareth Deeke even across a hundred yards.

The smell, suffusing this grey January dawn, triggered his memories sharply, and he felt the years fall away from him; it was as if he was back at Edwards, preparing to burn off another vodka hangover in the exhilaration and terror of a high-altitude flight.

But as he walked towards the B-52, the ground crew parted before him and avoided his eyes; there was none of the good-natured bull which he recalled from his days at Edwards. As if we are all doing something different now, he thought. Something wrong.

Here at Canaveral Air Force Base, he was only ten miles or so to the south of Kennedy Space Center, where Endeavour was being prepared for the last Shuttle launch of all. He peered into the north. Maybe he’d be able to pick out the illuminated pad: on clear nights the visibility of the pad’s lights, looming on the horizon, was a symbol of the failure by Hartle and his contacts to impede or even slow the preparations for the final Titan launch, to stem the tide of public support which still seemed to be flowing, generally, in favor of the mission. Certainly, on launch day, this whole damn area would be flooded with rocket light. But today the mist was lingering in the cold January dawn, and to the north there was only darkness.

He reached the bomber.

X-15 looked more like a missile than a plane. Big frosted pipes lay on the surface of the runway, feeding liquids and gases into the rocket plane. But the black lines of the X-15 were spoiled by the attachment of a slim white cylinder, round-nosed and finned, under the center line of the forward fuselage.

It was an ASAT.

Gareth Deeke, heart pumping, walked around his bird. X-15, restored from the museum where it had waited out the decades, looked ready to fly, but today was not its day; this morning, under cover of darkness, the ground crew were rehearsing the procedures they would use to mount and fly the bird.

If it came to that.

The rocket plane was just a big propellant tank, made of a tough heat-resistant nickel-steel alloy, with a cockpit on the front and rocket engine on the back end. The tanks were nested cylinders, with a long, skinny pipe containing high pressure helium pressurization gas embedded within the big liquid oxygen tanks towards the front of the aircraft. The fuel tank, containing anhydrous ammonia, made up the rear section of the airplane.

Deeke walked past the frosted-up walls of the lox tank. He didn’t get too close; the tank seemed to suck the warmth out of the air around him, cold as it was already. You could always tell how much lox was left in the tank by the level of frost on that outer skin. He could make out the three main fittings holding the rocket plane in place, and the quick-disconnect lines snaking out of the B-52 which topped up X-15 with nitrogen and liquid oxygen. Reaction control jet nozzles gaped in the hull around the nose, two on top, two on the bottom, and two to either side. Beside the nozzles there was a stencilled notice saying BEWARE OF BLAST.

He reached the cockpit, an aluminum box which would be pressurized with nitrogen to thirty-five thousand feet equivalent, and suspended inside the hull of the aircraft itself, isolated to keep it cool. Behind the cockpit was a big pressurized bay containing over a thousand pounds of instrumentation, to measure airspeed, altitude, pitch, yaw and roll rates, control surface positions, bending loads, temperatures… He had been assured that the handling characteristics and controls of the plane would be just as they had been back in 1961, though he didn’t know how the hell they had got all that antique electronics to function again after forty years. Maybe they had cannibalized X-15A-2, the other surviving X-15, which was mothballed at the USAF museum at Wright-Patterson AFB.

He reached the engine compartment at the back of the plane. The XLR-99 rocket nozzle gaped at the back of the aircraft, two feet long. The rocket, which hadn’t been fired in anger for forty years, looked as fresh as if it had come out of the Thiokol factory yesterday.

He allowed himself a stab of anger. He’d long lost count of the number of press releases he’d read which said the Shuttle’s main engine was the world’s first truly throttleable engine. The XLR-99 engine was a throttleable, restartable, reusable rocket engine, with almost as much thrust as the throwaway Redstone booster which had thrown Shepard and Grissom up on their first Mercury suborbital lobs. The USAF had been happily flying the thing ten years before the Apollo Lunar Module’s much-vaunted throttleable rockets had carried men to the Moon, and twenty years before Shuttle had first launched, years before NASA had started pronouncing you couldn’t build such a thing.

We threw all this away, he thought, all the possibilities summed up in the sleek black hide of this thing, because of stupidity and greed, and fear of the Russians, and damn bureaucratic infighting, a millennial madness reaching its final flowering over on Pad 39-B even now.

In its flight days the X-15 had borne USAF decals on its wings and fuselage, and big NASA strip decals on its tail. But today, the hull was a bare black, unmarked save for information and warning stencils, and its serial number, AFS-6670.

And that, Deeke reflected sourly, was entirely appropriate.

The mist cleared a little. There were stars in the sky. One of them, bright and clear, passed smoothly through the constellations, directly above him. That was the Shuttle orbiter Discovery, its wings reshaped for Titan’s thick air, already in orbit with its cluster of fuel tanks and equipment, waiting for its crew.

It had to be stopped.

Determination surged in him. He put aside the doubts and qualms of the ground techs. He had no doubts.

On the day, if the call came, he would be ready to fly.

At last, the schedule for STS-147 was firmed up.

STS-147 would be the last Shuttle launch: the last flight of Endeavour, the mission that would take the crew — including Paula Benacerraf — up to Earth orbit.

When the launch date was finalized, Benacerraf found herself staring at it, on her softscreen, for minutes at a time. It was like the date of her own execution. She would not see the dawn of the following day — and, perhaps, no dawn on Earth ever after.

As that epochal day approached, the tempo of Benacerraf’s life accelerated. She was doing three jobs now. As head of the Shuttle program she had responsibilities to discharge beyond the Titan mission, such as the disposal of the program’s assets around the country after the final flights — including thousands of staff. Then, too, she retained a lot of responsibility for the Station hab module conversion, and she spent long hours at Marshall and Seattle working on that.

Finally she was an astronaut, trying to prepare for the mission itself.

And, in the midst of this crescendo of activity, Paula Benacerraf — human, grandmother — prepared to leave Earth.

After all, the Titan expedition was going to be an open-ended mission. So she figured she ought to shut down her life, here on Earth, as if she was indeed going to die.

She spent a lot of hours scanning images — photographs, movies and videos of Jackie and the grandchildren, a couple of pictures from the walls of her home — onto high-capacity, radiation-toughened discs. She sold everything she owned of value — her apartment, her car, her furniture, her books, her clothes — and what she couldn’t sell she was going to give away to friends, or to charities. She wanted Jackie to have first choice. All she saved for herself was the few pounds of personal items she was going to be able to take to Titan. She had some bits of jewellery, and even a couple of precious paper books, sealed in baggies and wrapped up in her fireproof Beta-cloth Personal Preference Kit.

Benacerraf made out a will. But she tore up the draft. Instead she had her bank draw up authorization for Jackie to become a joint holder of Benacerraf’s accounts.

But she would need to meet Jackie, one last time, to finalize the transfer. And Jackie had refused even to take her calls, for more than a year.

Benacerraf kept trying.

Jackie would only agree to meet her in Green Town, a net Island.

Benacerraf hated the net and she resisted this. It was just another way of Jackie expressing her disapproval. But she had little choice.

Benacerraf had always refused to have any kind of net interface equipment in her home, beyond simple e-mail and browser. But there were plenty of public net cafes in downtown Houston; she found one in the Galleria which — though expensive — had a good variety of up-to-date equipment, and private booths you could lock yourself into.

Inside her booth, she wrapped the sensor mask across her face, and the gloves over the palms of her hands. She stood on the treadmill-like motion simulator, and — fumbling a little with the switch — dimmed the lights.

The mask on her face was soft and damp — like flayed skin, she thought — and, in the first few seconds of the immersion, quite dark. Then the moist contact pads on the surface of her eyes filled with light, blurred shapes of silver, black and green. She forced her vision muscles to relax; the images were set at virtual-infinity, and it did her no good to try to focus on the covers on her eyes.

The image resolved.

She was standing on a lawn of green grass.

Her arms held out for balance, Benacerraf stepped cautiously forward, over the glowing grass. It felt cool and damp under her feet; it was fresh cut, and she could smell the rich domestic scent of the crushed blades. A sprinkler was turning, droplets of water dancing in the sunlight.

She looked up, taking care not to move her head too quickly. Even so there was a characteristic delay between the motion of her head and the change in virtual scene in response; they said you got used to that with time, your sensorium accommodating the built-in delay. Benacerraf wasn’t adapted and sure as hell didn’t want to be, and the delay just made her feel motion-sick.

The lawn she was standing on was a little square, bordered by empty roads. The town was green and still. She could see houses of red brick and white-painted wood, with little white picket fences around their lawns. There were maples, elms and horse chestnut trees, their branches softly rustling in the breeze. There was even a church steeple, with a bell hanging silently. There was some kind of ornament on the lawn, a sculpture; it might have been an iron deer.

The sky was tall and blue, scattered with fluffy clouds. It felt like morning, and the sun was low, its light on her face flat and warm…

The sky wasn’t all that impressive, actually. The color looked pretty-pretty fake and too uniform, and those clouds were lumpy, a fairly obvious application of fractal technology. That lawn sprinkler was actually the most ambitious part of this whole scene, she thought. The motion of the droplets had been modelled realistically, with the effect of the gentle breeze on the shape of the droplet cloud captured well. And when she looked more closely she could see how each droplet splashed and broke up when it hit the grass, and scattered in dew-like beads over the blades.

She could see nothing that looked as if it post-dated, say, 1940. But there was nothing to pin down the time and place here specifically, one way or the other. This was Green Town, probably Illinois, and as far as she was concerned it was just an anal-retentive fantasy, a dream of a middle America that had never existed anyhow, modelled with gigamips of processing power and the most up-to-date VR technology.

Decadent as all hell.

One of the houses seemed to stand out from the rest, its colors and outline a little more vivid. So that was probably where she was supposed to go. It was a tall brown Victorian design, the low sunlight making it look like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting. It was elaborately adorned, covered with rococo and scrolls, and its windows were stained, blue and pink, made of diamond-form leaded glass. There was a broad porch at the front, with a swing that rocked gently back and forth in the breeze, creaking.

She walked towards the house. She stumbled once, but recovered easily. The little iron deer was in her way, but she didn’t bother to step around it; she walked right through the deer, and it disappeared in a burst of pixels.

She tramped heavily up the wooden stairs of the house, and onto its porch. The front door was open. She walked in, through a bead curtain. Wind chimes tinkled as she passed.

She entered a parlor. The furniture was old, covered in a maroon fabric, worn with use and obviously comfortable. There was a piano — an acoustic one — its legs covered up Victorian style. There was a piece of sheet music on the stand. Beautiful Dreamer.

Jackie emerged from a door at the back of the room. She was wearing a trim long dress of gingham, that pretty much covered her from neck to toe. Her hair was brushed back, and her face was recognizably her own — though, Benacerraf thought sourly, rather smoothed-over and more symmetrical than the real thing.

“Hi,” Jackie said neutrally. She was carrying a glass pitcher of red lemonade, which moved in viscous waves as she walked. “You want some lemonade?”

“Hell, no. I mean, no thanks.” Eating or drinking in here meant letting the mask push its way into her mouth and throat.

They sat on overstuffed Morris chairs, beside a fireplace, under a framed painting.

Jackie poured herself a glass, and sipped it deliberately, watching her mother. Benacerraf thought she wore the same stubborn look she’d had since she’d learned to be defiant, at the age of five.

“Are the kids here?”

“They’ll be over later,” Jackie said. “It’s a school day. So they’re over on Nintendo Island right now. You have any trouble getting here?”

Benacerraf didn’t much feel like playing this game; she didn’t reply.

Jackie lit up a cigarette. The smoke curled into the air, blue and white, its form another complex application, Benacerraf thought, of fluid-mechanical modelling. And all utterly pointless.

“You know, you’re honored,” Jackie said. “Your fame must have spread. The great Saturn explorer.” Her tone was contemptuous. “They don’t normally let you land in the square; there’s a port on a neighboring island, and you have to get a boat over here, then walk from the coast.”

“So many rules,” Benacerraf said.

Jackie shrugged. “It’s a world in here, Paula. Of course you have to have rules. They underpin the world. Like the physical laws that govern us in RL—”

“Oh, come on,” Benacerraf snapped. “This is virtual reality, for God’s sake. Why the hell shouldn’t I fly like Superman if I want to?”

“You think this is all too cute,” Jackie said sourly. “Well, maybe. It’s pretty much all we’re allowed since the government opened up the net again. You know, police monitoring engines consume twice as many mips as the VR software itself.”

Benacerraf waved a hand deliberately quickly, so fast the processing couldn’t keep up, and she left a trail of pixels, ghostly shadows of her fingers. “But so what? None of this is real. None of it is even unpredictable, challenging. You bind yourselves up in these endless rules, and—”

“And by contrast,” Jackie said coldly, “you and your little band are going off to break ground on the high frontier.”

“Isn’t that true? Isn’t that more worthwhile, more real than this?”

Jackie said bleakly, “There’s nothing out there but a collection of dead rocks and ice balls. Even the Earth is falling apart.”

“So where else to go but inwards, retreating into your own head? Right?”

Jackie sighed. “Is this why you’ve come here, Paula? To attack me again? Because if it is—”

Benacerraf held her hands up. “Time out, kid. Whenever we get together, we fall into the same old rut.”

Jackie shrugged and didn’t respond.

Showing she didn’t care about their flawed relationship was, Benacerraf thought, the most hurtful response she could have made.

“So,” Jackie said at length. “What do you want to talk about?”

“I need you to sign some documents.”

Benacerraf explained her plan.

“Virtually all my assets are in the accounts, and my salary will continue to be paid into it, as long as I’m alive. I think you ought to have immediate access to those funds. But you have to sign authorization papers; we can do that here, electronically, in Green Town. I also tried to have my pension contributions made over in your favor, but they couldn’t do it. Administrative reasons.” It was ironic, thought Benacerraf; here was NASA busting all the technical and political barriers in the way of a ten-astronomical-unit mission to Titan, but the bean counters couldn’t find any way around their own rule books…

Jackie listened to all this, her virtual face expressionless and unreadable. Benacerraf realized, belatedly, that she didn’t even know where her daughter was.

In the end, Jackie wouldn’t agree to Benacerraf’s proposals.

“Look, Mother, you don’t really care about me, or the kids. If you did you wouldn’t be indulging yourself in this ludicrous jaunt to Saturn.”

“I’m trying to make you a gift, of all my property, for God’s sake—”

“No,” Jackie said, with a harshness not matched by the china-doll prettiness of her virtual face. “You’re just trying to ease your damn conscience. Well, I don’t see why I should make it so easy for you. I won’t sign anything; I won’t have any part of this.”

They started to argue again.

It was like resuming a conversation, even though they hadn’t spoken for so long.

Benacerraf struggled to understand.

Perhaps, she thought gloomily, this is more than some kind of generation gap. Perhaps the species has reached a bifurcation. One branch reaching for other worlds, the other receding into an online sea, swimming in great mindless shoals, twitching and turning in unison. Beautiful, but empty.

In another century, we may not recognize each other.

Or maybe, she thought gloomily, I’m just getting old.

Maybe it’s just as well I’m getting the hell out, of a world I don’t understand any more.

She tried, one last time, to marshal her thoughts.

“Jackie, your life is your own — as is mine, to do with as I please. And I think it’s better to do this, to go to Titan — or the in the attempt — than to stay around here, getting steadily older, becoming a cliche for you. I’m sorry if it hurts. But I don’t owe you anything.”

“And what about the kids? What will I tell them when I have to explain they can’t see grandma any more?”

“Oh, come on,” Benacerraf said sadly. “In a few years they wouldn’t be interested anyhow. And besides, there will be telecasts from the mission—”

Jackie stood up. “Don’t you get it? Nobody will watch the telecasts. Nobody has cared for years. Only you, you old people. Nobody will give a damn, as you drift off into the darkness. If you go, I’ll tell the boys you’re dead,” she said evenly. “That’s the truth, isn’t it? What is this, but an elaborate suicide?”

On and on.

They parted without affection. Jackie came forward to hug her, but Benacerraf couldn’t bear to submit to such an electronic embrace.

Benacerraf walked out of the house, and back down the steps to the lawn where she’d first arrived. So, at the end of it all, they were reduced to this, a mother and daughter able to face each other only by locking themselves away in darkened rooms, hundreds of miles apart, with their faces buried inside electronic masks.

She tramped over the grass, fumbling at the mask which covered: her face.

When she emerged into the booth in the Galleria, she got out as quickly as she could. She half-ran out of the mall, and when she got outside, under a murky sky, she sucked in great lungfuls of hot, smoggy Houston air.

As the launch itself approached, the intensity of the training slackened, and it seemed to Rosenberg that they started to enter a realm of tradition, and superstition, and magic.

A couple of weeks before the liftoff, for example, they all went down to the Outpost Tavern. This was a wooden shack outside the gates of KSC, and the tradition was that every astronaut had to drink in there. Its walls were encrusted with signed photos of grinning spacemen, and Rosenberg learned — it was incredible — that the Outpost had originally been situated at Ellington, near Houston, and moved out here plank by wooden, beer-stained plank.

He didn’t dare question any of this stuff. It was understandable when you remembered that space travel was almost fifty years old now, and like any other human activity it was bound to accrete its own traditions. If these NASA people, under their WASP technocratic hides, believed some kind of white magic was necessary to get their birds off the ground, Rosenberg wasn’t going to start arguing now.

And then, a week before the launch, they were moved into the quarantine facilities at Houston, and then the crew quarters at the Cape, and now nobody from the outside world was allowed in — not even families — unless they passed a strict medical. That made sense to Rosenberg; he had no wish to take infection into space.

But, incredibly, a couple of days before leaving, they were allowed to greet their families one last time, face to face in the open air, on a grassy sward close to the crew quarters, separated only by a fifteen-feet ditch. Rosenberg couldn’t believe it. He recognized Jackie Benacerraf, Paula’s daughter, over there with her boys, and, standing there in cold January sunshine, they had a short, shouted, embarrassed conversation about life on Titan.

He observed how tough it was for the others — particularly Paula — to say goodbye, this one last time, without even being able to touch their family members. As a quarantine procedure it was dubious. And as a piece of psychology, he thought, it was truly, spectacularly dumb.

And then there were two days to go.

And then one.

And then, a subtle knock by a WASP fist on the door of his room, and he was awake on Earth for the last time, for it was the morning of the launch.

He even had a personal checklist:

9:00 p.m. Wake up

9:30 p.m. Breakfast

2:58 a.m. Lunch and crew photo

3:28 a.m. Weather briefing

3:38 a.m. Don launch and entry suits

3:50 a.m. Crew suiting photo

4:08 a.m. Depart for pad 39-B…

Rosenberg went through the routines he’d practiced so often in a daze; he let the various techs just manage him through.

It took him a full hour to be loaded into his pressure suit, for instance. The rubber sleeves and neck were tight, and he had to squeeze in there, like putting on a tight-fitting sweater. The suits were actually a post-Challenger modification designed to close a few more non-survivability windows in case of malfunction. Nobody had been prepared to tell Rosenberg, for all his pressing and all the training time they’d spent on disaster recovery, whether in the pinch the suits would be any use at all.

There was a lot of tension, forced humor, in that suiting room. The U.S. Alliance technicians were bland, smiling and competent, like well-trained nurses preparing him for an operation.

Angel was in his element. At one point he slapped Rosenberg on the back. “How do you feel, buddy? Just like being in the locker room before a basketball game at high school. Right?”

Wrong, thought Rosenberg. Dead wrong.

There were more rituals, as they headed out of the building towards the bus that would take them to the pad. There was a card game called Possum’s Fargo that they had to play, for instance, with a couple of the techs. Rosenberg couldn’t believe his eyes. Here they were, the five of them, like huge insects in their glaring orange pressure suits, standing around a table to play what seemed like, to him, a kid’s version of poker. But — rigid tradition had it — they couldn’t leave, until the commander, Angel, in this case, had lost a hand.

It took six hands.

They emerged into the chill pre-dawn.

The five of them clambered, bulky and clumsy, into a bus. The bus was cramped, depressingly ordinary. Rosenberg, short of sleep, felt compressed by mundanity, the gritty ordinariness of things; he felt irritable, as if his imagination had been switched off.

He suspected much of the news of the day was being kept from them, but he’d heard a little scuttlebutt over breakfast. The launch, possibly the last spectacular space event at KSC, was attracting crowds, to the bayous and motels of Florida. But the forces which had opposed the Titan program were gathering too. USAF spokesmen were steadily denouncing NASA. There were demonstrations at the security gates, and there was talk of a group calling themselves Nullists who had got as far as the pad itself, and lain down their bodies in the flame bucket. Even within NASA, there wasn’t a unanimity of support: Rosenberg had heard of resignations from Barbara Fahy’s team of controllers at JSC, problems with suppliers here at the Cape…

It was all falling apart at last, he thought. But it just had to hang together a few more hours, long enough to release him from Earth.

The road stretched ahead, straight-infinite, glowing in the headlights of the bus. And on the horizon, at the end of the road, he could see the pad itself, the glowing Shuttle waiting for him in a pyramid of searchlights.

At the pad, three hours before launch time, they were taken up the gantry elevator to the White Room, all of two hundred feet above the Earth. And now, at the far end of the room, Rosenberg found himself facing the spacecraft at last, a slab of Endeavour’s powder-white tiled skin, the tight round scuffed-metal hatch embedded in it.

He took a breath. Salt. It seemed entirely appropriate, he thought, that his last lungful of Earth air should smell of the sea.

He had to crawl into the orbiter through the tight hatch, as if being born in reverse. A white-suited tech was there to peel off his rubber overshoes, and to place him in his metal-frame seat, tipped up so he lay on his back, gently placing his helmet and parachute pack.

The tech had theUS ALLIANCE logo on his back; he wasn’t a NASA employee, Rosenberg reflected, but a worker for the lowest bidder in a contracted-out operation. Comforting.

“…Okay, real good. Put your other arm through there and I’ll hold it for you. Okay. Now your comms check. Talk to the OTC on that button.”

Rosenberg pressed the button. “OTC, this is MS-1.”

“Loud and clear. Good morning.”

The tech said, “Now put your visor down on the right.”

“It’s down.”

Tighten your helmet a little bit at the back. Make sure it’s snug but not too tight. Push this button right here and tell the LTD comm check.”

“LTD, MS-1. Comm check.”

“Loud and clear.”

“Now raise your visor with a little push with your right hand. Right hand there. That’s good. Now we’ll put this little air pack where it feels most comfortable to you, about here, beside your seat. Feel it there? Okay? You’re ready. Doing good. Watch your arm there, Isaac. Now, while I hook up Nicola you’re going to lose comms for a while…”

And thus Rosenberg, already toilet-trained, was fussed over as if by a parent loading a toddler into a push-chair, as he was strapped into this couch, upended between two gigantic rocket boosters, while a mountain of liquid fuel was pumped in below his spine.

The Shuttle was launched from the Cape, and, in the course of its routine operation, was supposed to come back down to the Cape, to America. After landing a version of the White Room was clamped onto the hatchway of the Shuttle, clean and enclosed and populated by more smiling, hand-shaking technicians, and the shaky astronauts were helped down, and delivered to their families once more, as if they’d never left, as if Shuttle was just a huge elevator system, he thought, lifting Americans in hygienic enclosure to the stars and back again, with all the mystery washed out by routine.

Except today, he thought, this old elevator is going up to the sky, and ain’t never coming back down again.

The long count continued. And as supercooled fuel was pumped into the stack, the metal walls creaked and moaned.

At Canaveral Air Force Base, Gareth Deeke was woken by a phone call. A one-word command.

He closed his fist. He was going to get his flight.

He climbed out of bed and marched to the shower. On the wall, a softscreen TV, activated by his movement, filled up with pictures of a glowing Shuttle.

“Endeavour,resume countdown on my mark. Three, two, one. Mark. Ground launch sequencer auto sequence started.”

Bill Angel was lying on his back in the left-hand commander’s seat. Benacerraf was behind him once more, in the flight engineer’s position. Siobhan Libet, for this last flight, was pilot.

With the orbiter in its vertical takeoff position, the cabin was upended. To Benacerraf, in her flight engineer’s seat, Angel and Libet were precariously suspended above her, like pupae in their orange partial-pressure suits. The rest of Endeavours final crew — Mott and Rosenberg — were in the mid deck area behind Benacerraf.

Angel reached over and pressed a button on a center instrument panel. “Event timer switched to start,” he called. “Operations recorders confirmed on.”

“Copy, Bill. Have a good trip, you guys.”

“We’ll send Endeavour back home to the Smithsonian in a week, safe and sound.” Now, the software controlling launch events had started its operation; the event timer, a clock on the flight deck’s instrument panel, started counting down.

So, it started. Barring malfunctions, there would be no more holds. To Benacerraf this moment was like falling off a cliff; now she was falling through time, all the way towards the launch, with the inevitability of ageing.

Endeavour’s windows, pointing upwards, were open to the sky. Benacerraf could see a slab of grey, forbidding cloud. The flight deck was warm and comfortable, the calm voices of the pilots over the whir of pumps steady and reassuring.

But she had already cut her ties with Earth.

The complex prelaunch ritual continued.

Inside the suit van, Deeke stripped down to his long johns. Here — refurbished and restored, just like X-15 itself — was his pressure suit.

The suit was of reinforced rubber, fitted with hoses, knobs and a big metal neck ring. It was tight and uncomfortable, like a full-body girdle. The damn thing had always been a chore to put on, even when he was a lot younger and more lithe than he was now.

When the inner garment was zipped up, the techs helped him into a silver-colored coverall of a tough artificial fabric, designed to protect the pressure garment in case he had to eject. Next came boots, gloves and helmet. He made sure his mirrored glasses were firmly set in place before the helmet was lifted over his head. When he was a kid, he hadn’t needed any optical correction, of course. Those days were long ago.

A lengthy check-out followed. The suit techs pressurized his garments and checked every joint of the forty-year-old gear for leakage and mobility. Deeke stood there in the van, enduring the prodding and fingering of the techs.

These guys were all pretty young; even the senior officer here in the van looked no more than thirty-five. They avoided his gaze. Their expressions were blank, busy, competent. They seemed to typify, to him, the newer generation of military people: calm, assured, expecting to be cocooned and protected and fed information by the high technology systems in which they were immersed. Different from the old days: different from Deeke’s generation, and those who’d gone before, those who’d fought in Vietnam and Korea and the Pacific, who built birds with their bare hands, who’d been prepared to fly to Moscow loaded with nukes.

He wondered what those old guys would think of him and his mission, when they heard.

Now there was a call for pilot entry. Equipment specialists formed up to either side of him, carrying a portable liquid oxygen breathing and cooling unit, hooked up to his suit.

Deeke stepped out of the van. Outside, light was starting to leak into the sky.

Deeke walked across the tarmac to the X-15. Inside the pressure suit it took some effort just to move his legs forward, and by the time he got to the bird he could feel his lungs dragging at the oxygen fed to him by the suit.

He climbed the ladder to the access platform over the open cockpit. The roomy cockpit was dominated by the big ejection seat. He could see the seat’s folded-up fins and booms, designed to bloom out after ejection, and the big beefy handles pivoted around the arm rests that would lock his arms and upper body in place in case he had to eject. He’d always found the massive seat terrifying; he’d never had to trust himself to its crushing, over-complicated embrace, and hoped he wouldn’t have to today.

He slid on in. Suit techs began to strap Deeke in, pulling harnesses around him and hooking him up to his bailout kit, the aircraft’s breathing oxygen supply, and the suit pressurization and cooling gas.

The seat wasn’t adjustable. He had to have pads for the seat, back and armrests.

As he looked around the little cabin, he felt his heart thump. The cockpit equipment had the bolted-together look of every test airplane Deeke had ever flown. Its hard-wired analogue instruments struck him as startlingly old-fashioned, though, in this age of glass cockpits. And the whole thing was generally scuffed and worn, despite its refurbishment. This X-15 model had been the first to fly in the test program, and the last. And it showed.

But now, sitting in this familiar cocoon, it was as if thirty years had fallen away from him; he felt young again.

He was surrounded by control panels. The front panel, dominated by a big eight-ball attitude indicator, was encrusted with barometric instruments to help with control and guidance. But for most of the flight the X-15 would be outside the sensible atmosphere, and such instruments were useless; he would have to rely on inertial data, computations performed by the onboard processor.

For atmospheric flight there were control rudder pedals and a control stick to his right-hand side, which moved the aerodynamic control surfaces. There was also a center stick, but in the course of the flight program it had become a macho thing never to touch that center stick but to rely on the side stick and pedals. And then on the left-hand instrument panel was mounted another hand controller, to operate the manual reaction controls: the little rockets which controlled attitude outside the atmosphere.

X-15 was built to fly like an aircraft when it had to, and as a spacecraft when it had to.

The crew closed the canopy.

The canopy was a solid box, save for a mailbox window to the front and the sides. Deeke was sealed in, inside this little bubble of nitrogen, unable even to lift his faceplate to scratch his nose. All he could smell was the cool oxygen in his helmet; all he could hear were the intermittent crackles of radio voices. Deeke was in a world over which he had complete control. He could make it hotter or cooler, brighter or dimmer; if he wanted he could even shut out the radio voices with his volume control. He was secure in here, safe. He felt himself receding deeper into the recesses of his own mind, his memories, and it was a nice place to be, excluding the complexities and doubts of the murky future outside.

Now the bomber’s engines started, and Deeke could feel the deep thrumming transmitted to him through the connecting bomb shackles.

The B-52 began its taxi to the duty runway. He could hear little of the noise of the plane’s big engines, the nearest just feet away from his head. Ground vehicles drove alongside, eight or ten of them, their headlights making great elliptical splashes of light over the dark tarmac. It was a rough ride for Deeke, with a lot of hard, jarring vibration to his spine. Probably the wheels of the B-52 had got out of the round during the long wait.

The control crew called out a brisk takeoff clearance.

The B-52 began its takeoff roll. It soon outstripped the ground vehicles, and the runway lights whipped away to either side of Deeke.

Then the lights fell away beneath him, and the ride smoothed out.

In the Flight Control Room in JSC’s Building 30, Barbara Fahy stood up behind her console, and surveyed her controllers. As they waited for the point, eight seconds into the ascent, where they would take over the management of the flight, the controllers cycled through their displays and spoke calmly on the loops to each other, to their back room teams, and to her. There was an atmosphere of competence, of calm.

Each of the controllers had a little plastic Stars-and-Stripes on his or her console, a memento of the mission, America’s last manned spaceflight, in this year of Our Lord, 2008. The STS-147 mission patch was high on the wall of the room, a big disc bearing a stylized planet Saturn with a Shuttle orbiter looping through the rings. It was only the second mission patch not to bear the names of the crew: the first was Apollo 11.

The launch events unfolded, eroding away to the moment of ignition.

There were no malfunctions, no holds. She tried to put aside her gnawing anxiety.

Jackie Benacerraf was almost late for the launch.

She’d flown into Orlando and stayed overnight, and then driven out to the Cape straight along Interstate 50. But that was the wrong way; she was turned back by a guard on the road, and she had to go over a bridge to the south and drive north along Merritt Island. Then, for the first time, she got caught in traffic.

The commentators had predicted a big turnout to watch this last Shuttle launch. It would be Apollo 17 all over again, the old-timers predicted. The nostalgia factor. Well, there was some heavy traffic here, but nothing like the density she’d expected.

But there were some roadside parties, young people glittering with image-tattoos, writhing to arrhythmic rock, draped in softscreen flags. They looked like beings from the future, she thought, brought back in time to this site of monumental 1960s engineering.

Maybe it really is over. Maybe people really don’t care any more, she thought.

At last she got into the Space Center, by Security Gate 2 off U.S. 3. There was an orderly demonstration here, mounted by a creationist group from Texas called the Foundation for Thought and Ethics. Here was Xavier Maclachlan himself on a soapbox, all jug ears and ten gallon hat, steadily denouncing the manned space program for the sake of the cameras.

At an office at the gate, after queuing, she picked up her orange STS-147 media badge.

She parked in the big lot at the foot of the stupendous Vehicle Assembly Building. When she got out of the car, with her camera around her neck and her softscreen rolled up under her arm, she heard the voice of the public affairs officer drifting across the lot, from the big speakers close to the press stand… T minus four minutes and counting. As preparation for main engine ignition the main fuel valve heaters have been turned on. T minus three minutes fifty-seven seconds and counting; the final fuel purge on the Shuttle main engines has been started in preparation for engine start…

Four minutes. Jesus, she’d cut it close.

She spent a moment looking up at the VAB: that gigantic block, taller than a twenty-storey tower, was as impressive, still, as when it had been built back in the 1960s. But it was showing its age, like the rest of the space effort. Its exterior was stained by the weather, and the big Stars-and-Stripes, painted on the building’s flank during the Bicentennial, was faded and had run.

She locked her car and hurried past the network TV buildings, with their glittering glass carapaces, to the press stand. The faded wooden bleacher was no more than a third full, last mission or not. There were a couple of guys in the front row doing radio feeds. A hundred yards away there was a portakabin press office, but it turned out that the mission timelines and info packs hadn’t arrived yet.

Her mother had fixed her an invite to the grander family viewing area, on the roof of the administration building. She’d decided she’d rather be here, in this battered old press stand, with working people, rather than drink with faded celebrities.

She sat near the front of the stand. She was looking east. The sky was overlaid by lumpy, broken grey cloud. Before her was a big old-fashioned TV monitor showing a grainy image of the interior of the orbiter flight deck — an image of her mother the astronaut, for God’s sake — intercut with shots of the Firing Room here at the Cape containing the controllers who would run the first few seconds of the launch, and Mission Control at Houston, who would take over later.

She looked around. The VAB was a big, visually dominating block over to her left. On a patch of grass before the press stand there were the press portakabins, a big rectangular digital clock, steadily counting down, and a flagpole. Beyond that was a stretch of water, the barge canal from the Banana River leading to the VAB. Behind the canal was a treeline, and beyond that, straight ahead of her, she could make out the two great launch complexes: 39-A to the right, forever empty now, and 39-B to the left, with Endeavour.

The launch complex looked grey, colorless, like a piece of some industrial plant. Beside the gantry there were big hemispherical fuel tanks, and a water tower. And she could see Endeavour, the gleaming white of the orbiter against the orange of its External Tank and the battleship grey of the gantry. She could make out the orbiter’s tail, wings, windows.

It looked, she thought, surprisingly beautiful, like 1950s vision of a spaceplane, somehow futuristic. The curve of the wing was especially striking at its joint with the body, the only curve in the mountain of engineering, graceful against the blocky industrial gantry.

To Jackie’s right there were more pads, stretching off to the south, towards what they called ICBM Row, a whole line of launch complexes facing the ocean. Among them were the pads which had launched the early Mercury and Gemini manned shots. Most were disused, dismantled. Already museum pieces.

She could have brought the kids today, but neither of them had been interested. Both of them had preferred to stay behind for some out-of-school trip to a Disney-Coke net Island.

That was fine by Jackie. She didn’t want to confront them with the reality of this. Her kids had been forced to say goodbye to their grandmother; what the hell could Paula expect from them?

Gareth Deeke was suspended beneath the wing of a B-52, high in the brightening sky over the Atlantic seaboard.

His head was enclosed snugly by the cockpit canopy. There was only just room for his helmet, and every time he moved, he brushed or banged his skull on a pad or the canopy structure. As the mailbox windows were right next to his head he had good vision ahead and sideways, but the widening fuselage beyond the windows restricted his downwards vision. Because of the placement of the windows and the fuselage, he could see nothing of most of his airplane, the wings and nose, or indeed the ground.

On most planes, the airframe could be used as a reference platform. Not in the X-15. It was disconcerting, as if he was suspended in the air in this glass bubble, as if his controls were connected to nothing at all.

At twelve minutes to launch he started to activate the X-15.

Inside the B-52 an engineer was working a panel. “Okay, Linebacker, you want to reset your altitude? I’ve got just a hair shy of a thousand feet per second velocity and maybe three hundred feet up. Eleven minutes to launch.”

“Rog,” Deeke replied. “Attitudes look good.”

“Do you want to try your controls again, Linebacker?”

Deeke worked his stick. “Here’s roll, pitch, and rudder.”

“Try your flaps.”

“Okay, flaps coming down.”

“Confirm that.”

“And back up.”

“We see flaps up.”

“My aux cabin pressure switch is on. The inertial platform is going internal.”

“That’s nominal, Linebacker,” the ground called.

He went into a stability augmentation system check. Then a generator reset. A hydraulic press check. And an electrical press check…

His launch light came on.

Everything was looking good. By God, it looked as if not even a malfunction was going to curtail this incredible flight.

“Five minutes.”

The ground instructed the B-52 to turn further eastward. Thus far the ground path had been a broad circle inland. Now, Deeke knew, the B-52 was going to line itself up with the ground path of the Shuttle, which, after launch, would be driving eastward towards its orbital path.

The B-52 crew called, “Two minutes.”

“Okay,” Deeke said, “data is on. Tape to fifteen. Push to test ball nose. Looks good. Alpha is still about one degree, beta is about a half degree right.”

“Calibrate, Linebacker?”

“Confirm, I got a calibrate.”

“One minute to go,” the B-52 said. “Picking up heading.”

One minute. Now he had to activate the engine.

“Emergency battery on. Fast slave gyro on. Ventral jet armed…”

Even now, Deeke half-expected to be called back.

The call didn’t come.

“Prime switch to prime. Igniter-ready light is on. Precool switch to precool.” Now the priming sequence had commenced, and the precool switch increased the flow of lox to the turbopump.

“Coming up on ten seconds. Pump idle.”

When Deeke pressed his pump-idle button, the rocket engine’s turbopump came up to speed and forced propellants into a small chamber called the first-stage igniter, where they were burned by a spark plug. The igniter acted like a blow torch, firing the propellant and oxidizer into the main combustion chamber.

Deeke heard a deep, bass rumbling.

The X-15’s flight path today was based on the old high-altitude profile used at Edwards. The only powered portion of the flight was the short rocket burst at the beginning, just after launch from the B-52, driving the bird into a steep climb out of the atmosphere. Then would follow a ballistic, unpowered trajectory up to a peak altitude, and a steep fall back into the atmosphere.

Thus, Deeke would leave the atmosphere and would be weightless for several minutes. This flight was basically a short-duration spaceflight, comparable to the first suborbital Mercury lobs by Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom, but fully under Deeke’s control.

Not that it was recognized as such, by NASA.

Maybe today would be a kind of vindication, Deeke thought.

And now, the moment was approaching.

“Everything looks good here.”

“Manifold and lines looking good. Launch light going on.”

Still no cancellation.

“And we’ll call that three, two, one, launch—”

“Three minutes. Orbiter main engines gimballed to launch positions. T minus two fifty-five. External Tank oxygen vents closed. Pressurization of the tank has started. You’re configured for lift-off. Two minutes. Set APU to inhibit.”

Libet turned a switch. “APU auto shutdown to inhibit.”

“Sound suppression power bus armed.”

Angel said, “Visors down.”

“Launch crew calls Godspeed, Endeavour.”

Thank you for that, Marcus.”

Benacerraf pulled closed her big faceplate. It clicked shut, and the whir of the cabin’s pumps and fans was muffled.

“Endeavour,control. Thirty-five seconds. Software mode 101 loaded. Hydrogen tank at flight pressure. APUs have started in the Solid Rocket Boosters. Go for redundant set launch sequence start. Twenty-five seconds. Smooth sailing, guys. Endeavour, control. You are on your on-board computer. Software mode now 101.”

“Copy that.”

Now the GPCs, the redundant general purpose computers on board the orbiter, had taken control of the launch sequence. Only one more command, for main engine start, would be sent from the ground.

Bit by bit, Benacerraf thought, Endeavour was cutting her ties to Earth.

Angel read off the continuing prelaunch events from his displays. “Pyrotechnics armed. Sound suppression system activated.”

“Fifteen seconds,” Libet said.

“SRB pyro initiation controller in its voltage limits… We got a live SRB destruct system.”

“Endeavour,we have a go for main engine start.”

“Rog,” Angel said. “Time to kick those tires and light that fire. Eight seconds. Position vector loaded…”

The geographic location of the launch pad had been turned into positional data inside the orbiter’s computers. Endeavour had become aware of its location as an object in three-dimensional space, only temporarily and accidentally clinging to the surface of a planet.

Angel said, “Engine flares ignited. Five, four. We have main engine start.”

There was a remote bang, a premonitory shudder.

“There they go, guys,” Angel shouted. Three at a hundred.”

The orbiter cabin creaked. Benacerraf could feel the displacement of the twang, through all of two feet: the Shuttle stack, pinned to the pad by posts at the base of its SRBs, flexed forward as it accommodated the thrust of its main engines.

Angel and Libet spoke at once. “Main engine pressure above ninety percent, all three.”

“Engine status lights all green.”

“Two, one. SRB ignition.”

For a few seconds, Jackie could make out a shower of sparks, bursting from the nozzles of the orbiter’s three main engines. Now a mist of propellants — liquid hydrogen and oxygen — was injected into the sparks, and a bright clear white light erupted at the base of the orbiter, and white smoke squirted out to either side.

The SRBs ignited. The plume of yellow light from the solid rockets was bright — dazzling, like sunlight, liquid light. There was a brief flash, as pyrotechnics severed the hold-down bolts pinning the stack to the pad.

The stack lifted off the ground, startlingly quickly, trailing a column of white smoke which glowed orange within, as if on fire. The movement of the huge Shuttle stack seemed impossible, as if a piece of a cathedral had suddenly taken leave of the Earth.

At the moment of launch there was a kind of release among the press flacks gathered in the stand. As one they stood, and there was clapping, cheering.

Jackie lifted her face to the rocket light that, for a few moments at least, was banishing the grey of winter.

It was, she conceded, a shame the boys weren’t here to see this.

And then the noise came, not a single roar but a succession of coughs and barks and crackles, like the popping of some immense oil fire. The ground shook, a rattling she could feel through her feet, on the bleachers.

To Benacerraf it was a shove in the back. It wasn’t a sharp spike of thrust — the Shuttle was much too heavy for that — more like riding an elevator of immense power, suddenly hurling her upwards, but an elevator that would keep on going until it burst, cartoon-style, through the roof.

The cabin shook violently, and the noise engulfed her. The cockpit was filled with yellow-white light, diffused from the rockets’ glare, eighty feet below her. She could see chunks of ice, breaking off the hull of the External Tank, clattering against the pilots’ windows.

The mood of quiet calm which had characterized the preflight prep was dissipated in an instant. She was riding a rocket, and it felt like it.

A new voice came on the loop. “Endeavour, Houston. Launch tower cleared. Eight seconds. All engines looking good.”

“Copy that, Marcus.” Angel’s voice sounded thin, and it trembled with the vibration.

Mission Control at Houston took control of the flight once the Shuttle stack cleared the launch tower. Marcus White, voluntarily brought out of retirement once more, was the capcom there today. It had been done as a PR stunt — a Moonwalker in Mission Control — by the NASA PAO, desperate to milk this last moment of attention for all it was worth. But to Benacerraf, immersed in noise and vibration, it felt comforting to have White’s gravelly tones on the other end of the line.

“Eleven seconds,” Angel said. “Initiating roll maneuver.”

The orbiter went through a hundred and twenty degree roll to the right and pitched over as it climbed, to ease the aerodynamic loads on the complex stack.

Thus, thirty seconds after launch, she was suspended upside down, and hanging from her straps. The ground was visible above the heads of the pilots, receding quickly. Like her first Sight, Benacerraf was surprised by the violence and speed of the maneuver.

“Shit hot!” Libet shouted.

It was like being shot downwards, out of a cannon; it felt as if the X-15 had just exploded off the hooks.

The violence of the moment was bracing, exhilarating, an intrusion of reality. My God, he thought. It’s real. We’re really doing this.

Immediately the plane began to roll to the right. X-15 always had a tendency to do that, because of flow effects around the B-52’s launch pylon. He worked the left aileron to compensate.

He was basically in free fall right now, falling away from the B-52.

He felt adrenaline pump crisply into his system. It was time. He pressed his launch switch.

There was an explosive noise, like a shout. The main combustion chamber had ignited.

The bird was hurled forward.

He was pressed back, hard, into his seat and headrest. Another memory he’d suppressed. And he started to develop tunnel vision, with blackness shrouding the periphery of his view. He tried to remember what kind of instrument panel scan pattern he used back then. So much he’d forgotten.

The engine noise built up into a banshee squeal.

He rolled his wings level and pulled his nose up to a ten-degree angle of attack. The acceleration swivelled around, from the eyeballs-in of the launch to eyeballs-down at pullup. He felt as if he was climbing straight up, or even going over onto his back. He knew he had to discount the sensations, and just watch his instruments.

The B-52 — flying at Mach point eight — just fell away behind him, as if it wasn’t moving at all.

The rocket engine was putting out full thrust. Now, for the next eighty or ninety seconds, it was Deeke’s job to ride this bull, to keep X-15 on the track that had been programmed for it on the ground.

Soon he would be accelerating at multiple Gs, which meant adding ninety miles per hour every second.

He’d forgotten how impressive an aircraft X-15 was.

“Should be coming up on alpha,” the ground said.

Seven seconds. Deeke turned three degrees to the right to correct his heading. He kept one eye on the cockpit clock. Nine seconds. Ten seconds. Timing was everything in an X-15 flight. He checked his angle of attack, angle of sideslip, roll attitude, rate of climb.

Fifteen seconds. The acceleration looked nominal, still under two G. He watched his pitch attitude vernier needle, which was stalling to come off its peg. Here it came, at eighteen seconds, moving towards the null position. At twenty seconds the needle was centered and he eased off on his angle of attack, to maintain the planned twenty-five-degree climb angle.

“You should be on pitch attitude now,” the ground said.

“Rog. Track looks real good. I feel as if I’m back in the saddle again. I wish I could do a barrel roll.”

“Rog that,” the ground said anonymously.

Yeah. You aren’t here to enjoy this, Linebacker.

At fifty thousand feet he shot through a layer of grey, hazy cloud. He emerged into a blue, infinite sky. The sun was still low, and it cast shadows on the ocean of cloud beneath him, which obscured the Earth.

He looked ahead, half expecting to see the Shuttle’s vapor stack, ahead of him; but his tipped-up windows showed him nothing but sky.

The handover from the KSC Firing Room had been as smooth as Barbara Fahy could have asked for. She didn’t even have to say anything. The ascent, complex and dangerous as it was, was just a process, she reflected, something they had handled more than a hundred times before, unfolding now with the inevitability of the logic of a well-tested software program.

Only the brilliant rocket light on the projected display at the front of the room gave any hint of the violence of the events the FCR’s devices were monitoring.

Even so, Fahy found it difficult to breathe.

…Now a new voice sounded in her ear. It was the range safety officer. It seemed that some unknown aircraft had wandered into the exclusion zone around the ascent profile.

Benacerraf looked ahead, out of the window beyond Angel. A layer of cloud hurtled at the orbiter like a wall. Endeavour shot through in a second, and emerged under a deep blue, dome-like sky.

Angel closed switches, configuring the attitude indicator before him.

“There’s Mach point nine,” Libet said. “Okay, Mach one. Going through nineteen thousand.”

Forty seconds, Benacerraf thought, to reach the speed of sound from a standing start.

“Forty-four seconds.”

“Houston, Endeavour. Max Q. Into the throttle bucket.”

Max Q was a moment of danger, Benacerraf knew, the moment at which the Shuttle stack’s gathering velocity, coupled with the still-high density of the air, exerted maximum aerodynamic pressure on the airframe. The main engines had briefly throttled down to relieve the pressure.

“Copy,” Marcus White called. “Fifty-seven seconds. Endeavour, Houston. You are go for throttle up.”

“Copy that. Throttle up.”

“Wow,” Libet said, “feel this mother go.”

“Sixty-two seconds,” White said.

“Thirty-five thousand,” Angel said. “Going through Mach one point five.”

“Here we go,” Libet said. “SRB pressure is dropping.”

Already the solid rocket boosters were burning out.

“One minute fifty,” White called up. “Twenty-one miles high, eighteen miles down range. Houston, Endeavour. Pressures less than fifty psi.”

“Copy.”

“SRB burnout.”

As the solid boosters died, it felt to Benacerraf like a dip, as if the Shuttle was suddenly falling out of the sky, just for a second. But then the acceleration built up powerfully once more.

“Ready for SRB sep.”

“Roger.”

There was a bang and a bright flash, beyond the orbiter’s panoramic windows, as the boosters’ separation motors ignited. It was as if she flew through a fireball.

“Okay, Linebacker, we have you right on track, on the profile.”

“Rog.”

Thirty-one seconds. The rocket burn roared on. Deeke worked his way around checks of his engine instruments, hydraulic pressures, generators, APU temperatures, stabilizer positions, crosschecking his altitude and velocity and rate of climb.

Thirty-five seconds. He shifted in his seat slightly, trying to get more comfortable; the G was already above two and was climbing fast.

“Stand by for eighty-three thousand feet.”

“Rog, eighty-three thousand.” Now his altitude too was piling up rapidly.

“Do you still read us, Linebacker?”

“Affirm.”

“Coming up on a hundred and ten thousand.”

“Hundred and ten, affirm.”

“On the profile, on the heading. On the profile.”

A minute fifteen.

He was already above the bulk of the sensible atmosphere. Ahead and all around him, the sky started to turn from a pearl blue to a deeper, dark blue. His vision seemed to stretch to infinity, to the gently curving, blue-white horizon; there was very little dust or mist above him.

The G forces were reaching their peak now — constant thrust combined with reducing aircraft mass to drive the acceleration higher — he was almost up to four G. This wasn’t excessive, Deeke knew, but it hurt his ageing chest; he felt he had to fight to take a breath.

“Stand by for shutdown.”

“Standing by.”

The airframe popped and banged, its skin panels buckling and cracking as he climbed through four G. He’d heard such noises before. The pilots used to call it the oil-can effect. Outside air would work its way into the aircraft through small gaps in external doors or panels; the air was like a torch at high speeds, and would burn electrical wiring, aluminum internal structure and metal tubing, and smoke would waft into the cockpit.

But the X-15, even after decades in a museum, was a tough old bird.

A minute twenty-three. Deeke closed the shutdown switch.

The roar of the engine tailed off into a high-pitched, hog-calling squeal, then ceased.

Suddenly he was weightless; he was thrown forward against his restraints, and he felt his stomach lurch within him.

He was gliding, at almost five Mach, a stone hurled from a catapult.

Now Deeke took his left-side stick, to work the RCS manual controls. He dipped the nose of the X-15.

The horizon rose over the lip of the mailbox window before him. My God, he thought. I’m too damn old for this.

Earth was a brilliant blue floor beneath him, set beneath a darkened sky. To his left and right, he could make out the whole of the eastern seaboard of the U.S., from New York bay to his left, Florida obscured by its ragged coating of cloud below him, and to his right, set in the glittering blue skin of the ocean, a lumpy, brown-green mass that must be Cuba. He was still climbing, thrown by the rocket thrust out of the atmosphere like a stone. The curvature of the planet was clearly visible, as was the layer of denser atmosphere that surrounded it.

And, directly ahead of him, a pillar of orange-white vapor came climbing out of the atmosphere, filled with bright sunlight, arcing gracefully away from him. At the tip of the pillar there was a jewel of yellow-white light, a droplet of brilliance brighter than the sun itself.

The stark simplicity of that thrust out of gravity’s bonds was unbearably beautiful, astonishing, like a direct challenge to God.

Through gaps in the cloud Jackie could see the solid rockets fall away from the stack, still trailing dribbles of smoke and flame. There was a ragged cheer from the stand behind her.

Once started, the solid rockets couldn’t be stopped or throttled down, unlike liquid boosters; once the solids were lit, the orbiter — and its crew and that huge explosive tank of hydrogen and oxygen strapped to its belly — were just along for the ride, until the SRBs expended themselves.

So getting rid of the SRBs was a good sign. And—

And suddenly there was a second contrail in the sky, spider-web thin, climbing up from the south-west.

She heard some muttering from the press stand behind her. “What the hell can that be? A chase plane?”

But there were no chase planes during a launch. The whole area was supposed to be kept clear.

It was difficult to follow the track, through the breaks in the cloud deck. But it looked to Jackie’s inexpert eye as if that second trail was heading straight for the climbing Shuttle stack.

“NASA have confirmed SRB sep, Linebacker.”

“Rog.”

At this point in its ascent profile Endeavour was climbing towards Mach Four, Deeke knew — but even so the X-15 was outrunning it. It was the only aircraft in the world which could have done so.

Now there was one more decision point, one more gate to pass through.

It took one more second for the confirmation to come.

“Linebacker, you are go to deploy. Repeat, go to deploy.”

The pure oxygen in his helmet seemed to have turned his mouth dry as Mojave dust.

“Linebacker, do you copy? You are go to deploy.”

“…Affirm, Canaveral. Copy that. Go to deploy.”

There was one major addition to the X-15 control panel, a small flip-up softscreen display. Deeke reached forward and lifted this now. It showed a schematic gunsight, and a bright starburst, representing the Shuttle, over to the left of the screen.

He took the RCS control in his left hand. The reaction control system was a set of simple hydrogen peroxide rockets. Deeke used the system in bang-bang mode, where he just pulsed the RCS rockets by shoving at the control stick. When he didn’t get the response he wanted, he applied another impulse. And he took care to move in just one axis at a time, to keep control.

In stages, blipping his RCS, he turned the nose of the X-15 as it soared through its ballistic profile. All Deeke had to do now was to center the Shuttle starburst in the little toy gunsight.

Point and shoot.

After a couple of minutes, still closing on Endeavour, he got the starburst centered.

It was a firing solution.

The digital display came up with a small qwerty keypad, for him to punch in an enabling code.

He held his gloved hand over the pad.

His whole life hung on this moment, the actions he took in the next few seconds.

Somehow, although he’d rehearsed it, in simulations and in his head, he’d never quite believed he’d have to face this. All he’d really wanted was a way to get back into the cockpit of an X-15, one last time, before he subsided into old age.

“Canaveral. Do I still have go for deploy?”

“Linebacker, you have go for deploy. Repeat—”

“Affirm.”

He thought of the blank faces of the ground crew and suit techs, of Hartle sitting like a spider in its web at the heart of Cheyenne.

What right did Deeke have to entertain doubts? What right did he have to oppose such certainty?

His hesitation melted away. He tapped in the code with confident keystrokes. He could barely feel the pad through his thick gloves.

He felt a solid clunk beneath him. That would be the pyrotechnic bolts severing the ASAT from its berth in the belly of the X-15, and pushing it away.

It was done.

For a moment he heard and felt nothing else. The X-15 continued to arc upwards through its ballistic profile, climbing towards its peak altitude of two hundred thousand feet. His attitude was drifting off a little; he would have to correct it…

There was a burst of yellow-white light beneath him.

He could see a slim pencil, trailing a blob of fire and billowing smoke, white and clean, like the smoke from the Shuttle’s own solid rocket boosters.

Deeke corrected his attitude drift with blips from his RCS. He lifted his nose, so that the horizon was hidden by the sill of his window. He didn’t particularly want to witness the last act of this drama, when it came.

He closed up the little digital pad; it had served its purpose, and had no further function.

The ASAT arced away from him, towards the sunlit horizon, over the lumpy cloud.

“Smooth as glass, Houston. To software mode 103…”

With the solid boosters discarded, Endeavour was driven upwards solely by her main engines, the External Tank feeding propellants through its connecting pipes. The ride became easier; liquid boosters provided a much smoother thrust than solids. The whole stack seemed to purr, like some huge sewing machine, every part working in harmony with the rest.

Benacerraf found herself grinning, the exhilaration of the launch getting to her.

Way to go,she thought. Way to go.

The ASAT, developed by Boeing in the Reagan years, had been in storage for two decades.

Now, called upon at last, it functioned perfectly.

If was actually a three-stage solid-propellant rocket. It controlled its attitude using three large moveable fins on its tail. It carried an infra-red sensor and eight small telescopes to help locate its target. It was intelligent, to some degree, containing an on-board computer and a laser gyro.

The first stage fell away, and the smaller second stage burned briefly, accelerating the ASAT to many multiples of the speed of sound.

Then the second stage was discarded.

The ASAT was designed for airborne launch, primarily from an F-15, and was actually capable of knocking satellites out of low Earth orbit. So it was overdesigned for this particular mission. That was not seen as a problem, by the mission planners.

The final stage of the ASAT was basically a smart projectile, which would use the momentum imparted by the rocket boosters to hurl itself at its target. It spun itself up now, and used the fifty-six small rockets in its outer hull to obey its guidance system and keep it on its course. It carried no explosive; it was designed to destroy its target by direct collision, impacting with the force of a shell from a battleship’s main gun.

It closed rapidly on the infra-red glow it perceived before it. But the target was large, complex, with many sources of heat; accuracy would be difficult to achieve.

There was a bang: loud, deep, solid.

The flight deck shuddered, over and above the usual rattling of equipment and loose gear.

Benacerraf was startled. She remembered nothing like this from the sims, or her first flight.

Libet turned to Angel, her mouth open. “What was that?”

Marcus White called up with a routine message. “Endeavour, you have two-engine transatlantic abort capability.”

Angel said, “Copy, two-engine TAL.” His voice was flat, the response automatic; Benacerraf could see that his attention was focused on a main engine status display. “Houston, Endeavour. I think we might have a situation here. I’m reading a climb in the fuel pump operating temperature, on main engine number one.”

“Endeavour,Houston. Say again.”

“I have a multisensor fuel pump temp rise on engine one.”

“Copy that, Endeavour. Stand by…”

Tell me this isn’t happening, Barbara Fahy thought.

In her mind she replayed those final, stunning pictures from the big FCR screens, over and over again: the remote, blurred image of the Shuttle stack still rising smoothly, with the SRBs slowly diverging — and then that shocking incursion from the edge of the picture, a second contrail that had cut obliquely across the complex shape of the orbiter.

Some asshole shot at us.

I still can’t believe this is happening, she thought. Who the hell would try to shoot down a Space Shuttle? The Chinese, maybe?

The controller called Booster was trying to get her attention. “Flight, Booster. Flight.”

She tried to reply; she felt her mouth working, but no sound emerged, as if the components of her body were becoming disengaged, the systems breaking down.

At last she forced out a word. “Go.”

“Confirm that temperature rise in the center engine. If we pass through nine hundred fifty we’re heading for an auto shutdown. We’re working on the hypothesis that there’s been a collision of some kind, probably with one of the discarded SRBs. We—”

“No. Booster, that’s wrong.”

“But—”

Somehow it made it easier for her that she wasn’t the only one, here, who couldn’t believe this. “We all saw it, damn it. Someone just drove into us. We’ve been hit a glancing blow by some kind of projectile. Prop, Egil, DPS, are you working with Booster on this?”

“Confirm, Flight.”

“Flight, capcom. What do I tell the crew?”

She took a breath. “Stand by, Marcus. Let’s just keep monitoring. We haven’t lost anything yet; we still have all three engines.”

But, she wondered, for how long?

To Benacerraf, it was like a rerun of the disintegration of Columbia’s final mission, the slow, almost laborious unravelling of catastrophe. Not again, she thought. Dear God, whatever happens, I can’t go through that again.

Angel turned to Libet, and Benacerraf could see him clench a fist, big knuckles white. “Houston, we heard a bang, just after SRB sep. A loud bang. We have a real issue here.” His voice had a sharp edge.

“We’re working on it, Bill,” Marcus White said. “Four minutes twenty. You have negative return. Do you copy?”

That routine call meant that, whatever the emergency, the abort option of returning to the launch site — in a drastic powered maneuver that would have pointed the Shuttle back towards Canaveral and used its main engines to slow it — was no longer available.

And it was a reminder that the events of the launch were continuing around them, bang or no bang; that Benacerraf was still trapped here, inside this slowly exploding bomb.

Angel said, “Houston, I’m watching this damn engine temperature reading here. It’s still climbing. Over nine twenty degrees—”

“We’re copying, Endeavour, Hold on that. Endeavour, Houston. Negative TAL now.”

“Copy, negative TAL.”

Another abort option had passed out of operation. Now it was impossible for the orbiter to attempt to cross the Atlantic and land at the emergency airstrip, at Zaragoza in Spain.

“Four minutes fifty seconds,” White said. “We’re still with you guys.”

Despite the situation, his tone was even, deep, immensely reassuring to Benacerraf. This is a man who has been to the Moon, she thought. Marcus won’t feed us bullshit. He will make sure we’re okay.

Angel was hunched forward, against the acceleration, studying his main engine temperature gauge.

If only, she thought, White was here in the cabin with them.

Angel said, “Okay, the center engine has gone through its red line. Do you copy? Nine hundred fifty centigrade. And—”

Benacerraf felt an immediate decrease of acceleration, a lessening of the Gs that pressed her against her seat. The flight deck was filled with a loud, oscillating tone. Four big red push-button alarm lights lit up on the instrument panels around the cabin.

Angel pushed a glowing button on a central panel, above a CRT, to kill the alarm. “Master alarm,” he snapped.

I know, Benacerraf thought bleakly.

Just to the right of the lowest of the cockpit’s three CRT screens was a small cluster of three lights. They were main engine status lights. Benacerraf saw that the centermost light had turned red.

“We lost the center engine,” Angel called. “It got too hot and shut itself down.”

“We copy, Endeavour,” Marcus White said. “Endeavour, Houston…” The capcom fell silent.

“We’re waiting,” Angel said heavily.

Deeke tried to keep from looking out of the cockpit.

What would he see? — a cloud of dispersing liquid oxygen from a ruptured External Tank, the bright orange glow of RCS hypergolics, fragments of the orbiter wheeling out of the plume, like another Challenger?

Had it worked?

…He approached his peak altitude. Deeke began to push his nose down, with RCS blips, so that he climbed to the top with a ten-degree nose-down attitude.

In the moment of stasis at the top of his trajectory, he saw the Earth, spread out before him, through his mailbox window.

The world was very bright, like an inverted sky. Under the nose of the aircraft it curved away, in all directions, as if he were poised above some huge blue dome. Out ahead, he could see the ocean, a deeper, bluish grey color. The atmosphere was clearly visible, as a layer of blue haze over the Earth. Above him there was only blackness.

It was extraordinarily beautiful.

My God, he thought. What have I done?

He probed his soul for remorse.

His main regret, actually, was that he would surely, in any conceivable future, never again fly like this, never see the Earth from this extraordinary altitude, spread out like a bright blue quilt.

As he went over the top, the change was rapid; the flight path changed from a climb of plus thirty degrees to minus thirty in minutes.

The deep ocean receded from him as he fell. The lighter blue of the coastal waters expanded below him, coated with lumpy cloud. The air seemed to reach up and clutch at him.

The black nose of the X-15 began to glow as the plane dipped back into the thickening atmosphere. The sensation of speed returned, and negative Gs piled on, soon climbing to four or five.

Deeke pulled X-15 up through twenty degrees. He could feel the aircraft fighting him. The leading edges of the wings glowed a bright cherry-red; now, at the climax of the reentry, the heat of air friction was dispersing around the airframe, raising its average temperature above a thousand degrees. But here, in his little aluminum shell, Deeke could feel nothing but the brutal eyeballs-out deceleration. He felt blood pool in his arms, painfully.

Canaveral said, “Ease it on over. Watch your nose position, Linebacker. We have you low on altitude. Bring it back up. Pull your nose on up, Linebacker.”

“Okay, it’s coming up.”

“Turn left three degrees. Left three degrees.”

“Rog.”

“Speed brakes in. And maintain your altitude, you’re still a little low, Linebacker.”

“Rog.”

“Okay, you’re about ten miles from your checkpoint. You’re looking very good here, Linebacker.”

The calm, competent dialogue went on, routine and almost meaningless.

Nobody had said a word since he’d deployed the ASAT. He still didn’t know whether he’d succeeded or not.

Just get onto the ground, Linebacker. Time enough for all that later.

The flight dynamics engineer, Fido, was talking steadily in Fahy’s ear, outlining available abort modes to her.

The RTLS and TAL modes were already unavailable to her. But they could lengthen the burn of the remaining engines and the OMS, and so reach some kind of orbit. That was an Abort to Orbit, ATO. It had actually been flown before. Later, an abort once-around would be available, with Endeavour completing a single circuit of Earth, and reentering immediately.

The ATO gave some chance of salvaging some of the mission’s objectives. And getting Endeavour up, intact, into some kind of orbit would provide time to figure out what in hell was going on here, and what resources she had to work with.

But an ATO would be a gamble. She would have to hope that the remaining main engines kept working nominally for the rest of the ascent. And as Booster kept pointing out, there was no guarantee of that.

Someone shot at us, damn it. I can’t believe it.

The launch sequence was unfolding rapidly, a ticking clock. In the next few seconds, she had to make the decision: to abort or not, and which mode.

Again that strange feeling of decoupling settled over her, as if she was paralysed by her anxiety, as if she could no longer make her body function in conjunction with her will. She wanted to just sit here, listening to GNC’s brisk voice outlining the technical options.

It’s as if I was hit by that damn missile, whatever it was, rather than the Shuttle. We’re all just flawed, limited beings, struggling to cope with these monstrous machines we create, and failing.

I can’t do this any more, she thought.

But I must.

She thought about her assets. After all, the Shuttle’s main engines were the most complicated ever built. They were throttleable, and had to deliver high thrust with great efficiency. They had inbuilt control systems, so they could monitor their own performance. They were heavily over-engineered, made to be rugged for multiple reuse. Each of the engines on Endeavour today had flown a dozen or more times before, on different orbiters, running up thousands of seconds of hot-fire time each.

The hell with it, she thought. Those engines are tough. No asshole is going to shoot us down. Especially as they all but missed.

She felt determination gathering in her, dispelling her doubts.

She turned to Marcus White, her capcom.

When White came back on the loop, he sounded more decisive.

“Endeavour,Houston. Abort to orbit.”

Angel glanced at Libet. “Say again, Marcus.”

“Endeavour,Houston. We’re going to abort to orbit, Bill.”

“About fucking time,” Angel said.

He reached down to a small panel close to his right hand, and turned a rotary switch from OFF to its extreme right position, ATO. Then, on the same panel, he pushed a button to confirm the abort. Now they had a course of action ahead, Angel looked as if he was actually enjoying this, as if he was already thinking ahead to the sea stories he could spin out of it.

He was one unimaginative asshole, Benacerraf thought angrily. And yet right now, her life was in his hands…

“Uh-oh,” Libet said.

“What? What now?”

“I got temperature rises in the remaining main engines.”

“Which one?”

“Both of them, Bill. Look here.”

“Oh, shit.”

Benacerraf tried to remember what the procedure would be if they lost another main engine now. She had a sinking feeling that there wasn’t one.

Is this how, after all, human spaceflight is to finish, for the foreseeable future?

Beyond the pilot’s windows, the sky was growing dark.

“Endeavour,Houston. We copy your temperature rises, Bill. Here’s what you have to do. We want you to override the main engine auto shutdown.”

“Say again.”

“Override the shutdown. Don’t let the engines shut themselves off.”

Angel and Libet hesitated for one second. Then they began to work switches.

The first engine had shut itself off when its internal multisensor noted the pump operating temperature exceeding its safety limit. Perhaps Mission Control were speculating that the readings were flaky, that identical temperature rises in the other pumps were unlikely. If that was so, then a well-meant auto shutdown of a perfectly functioning engine might be the greatest hazard facing the crew.

On the other hand, if the sensor readings were not ratty — if the operating temperatures in those pumps really was rising as the data showed — then probably, before they reached orbit, one of the pumps would blow itself to pieces. And that would finish Endeavour anyhow.

After all, they had all heard and felt that bang. There was more than just a telemetry problem here.

Fahy, Benacerraf sensed, was taking a hell of a gamble.

Maybe she is compensating, still, for what happened with Columbia. Even overcompensating.

But what choice do I have but to trust her?

“Okay, Houston, Endeavour. Auto shutdown disabled. Now what?”

“Endeavour,we’re going to ask you to burn your remaining two main engines for an extra forty-nine seconds. And the OMS one burn will be extended. And augmented with an aft RCS burn. Do you copy all that?”

Benacerraf had scribbled down the instructions on a scratchpad. “Forty-nine seconds, then an extended OMS. We have that, Houston.”

Meanwhile the orbiter continued its climb.

They were eighty miles high, and moving at Mach fifteen.

Now Benacerraf felt the orbiter pitch further over, almost onto its back.

“Okay,” Angel said, “we have single engine press to ATO. Houston, Endeavour. Single engine press to ATO.”

“Copy that, Endeavour. We’re breathing a little easier down here.”

“Keep your pacemaker charged up, Marcus.”

Another barrier had been passed. Now, even if another main engine failed, the Shuttle could still continue to MECO — main engine cut-off — with one engine, and so, presumably, achieve some kind of orbit, even if lower than planned.

Benacerraf knew that the risk of catastrophic failure had receded a little.

“Main engine throttle down.”

“Throttle down, copy.”

“Seven minutes forty. Endeavour, Houston. Engines down to sixty-five percent. You’re looking good.”

“Sure we are.”

She could see a muscle ticking in Angel’s cheek. He was itching to do something, she saw. The launch sequence was so automated that there was almost nothing the crew could do to influence events. They could only sit here, gripping checklists and seat frames, wait while some piece of abort-procedure software flew the craft, hope that nobody had screwed up. No wonder the astronauts had always fought to retain control systems in their ships. Inactivity drove them rapidly crazy.

“Eight minutes thirty-eight,” Angel said. “Okay, people. Now we’re in the extended thrust regime. Here we go…”

According to the original timeline, MECO should have come at eight thirty-eight. They were off the flight profile, then.

“Endeavour,Houston. Coming up on MECO at revised time of nine minutes twenty-seven.”

“Copy that, Marcus.”

“At this time you are go for MECO.”

“We’re relieved to hear it.”

“Coming up on MECO, on my mark.”

As the tanks emptied, the acceleration built up to its dynamic crescendo, shoving Benacerraf harder back in her seat.

“Three, two, one. Mark.”

The acceleration faded immediately.

Benacerraf was not thrown forward. The force which had pressed her back simply vanished.

She still had a sensation of motion, of high velocity, as if she could feel the huge energy which had been invested in her body and the rest of the orbiter’s mass.

Her arms, limp, floated up from her lap before her.

“MECO on schedule,” Angel said. “Houston, Endeavour. I got me three red engine status lights.” He turned and grinned through his faceplate at Benacerraf. “Those balky main engines can’t hurt us now.”

“Endeavour,Houston. Bill, you are go for ET separation. On my mark. Three, two, one. Mark.”

There was a remote boom.

“ET sep is good,” Angel said. “Beginning minus zee translation.”

“Paula,” Libet said. She pointed upwards. “Look out there.”

The orbiter, without its External Tank, was still flying upside down, almost parallel to the Earth’s surface. So when Benacerraf squinted upwards, she could see the blue skin of the Indian Ocean.

And there, dark and ugly against the ocean, was the bullet shape of the External Tank. The brown insulation foam over its aluminum-lithium lightweight honeycomb shell was battered and badly charred, by the air friction of the ascent and rocket exhausts. It would fall back into the atmosphere to a height of a hundred and sixty thousand feet, where, glowing white hot, its fragments would hail down over an empty slice of Indian Ocean.

“It looks more beat-up than I expected,” Benacerraf said.

“Yes. Like it’s been in a war,” Libet said.

“So it has.”

“Software in mode 104,” Angel said.

“Endeavour,Houston. You are go for the OMS-one burn.”

“Copy that, go for OMS-one,” Angel said.

Libet worked switches. “Attitude indicator to inertial.”

Angel began to punch the relevant navigation software into the computer, using the keypad to his right. Benacerraf, still following her checklist, monitored his keystrokes: ITEM 27 EXEC.

The small orbital maneuvering system lit up with a crisp jolt, a dull roar.

“We’re going to come out of this low,” Libet said.

She got no reply. There was silence, on the ground, on the flight deck.

The burn seemed, to Benacerraf, to go on and on.

White called from the ground, “Coming up on OMS cut-off. On my mark. Three, two, one. Mark.”

The gentle thrust died.

In the FCR there was a burst of clapping.

Endeavour was in orbit.

Barbara Fahy thumped her clenched fist against the surface of her workstation. She felt a surge of savage, exultant joy. She had acted; her decision had been correct, and had maybe saved the mission.

She wished she could get her hands on whoever had shot at her orbiter. She felt she could destroy them herself, with her bare hands, unleashing primitive, savage energy.

She tried to calm herself down. She started to talk on the voice loops, calling her controllers to order. There was still a hell of a lot of work to do, not least the planning of the next big burn, the revised OMS-two burn.

But, even as she forced her mind to work analytically once more, she clung to the memory of that wild moment of exultation.

Jackie stayed in the press stand, listening to the fragmentary, incomplete announcements from the NASA PAO. It was as if she was somehow connected to Endeavour, that huge pile of metal to which she’d been so close, just three miles from it, before its explosive launch into space — as if she had to stay here until the crew were safe, as though if she moved away she would somehow break the spell that was somehow preserving the crew, her mother’s life.

In the distance she could hear cars, the squeal of brakes and tires. The car park around the VAB was filling up, and there was a lot of activity in front of the TV networks’ big glass-fronted studios. More press were hurrying here, and presumably to the other NASA centers around the country, now that the launch had turned into some kind of genuine news story.

They finally did it,she thought. She’d understood, technically, only a fraction of what she’d witnessed today; but the meaning was clear.

At last, the military-industrial complex of the United States — the sprawling, interconnected mass of semi-covert interests and alliances out of which the space program had been spawned in the first place — had turned in on itself, and was consuming its own children.

The column of smoke and vapor from the launch still towered into the sky, dwarfing everything, dwarfing even the VAB itself. It broadened and twisted as the off-shore winds pulled slowly at it.

I always knew this was a dumb idea, Mother.

“Seventy thousand feet.”

“Okay, all out.”

“Keep on coming downhill, looks real good. The strip is off to your ten o’clock, do you have it in sight?”

“Yep.”

“Coming through Mach two now, real nice. Keep your brakes out. Okay, you can bring the brakes in now, have you about ten miles out. One point five Mach. What’s your attitude, Linebacker?”

“Coming through forty-five now.”

“You’re about six miles out of high key here, Linebacker.”

“Rog.”

“Velocity one point two Mach. Watch that angle of attack;”

“Rog.”

Deeke was flying an unpowered aircraft now. He was facing perhaps the toughest moment of the flight, an unpowered deadstick landing. And this wasn’t Edwards, on the tabletop of the Mojave, with its hundreds of miles of surrounding glass-smooth dry lake beds. He would get just one chance at this.

But he had always been a pretty good stick and rudder pilot. He wasn’t really concerned.

In fact, he’d rather the flight never ended.

At thirty-five thousand feet he reached the high-key position. He was now directly over his landing site, and he would go through a three hundred and sixty degree spiral, to line himself up for the runway.

He rolled into a broad left turn, using a thirty-five degree bank. Now, from his side window, he could see Merritt Island set out below him, like a flat, brown map overlaid with the long straight lines of highways and the Canaveral AFB, surrounded by flat, shining water. And there was his runway, fat as a goose, right under him where it ought to be.

He glanced up. He caught a glimpse of a vapor plume to the north, still lingering around Launch Complex 39-A.

He descended smoothly and steeply, hanging on his speed brakes. The X-15 seemed to drop like a brick; he decided he’d done too much flying in commercial aircraft, with their baby-gentle descent profiles.

At some point the ground metamorphosed from a flat landscape far beneath him, into a complex three-dimensional world. The runway stretched off before him, converging, comfortingly infinite.

He pulled the X-15 out of its dive, coming level at about a hundred feet above the ground. He extended the landing flaps, and brought up the plane’s blunt nose, scorched and blistered from the reentry.

Just feet above the runway, still moving at more than two hundred miles per hour, he pulled a T-handle to the lower left side of his instrument panel. He heard a solid bang under his feet: the landing gear dropping into place.

“Flaps down,” he said.

“Rog, flaps look good, gear looks good. Fifty feet, ten, five.”

The rear skids hit the ground first, sending a cloud of dust up into the cold January air. The initial touchdown was smooth, and the nose wheel held aloft for a few seconds. Then the nose thumped down, hard enough to give Deeke an eight-G jolt. For a moment he thought the nose gear must have failed; he’d forgotten how close the cockpit was to the ground in the landing attitude. The X-15 was a low-slung aircraft; his head was no more than five feet above the ground.

“That’s a beauty, Linebacker.”

He pulled back on the stick. It was an old trick: hauling back on the control stick increased the friction with the ground, and slowed his slide more quickly.

A mile from the touchdown point, the X-15 dragged to a halt.

“How about that,” he said.

“Yeah. Real nice show, Linebacker.”

He checked his timer. The whole flight, from his launch from the B-52, had lasted just five hundred and eight seconds. Less than nine minutes. It was hard to believe; it felt much, much longer.

Recovery vehicles converged on him, a dozen of them, like, he thought, vultures after a corpse. A recovery helicopter flapped overhead, thirty feet up, seeking fires or propellant leaks. Then it landed, and dropped off two technicians in protective suits. They came running towards the cockpit.

He sat in his warm cabin, breathing hard. When he lifted his arms, he found them shaking, as if the muscles were depleted, and he felt sweat pooling at his collar. He was definitely getting too old for this.

He remembered landing at Edwards after his first familiarization flight. Most of the project’s staff, and PR people and a few family, had been out there on the lakebed. Later, Deeke figured he had shaken over a hundred hands, out there in the dry sunlight of the high desert, while the chase planes did salute rolls overhead. And then they had all returned to Rosamond to sink a few Baltics. It had been one hell of a day, the height of his sunlit youth.

He wondered if anyone would shake his hand today.

There were military police vehicles on the fringe of the recovery convoy, holding back while the technicians moved in on him.

The first tech opened up the canopy, and began to secure the ejection seat. Fresh, cold air pushed into the cockpit; Deeke breathed of it deeply.

To the north, that tower of vapor still dominated the horizon, misshapen, slowly dispersing.

Endeavour,still inverted, was crossing the equator.

Benacerraf looked up. The glowing skin of Earth scattered rich, cool light over the consoles and equipment of the cluttered cabin. Thunderclouds, ten miles high, were piled up along the equator; visibly three-dimensional, they seemed to reach down from a solid sky, clutching at the wounded orbiter.

My God, she thought. I’m still alive. I survived it. Again.

“We’re working on a revised OMS-two for you, Bill. Hang in with it. In the meantime, you want to proceed with your checklist?”

“Rog.”

“APU auto shutdown enabled. Boiler controller off. APU control off.”

“OPS 105 PRO. Gotcha.”

“ET umbilical door mode to manual. Left and right door, left and right door latch switches…”

“Houston, Endeavour. You want to tell us where the hell we are?”

“You’re in orbit, guys. Ah, seventy by seventy-one miles. Congratulations.”

“Jesus. We’re hardly out of the atmosphere,” Angel said.

Benacerraf knew he was right; at this altitude atmospheric drag would soon haul the orbiter back to Earth, whether the crew chose to come or not. And they had a way to climb to get to the rest of the cluster, built around Discovery.

But they would overcome all that. She felt a huge relief.

Angel whooped. “I guess we had a horseshoe up our ass the whole time, huh.”