STEPHEN BAXTER
TITAN
THE NASA TRILOGY

COPYRIGHT

HarperVoyagerAn imprint of

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

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London SE1 9GF

www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 1997

Copyright © Stephen Baxter 1997

Cover photo © NASA

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015

Stephen Baxter asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780006498117

Ebook Edition © June 2012 ISBN: 9780007502066

Version: 2015-10-07

DEDICATION

For Tony, Christine and Catherine

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

Book One: Landing

Book Two: Low Earth Orbit

Book Three: Cruise

Day 80

Day 169

Day 325

Day 504

Day 680

Day 1181

Day 2460

Book Four: Ground Truth

Book Five: Extravehicular Activity

Book Six: Titan Summer

Epilogue

Afterword

Keep Reading

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Praise for Stephen Baxter

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

After seven years of flight, after travelling a billion miles from Earth, the human spacecraft Cassini reached Saturn.

Cassini was about the size of a school bus. Thick, multi-layer insulation blankets covered most of the craft’s structure and radiation-hardened equipment. The blankets’ outermost layer was translucent amber-coloured Kevlar, with shiny aluminum beneath; the two layers together made it look as if the spacecraft had been sewn into gold.

But Cassini looked its age.

The blankets were yellowed, and showed pits and scars from micrometeorite impacts. The brave red, white and blue flags and logos of the US, NASA, ESA and the contributing European countries, fixed as decals on the insulation, had faded badly in the years since launch. Cassini’s close approach to the sun, with the intense heat and solar wind there, had done most of the damage.

A fat pie-dish shape, ten feet across, clung to the side of the Cassini stack, so that the craft looked like a robot warrior going to battle, clutching a shield. In fact, the shield was a combined aeroshell and heat shield for a separate spacecraft, called Huygens, which was designed to land on Saturn’s largest moon Titan. The results Huygens gathered would serve as ‘ground truth’, confirmation and calibration for the more extensive orbital surveys Cassini would perform of the moon.

Now Cassini reached a point in space almost four million miles from Saturn’s cloud tops.

From here, the planet looked the size of a quarter-inch ball bearing held at arm’s length. Spinning in just ten hours, the planet was visibly flattened. A telescope might have shown its yellowish cloud tops, with their streaky shading and complex, anti-cyclonally rotating cloud systems. The sun was off to the right, with its close cluster of inner planets, so Saturn, seen from the probe, was half in shadow. The ring system, tight around the planet, was almost edge-on to the spacecraft, all but invisible, and it cast sharp shadows on the cloud tops.

Titan – the largest of the moons, orbiting twenty Saturn radii from its parent – was a reddish-orange pinprick, well outside the ring system.

Titan appeared to lie directly ahead of the spacecraft.

It was time.

Pyrotechnic bolts fired, silently, releasing puffs of vapour that immediately crystallized and dispersed. Three springs pushed Huygens away from Cassini, and a curved track and roller made the released probe spin, at seven revolutions per minute.

The path of Huygens and its parent probe diverged, at half a mile per hour.

Two days after the release, with the two craft about thirty miles apart – each clearly visible from the other, as a bright, complex star – Cassini fired its main engine once more, to deflect its orbit. Now Cassini and Huygens parted more rapidly.

Cassini’s nominal mission was a four-year orbital tour of the Saturn system. Its objectives were to study Saturn’s atmosphere, the atmosphere and surface of Titan, the smaller icy satellites, the rings, and the structure and physical dynamics of the magnetosphere.

And while Cassini flew on, Huygens – dormant, unpowered, a mere ten feet across, spinning slowly for stability – fell directly towards the burnt-orange face of Titan.

It was November 6, 2004.

… It would be a second-generation star.

It formed from a spinning cloud, of primordial hydrogen and helium, polluted by silicon, carbon and oxygen: rock and snow, manufactured by the first stars, the oldest in the Universe.

The cloud was a hundred times the width of the Solar System, to which it would give birth.

The cloud collapsed, and spun faster. It heated up. At last, the cloud became unstable, and broke up into successively smaller fragments.

It shrank. The cloud became opaque, and the heat it generated as it collapsed could no longer escape.

The core imploded suddenly.

The collapse made the core, a protostar, shine brilliantly, ten thousand times as bright as the sun that would shine on mankind.

Eventually the core was so hot that hydrogen nuclei began to fuse to helium. The thermonuclear energy generated balanced the inward gravitational force. The protostar stopped contracting.

It was a star. The sun.

The remaining nebula cloud condensed into dust particles and snowflakes. The orbiting particles collided with each other, and – because of the stickiness of the ice, and the organic tars coating the dust – they formed a flat disc of swarming planetesimals, objects ranging in size from a few yards across to several miles.

The planetesimals collided; some grew in size, forming planets, and others fragmented.

Most of the nebula’s mass was lost in the process.

Earth formed in a million years. Earth was dominated by rock, its snow boiled away by the young sun’s heat, its surface pounded by planetesimals.

Further out, it was different.

Further out, everything was moving more slowly, and the nebula was less dense. It was cold enough for water, carbon dioxide, ammonia and methane to condense into ice. So while the inner planets were dominated by rock, the accreting planetesimals at Jupiter’s orbit and beyond swept up dirty snow.

Hundreds of millions of years after Earth, Saturn formed, gigantic, gaseous. It radiated heat as it collapsed, warming the orbiting fragments of nebula gas and dust.

Around Saturn, an accretion disc formed. Moons coalesced, from a mixture of water ice, silicates, ammonia, methane and other trace elements.

One of them was massive.

It was half rock, half ice. It heated as it collapsed, because of its huge mass; the primordial ices melted and vaporized. The rock settled to the center, because of its greater density. At last, at the core of the moon, a ball of silicate formed, overlaid by a shell of ice, six hundred miles thick.

An ocean gathered. It was a mixture of ammonia and methane. A dense atmosphere was raised over it. The new world was a cauldron, with pressures hundreds of times that of Earth’s sea level in human times, and temperatures measured in hundreds of degrees.

The high pressure and temperature were sustained, for millions of years. And in the organic soup of the ammonia-water ocean, complex chemistry seethed.

But the new ocean and atmosphere were not stable. Ultra-violet flux from the young sun beat down; planetesimals continued to fall, blasting away swathes of the air; the atmospheric gases dissolved in the ocean.

The atmosphere cooled and thinned. The pressure dropped.

The ocean froze over.

New methane lakes formed, which converted slowly to ethane. Sunlight broke up atmospheric ammonia, to release a new atmosphere of nitrogen.

The moon settled into its long freeze.

But it was not inert. Ultraviolet photons from the sun and charged particles trapped in Saturn’s magnetic field beat down on the thick layer of air. Chemistry continued in the new atmosphere, and complex organic deposits rained down on the frozen surface …

Thus, for billions of years, Titan waited.

An object looking a little like a comet streaked across the sky of Titan, battering atmospheric gases to a plasma twice as hot as the surface of the sun itself.

Cooling, it fell towards the surface slush.

A parachute blossomed above it.

Huygens was built like a shellfish, with a tough outer cover shielding a softer kernel, with its fragile load of instrumentation. When its job was done, the outer aeroshell broke open, like the two halves of a clam shell, and the main chute unfolded.

So, after being carried across a billion miles, the aeroshell was discarded. It had absorbed nearly a third of the probe’s entire mass.

The descent module, exposed, was built around a disc-shaped platform of thick aluminum. Experiments and probe systems were bolted to the platform. The equipment was shrouded by a shell of aluminum, with a spherical cap for a nose and a truncated cone for a tail. It looked something like an inverted clam. Now cutouts in the shell opened, and booms unfolded from the main body. Instruments peered through the cutouts, or were held mounted on the booms, away from the main body.

Tentatively, the lander sought contact with the orbiter.

Fifteen minutes after its unpackaging, the main chute was cut away, and a smaller stabilizer chute opened.

The probe began to fall faster, into the deep ocean of air. Vanes around its rim made it rotate in the thickening air.

Diaphragms slid back. A series of small portals opened in the protective shell of the craft, and sensors peered out.

At the base of Titan’s stratosphere, some thirty miles above the surface, the temperature began to rise a little. Gradually, the surface became visible. Downward-pointing imagers peered, in visible and infra-red light, and as the probe slowly rotated, mosaic panoramas were built up.

At last, the probe crashed into the slush. Slowed by Titan’s low surface gravity, and the density of the lower air – half as dense again as Earth’s – the impact was slow, as gentle as an apple falling from a tree.

The probe continued its battery of experiments, pumping telemetry up to the orbiter, which sailed onwards towards Saturn.

Huygens was primarily an atmospheric probe. It had not been certain that the probe would survive the impact. And the probe had actually been designed to float if need be, for none of its mission planners had been sure whether oceans or lakes existed here, or if they did how extensive they were, or whether the chosen landing site would be covered by liquid or not.

Just six minutes after landing, the probe’s internal batteries were exhausted.

Melted slush frosted over the buried portals of the inert, cooling lander. And a thin rain of light brown organic material began to settle on the upper casing.

The chatter of telemetry to Cassini fell silent. The orbiter passed beneath the horizon, and then turned its high gain antenna away from Titan, to Earth. Patiently, Cassini began to download everything the lander had observed.

Some of the results were unexpected.

Paula Benacerraf worked through her EVA suit checklist.

She connected her Snoopy hat comms carrier to the suit’s umbilical. She set the sliding oxygen control on her chest pack to PRESS. She put on her gloves and snapped home the connecting rings. Then she lifted her helmet over her head. The suit built up to an overpressure, and she tested it for leaks.

The ritual of checks was oddly comforting. It took her mind off what she was about to do.

Tom Lamb rapped on her backpack.

Paula Benacerraf turned, awkwardly. Foot restraints held them both in standing positions, packed in head-to-toe. In her EMU – her suit, her EVA mobility unit – she felt ludicrously bulky, awkward in the confines of Columbia’s airlock, which was just a cramped, cylindrical chamber in the orbiter’s mid deck.

‘That’s it, Paula. I think we’re go.’

She said, ‘Already?’

‘Already.’ Lamb grinned out of his helmet at her, and she could see silvery stubble in the creases of his leathery cheeks. ‘You’re an independent spacecraft now.’

Her heart was hammering under the tough surface of her HUT, her hard upper torso unit. ‘Spaceship Paula. It feels good.’

Tom Lamb had once been the youngest Moonwalker. Now, at sixty-two, he was one of the oldest humans to have flown in space.

And Benacerraf, forty-five, a grandmother, was one of the oldest rookies.

Benacerraf disconnected her suit from the wall mount.

Lamb said, ‘Houston, we’ve got the hatch closed and we’re waiting for a go for depress on time.’ His native Iowan twang was overlaid with a Texan drawl acquired over long years at Houston.

‘Affirmative, EV1; you have a go for depress.’

Lamb turned to the control panel and turned the depress switch to position 5. Then, with the pressure down to five psi, Lamb turned the switch to its second position. ‘Depress valve to zero.’

Benacerraf heard a distant hiss. She moved the oxygen control on her chest pack to its EVA position.

‘Pressure down to point two,’ Lamb said now. ‘Let’s motor.’ He kicked his feet out of their restraints. With a confident motion he twisted the handle of the outer airlock hatch. Benacerraf thought the hinges and handle looked old, like bits of a school bus, with the polish of long use.

Lamb pushed the hatch outward, and Paula Benacerraf gazed into space.

She was looking along the length of the orbiter’s payload bay. The big bay doors were gaping open, the silvered Teflon surfaces of their radiator panels gleaming, and the bay itself was a complex trench, crammed with equipment, stretching sixty feet ahead of her. There was no direct sunlight; the bay was in the shadow of a wing, and the light in the bay was like a diffuse daylight.

Tom Lamb moved out through the airlock’s round hatchway, and drifted over to the left payload bay door hinge. There was a handrail and two slide wires that ran the length of the big hinge, and Lamb tethered himself to the wires. She could see his bright EV1 armbands.

He turned and waited for her.

‘Houston, the hatch is open and EV1 is out.’

‘We see you, Tom.’

‘EV2 is halfway out, getting ready.’

Benacerraf, with her hands on the doorway, felt as if she was frozen in place, as if she really couldn’t step out there.

Lamb lifted up his big gold visor, so she could see his face. ‘Just stay with it, kid. One step at a time.’

She grunted. ‘Some kid,’ she said.

Somehow, though, Lamb’s gravelly words punctured her tension.

She kept her eyes down on the floor of the payload bay and drifted through the hatch, just as she had done a hundred times in training, in the big swimming pool in the Sonny Carter Facility at Ellington Field. She fixed her own tether in place. Now, at least, she wouldn’t go drifting off into space.

For the first time she looked up.

Columbia was flying with her instrument-laden payload bay pointing at Earth, so that the planet was a ceiling of light above Benacerraf, a belly of ocean strewn with white, shadowed clouds.

Earth flooded the orbiter with light.

When he saw she was tethered, Lamb pulled himself along the length of the payload bay with practised ease. He reached the far end, and, diminished, he performed a simple pirouette, his tether flailing around him slowly.

‘Hey, Paula,’ Lamb said now. ‘Look at your hands.’

She lifted up a gloved hand before her face. There was grease on the glove, from the payload bay door hinge.

When she’d first joined the astronaut corps six years ago Benacerraf had been in complete awe of Tom Lamb.

He was the last Apollo veteran still working in the program, all of thirty-two years since the last Lunar Module had lifted off that remote surface. Tom Lamb still called himself an aviator, Navy style. She knew he had some kind of antique aeronautics degree from some technology institute in Georgia. But as far as he was concerned, Lamb was primarily a graduate of the Naval Pilot Test School at Patuxent River, in Maryland. She knew he had been known as a superb stick-and-rudder man, and his specialism had been night carrier landings, the hairiest flying in the Navy.

And as a young teenager Paula Benacerraf had watched Lamb and his commander Marcus White bounce like sun-drenched beach balls over the rubble-strewn floor of Copernicus.

How could you meet, how could you work with, a man like that?

But the awe had soon worn off, for Benacerraf.

Benacerraf was an engineering specialist – her discipline was orbital construction techniques – and she’d come into NASA with a hatful of qualifications, awards and degrees. She’d worked as a ground-based contractor on a number of Space Station construction missions. It was only when, because of Shuttle launch wave-offs and Russian construction delays, the Station assembly sequence had started to fall drastically behind its timeline that the need had been identified to draft the right experience directly into the program.

So – against the advice of her daughter Jackie, against the resistance of her employers – Benacerraf had given up her fancy consultant’s salary and her nice apartment in Seattle, and moved down to the humid stink of Houston, on Government pay.

At first she’d worked as a specialist in the backrooms behind the Mission Control rooms, in Building 30 of JSC, the Johnson Space Center. Then she’d been promoted to work as a Mission Controller, in the FCR – the Flight Control Room – itself.

But it still wasn’t enough. It was pretty obvious that this construction project – if it was ever going to get back on schedule – needed foremen in space.

Benacerraf had been a space nut since watching Lamb and his buddies on the Moon, all those years ago. But the thought of actually going up there herself, in a dinged-up old Space Shuttle, pretty much appalled her.

Tom Lamb himself had been deputed to talk her round. He’d used all the grizzled charm at his disposal.

… But I’ve got two grandchildren, Tom.

Hell, so have I. And if I can still cut it, a couple of years off my pension, why not you?

She was given promises of cooperation, special provisions, fast-tracks through the training. Even bonuses, to compensate her for her dropped salary. You’ll be treated with respect, drawled Tom Lamb. We need you, kid.

The training maybe hadn’t been quite as smooth as she’d been led to believe – too much resistance from the Spaceflight Training Division for that, who had insisted she had to work her way through their hierarchy of trainers and simulators, fast-track or no fast-track. But the pumped-up pay had come in as promised.

She just hadn’t bargained for the respect.

As an ascan, an astronaut candidate, she was royalty – at the rank of princess, at any rate, until she flew. People around the JSC campus were truthfully in awe of her, and the deference with which she was suddenly treated embarrassed her deeply.

But if she was a princess, Tom Lamb was a king among kings. And he loved it. She would watch him stroll through the Public Affairs Office or the clinic or the Crew Systems Lab, and people come running to serve him. And Lamb just lapped it up. It was as if Lamb had spent the whole of his adult life preparing for this role. Which, in a sense, he had.

Her opinion about Tom Lamb had evolved rapidly.

She pulled herself tentatively along the slide wire.

The orbiter was like a splayed-open aircraft. Before her she could see the big delta wings, spreading out to either side of the payload bay. Straight ahead, at the far end of the bay, was the bulky, rounded propulsion system housing, with its tanks and the engine bells for the main engines and the orbital manoeuvring system. Behind her was the flat rear bulkhead of the cabin section, like the wall of a big roomy shack, which contained the rest of the crew.

The curve of the wings was elegant. But for her, the design was spoiled by the softscreen mission sponsors’ logos displayed there: the US Alliance, Boeing, Lockheed, Disney-Coke. She knew that stuff brought in a lot of money to NASA, but for her it was a step too far.

At the back of the bay she could see the EDO wafer, the extended-duration pallet with its supplement of lox and liquid hydrogen for the orbiter’s fuel cells, which would allow Columbia to stretch out this mission to sixteen days. One objective of this flight had been to test the new EDO wafer in extremes of temperature, so the orbiter had been aligned to keep the payload bay in shadow for hours at a time, longer periods than on most flights.

Tom Lamb approached her, along the starboard fuselage longerons. ‘You ready for the MMU?’

‘Sure.’

‘Houston, EV2 preparing to deploy MMU.’

‘Copy that, Tom.’

Benacerraf made her way to the MMU station. The Manned Manoeuvring Unit was a big backpack shaped like the back and arms of an armchair. Since launch it had been stored in its station in the payload bay against the rear cabin bulkhead, on the starboard side.

Lamb had got there first, and he ran a quick check of the MMU’s systems.

‘You ready?’

‘Let’s do it.’

Lamb held her arms. He turned her around, and she backed into the MMU. She felt latches clasp her suit’s backpack.

‘Houston, EV2,’ she said. ‘EMU latches closed.’

‘Copy that.’

She pulled the MMU’s arms out around her. She closed her gloved hands around the controllers, which were simple hand-controllers on the end of the arms. A fibre optic data cable plugged into her suit from the MMU.

Lamb released the tethers which still clipped her to the payload bay slide wires, and reached around her. ‘Captive latches released.’

‘Copy.’

He shoved her gently in the back, and she floated away from the bulkhead. ‘Don’t even think about it,’ he said calmly. ‘It’s just like the sims.’

… Suddenly she didn’t have hold of anything, and she was falling.

‘Oh, shit.’

‘We didn’t copy that, EV2,’ the capcom said humourlessly.

Lamb ignored him. ‘Come on, Paula. Turn around.’

She had two big nitrogen-filled fuel tanks on her back now, and there were twenty-four small reaction control system nozzles. She grasped her right-hand controller, and pushed it left. There was a soft tone in her helmet as the thruster worked; she saw a faint sparkle of nitrogen crystals, to her right. In response to the thrust, she tipped a little to the left.

The controller was intuitive; moving it up or down made her pitch, her feet tipping up; left or right gave her a yaw, a sideways tilt. She twisted the handle, and made herself roll about an axis through her head to her feet.

The payload bay rotated around her.

‘It’s heavy,’ she said. ‘I can feel the unit’s inertia as I roll.’

‘You mass more than seven hundred pounds, suit and all, Paula.’

She blipped the RCS thrusters again, and slowed her roll. She finished up facing Lamb, where he clung to the aft cabin bulkhead. She pushed her left-hand controller, which drove her forward and back. There was a gentle shove, and her drifting slowed.

The MMU seemed to be working well, but its scuffs and scorch marks showed its age. And things most definitely did not feel the same, up here, as in the tethered sims on the ground. When she started moving, she just kept on going, until she stopped herself. She was in a frictionless, three-dimensional environment, like a huge ice-rink, where Newton’s laws held sway in their bare simplicity.

No wonder the Station assembly has proceeded so slowly, she thought. We just aren’t evolved for this environment.

‘Okay, Paula,’ Lamb called. ‘You ready for your one small step?’

No, she thought.

‘Let’s do it.’

‘Houston, EV2 is preparing to leave the payload bay.’

‘We copy, Tom.’

Benacerraf tipped herself up so she was facing Earth, with the orbiter behind her.

Earth, before her, was immense, overwhelming. The overall impression was of blue sea and white clouds, the white of an intensity that hurt her eyes. When she looked towards the horizon she could see the atmosphere, a thin blue shell around the planet.

She gave herself a single, firm thrust with the RCS. She felt a small, definite shove in the small of her back.

She rose out of the bay towards the face of Earth; she saw the big silvered doors to either side of her recede.

A tone sounded softly in her helmet, startling her.

‘Oh-two alarm, EV2.,’ the capcom reported.

An oxygen leak. Holed fabric, maybe. ‘Houston, EV2.. Should I come back? I—’

‘Belay that, EV2,’ Lamb said. ‘Paula, just take a couple of deep breaths. Relax. You’re safe and snug in there.’

She became aware of her breathing, which was shallow and rapid. Her suit monitors had misinterpreted her high oxygen consumption as a leak.

Deliberately, she slowed her breathing; she tried to unclench her muscles, to relax in the warm cocoon of the suit.

‘Just look at the view, kid.’

She looked at the view.

She was flying up towards Africa. The clouds piled over the equator seemed to reach down towards her, clearly three-dimensional and casting long shadows. She could see the Nile, and the ribbon development along it, surrounded by the baked-hard surface of the desert; the dependence of the people on the Nile’s water was clear.

She was extraordinarily comfortable. The suit was quiet, warm, safe. She could hear the whir of her backpack’s twenty-thousand rpm fan – it sounded like a pc fan. She heard squeaks and pops on the radio, as she drifted over UHF stations on the ground. In her bubble helmet she had a hundred and eighty degree vision, and she had a great sense of freedom. She knew that when she returned to the cabin, after the EVA, it would seem constricting, absurdly confining.

As she gazed at Earth – at all of humanity, save for the six on orbit with her on Columbia and a handful on Station – she felt some of the tension drain out of her, as if it was being drawn up to the planet. She felt lifted out of the web of concerns that dominated her life: the difficulties of her career, the frustrating pace of the space program, her unsatisfactory relationship with Jackie, her daughter, the blizzard of hassles that made up every day, mail and balky technology and her car and her apartment and accounts she had to pay and …

No wonder people get hooked on this, she thought.

‘Okay, EV2, Houston. Coming up to your three hundred feet limit.’

‘Copy that.’ Three hundred feet was as far as she could allow herself to travel. Moving away from Columbia, Benacerraf was actually entering a slightly different orbit. If she went much further, return to the orbiter would become a full-scale rendezvous, a matter of complex course correction manoeuvres.

She passed out of the shadow of the wing, and into sunlight; her EMU seemed to glow.

‘I see your light, Paula,’ Lamb called.

‘I’m pleased to hear it, Tom.’

‘EV2, Houston. Confirming your ground-to-MMU direct link is operational.’

‘Thank you.’

‘And your transponder beacon is functioning.’

‘Copy that.’

‘EV2, Houston. You have a lot of green-eyed people watching you; looks like you’re having a lot of fun.’

‘Sure. This is working very nicely. Ah, I’m glad I’ve got old Brer Rabbit out here with me, out in the briar patch where he belongs.’

She heard Lamb chuckle at that, back in the payload bay. She was aping the first words he’d spoken on the Moon.

Most astronauts got off the active list after four or five flights. They moved out into industry, or up into some kind of program management position within NASA. What kind of man was it who would keep on subjecting himself – and his family – to the grind of training, two years for every Shuttle mission, the enormous dangers of the missions themselves, flight after flight, year after year, logging up the spaceflight hours well into his sixties, endlessly defying the survival odds?

She’d even formulated the thought that maybe Lamb wasn’t actually good for anything else. To stay in the office you had to resist promotion, after all. You had to demonstrate sustained mediocrity. John Young, the other great surviving Moonwalker, had been taken off the active roster when he’d been so vocal in criticizing NASA safety procedures after Challenger.

Besides, all that ancient astronaut-as-Cold Warrior garbage from the 1960s, which still clung around NASA, just did not cut any ice with Benacerraf. It had nothing to do with the future of space travel as she saw it, which could only be about a steady, logical and gradual expansion of the space frontier, beyond Earth. Or even with the actions required of NASA, the space agency, to survive in a future of decreasing funding, increasing irrationality, a growing sense of military threat from China and elsewhere which was causing the ancient Cold Warriors to come rearing from their bunkers once more …

It might take all of her career to build the Space Station; she might never get to see another human being walk on the Moon. Well, that was fine by her. Space was a damn difficult place to work.

But as long as Lamb, and one or two others, still hung around, you still had the hero-centered distortion of the whole organization. As if everything that had happened after 1972 had been a long, dull coda. Even the Mission Controllers and their backroom staff were mostly aviation people of some kind, she was finding; and a startling number of the controllers – who were supposed to be there as specialist engineers or scientists – would apply to join the astronaut office at every recruitment round, regular as clockwork.

… But all that was before she’d begun to train with Lamb for this flight, STS-143. Before she’d sat with him through hours of sims, observed his prowess at the antique complexities of the Shuttle system, seen him demonstrate his calm control in the abort options. Tom Lamb could handle things, she’d come to realize. His old-fashioned jock bull hid a central, deep-rooted competence.

As she’d been strapped into Columbia’s flight deck for her first launch, she’d been grateful for Lamb’s calm voice, responding to the ground. If anyone could get her home alive, it would be Tom Lamb.

And anyhow, now she was up here, she started to see his point of view.

She swung herself around, and faced back down into the payload bay. She blipped her left-hand controller to slow her rotation.

Columbia’s cabin was above her head, the tail section below her feet. The starboard wing was in the shadow of the sun; the big Stars and Stripes on the port wing was obscured by the open bay doors. Her eyes were dark-adapted to Earthlight, so she could see no stars beyond the orbiter. Columbia was like a complex toy, brilliant white and silver, set against complete blackness.

At first glance Columbia looked faintly ridiculous: that fat, boxy body, the patchy coloration of the thermal protection system, the snub nose, those thick wings and that huge tail: Columbia was like an airliner stranded in space, its aerodynamic surfaces useless in vacuum. Columbia, the first of the five Shuttle orbiters built – and so the most primitive – weighed all of a hundred and eighty thousand pounds dry. You had to haul all that mass up into orbit, and back down again, every flight, to deliver just fifty thousand pounds of payload to orbit.

And after thirty flights Columbia was showing her age. She could see how the white-painted hull was scarred and battered, the slight discolorations between the tiles, the scuffs on the windows that sparkled in the sunlight, the stains on the thermal fabric lining the payload bay.

But all of that seemed to fade from her awareness, as she saw the orbiter drifting serenely against the blackness of space. Bizarrely, Columbia looked as if she belonged up here.

The Shuttle system was the technology of the 1970s, still flying in the ’oos, with the hard wisdom of the intervening years built into it. And, realistically, no replacement system in sight. Columbia was fresh paint over rusty, obsolescent technology. But somehow, up here, she was able to make out the 1960s von Braun dream of spaceplanes which the orbiter embodied.

Her throat hurt. Damn it, she felt as if she was going to cry.

The light around her changed. The shadow of the starboard wing was growing longer. Columbia was passing into another forty-five minute night.

‘… Hey, Paula,’ Tom Lamb said now. ‘Scuttlebutt from home. Some double-dome from JPL is saying he’s found life on Titan.’

‘Really?’

‘So they say. Nice place to hear about it, huh.’

‘Yes,’ she said.

… She turned again, to face Earth.

At the rim of the planet she could see the airglow layer, a bright layer of oxygen radiating at the top of the atmosphere, like a false horizon. The lights of cities, strung along the coasts of the land, looked like streetlights scattered along a road. There was a thunderstorm over central Africa, and she could see lightning sparking constantly, over cloud systems spanning thousands of miles. The lightning propagated through the clouds like a living thing, growing and spreading; its glow shone from beneath the layer of cloud, and she could see three-dimensional structure within the cloud, edges and swirls of purple.

The leading edges of Columbia glowed, a faint orange, in an aura a few inches thick. The glow came from a thin hail of atoms of atomic oxygen, interacting with the orbiter’s surfaces.

Even here, she thought, they were not truly free of Earth.

She thought about the news from Titan, wondering vaguely what it might mean for her.

The low-level arc floodlights in the payload bay glowed like a captive constellation.

The suit technician removed the protective cover from Jiang Ling’s helmet. Jiang sat down on the lip of the hatch and hauled herself into the orbital module, head first. Another technician pulled off her outer boots, and she swung her legs inside the module.

She was alone, here in this orbital compartment, this elongated sphere within which she would spend a week in low Earth orbit. The compartment was like a miniature space station, crammed with storage lockers, provisions, scientific equipment and literature. Everything was gleaming white, new and shiny.

The technicians were framed in the hatchway. They were both Han Chinese: military officers, with their brown uniforms visible under their white coats. They grinned at her. But, she thought, their eyes were hard.

One of them passed her a small brass bell. She took it in her gloved hand. It was inscribed with the face of Mao Zedong, in comfortable, corpulent middle age.

The technician grinned at her. ‘Maybe ta laorenjia will bring you luck.’

She raised her hand in thanks.

The technicians stepped back into the white room beyond the doorway, and hauled the hatch closed. It shut with finality. Even the quality of the sound changed. She was aware of a sense of enclosure, almost of claustrophobia.

Clutching the brass bell, she put such thoughts aside as irrelevant.

Beneath her was an inner hatch. She twisted around and lowered herself through this. Now she was entering the second of her craft’s three modules, called the command compartment, which she would ride to orbit – and home to Earth again, to her planned soft landing in the Gobi Desert.

Below her, inaccessible now, was the third part of her craft: an equipment module, containing fuel tanks, oxygen, water supplies, life support, and the mass of equipment that ran the on-board systems. The equipment module would be used to manoeuvre the craft in orbit, and when Jiang finally returned to Earth this stage would be used as a retro-rocket, before being jettisoned along with the orbital module.

She settled into her couch. The command compartment was a compact half-sphere, its walls curving up before her. There were bulky compartments and packs all around her, strapped to the walls and floor, most of them containing equipment that would be needed for the return to Earth: parachutes, flotation gear, emergency rations, blankets and thick clothes. The spacecraft’s main controls were set out before her: an artificial horizon, handsets for attitude controls, communications and monitoring gear.

She was hemmed in, embedded in this solid mass of equipment like a wrapped-up porcelain doll.

The astronaut trainees, morbidly, called the command compartment the xiaohao, after the small isolation cells which were still operated within Qincheng Prison in Beijing. But her brief feeling of confinement had passed, for the capsule was already alive: the cabin floodlights glowed cheerfully, complex graphics scrolled through the softscreens embedded in the walls, and green lights shone all over the instrument panels.

There were two small circular windows, one to either side of her. Now there was only darkness within them, because the spacecraft – perched here a hundred and seventy feet above the ground at the tip of the Long March booster – was enclosed within its protective fairing. But there was a small periscope, its eyepiece set in the center of the instrument panel before her, whose extension poked out beyond the fairing.

Seen through the periscope, the sky was a vast blue dome, devoid of moisture.

This was Inner Mongolia, the north-east of China. The desert was a vast, tan brown expanse, as flat as a table-top, stretching to the horizon in every direction. Beijing was hundreds of miles east of here. To the north, beyond the shadow of the Great Wall, camel trains still worked across the Mongolian Gobi.

The Jiuquan launch center itself was modest. There were just three launch pads set in a rough triangle a few hundred yards apart. The pads were concrete tables, a hundred feet across, with minimal equipment at each; there was a single gantry almost as tall as the Long March booster itself, which was moved on rails between the pads. She could see the railway spurs which brought booster stages here. There was no surrounding industrial complex, as at Cape Canaveral or Tyuratam. There was only an igloo-like blockhouse close to each pad, buried partly underground, containing the firing rooms; further away there were gleaming tanks and snaking pipelines for propellant storage and delivery, and a small power station.

The launch complex, in fact, was dwarfed by the thousand-mile hugeness of the Gobi.

To Jiang, the elemental simplicity of this facility was its power. Here in the mouth of the desert it was as if her booster had barely any connection with the Earth it was soon to shake off. To Jiang, Jiuquan was the reality of spaceflight, reduced to its core …

The flight was still to come, of course. But already, she sensed, the worst of her mission was over: the public tours, the attention from TV and net correspondents, the speeches to thousands of Party cadres in Tiananmen Square, even the meeting with the Great Helmsman himself. Of course there would be many more such chores after the flight, but that was far from her mind.

For now she was alone in here, contained within the xiaohao – in this environment she had come to know so well. Here, she was in command, and she was ready to confront destiny: to become the first Chinese, in five thousand years of history, to break the bonds of Earth itself.

A voice crackled in the small speakers on her headset. ‘Lei Feng Number One from the firing room. Are you ready to begin your checklist?’

She was still clutching the brass bell. She reached up, and fixed it to the handle of the hatch above her with a twist of wire. She touched Mao’s face with a spacesuited finger. The bell rang gently. She smiled. Now, ta laorenjia could protect her as he did millions of Chinese; Mao Zedong, three decades after his death, had become the most popular household folk god.

She settled back in her couch. ‘This is Jiang Ling in Lei Feng Number One. Yes, I can confirm I am ready to proceed with the checklist. Today is a good day to fly!’

The work seemed to come in waves, with clusters of switches to throw and settings to check in a short time. In addition she had to record measurements in her log book. And she had to work to reduce the condensation inside the cramped compartment. In orbit this would be done automatically, but on the ground the light pumps were overwhelmed by Earth’s gravity, and she had to open and close valves at set times, and she had a little hand-pump she used to move condensate from one part of the cabin to another.

There were several long holds in the countdown, when malfunctions were encountered. During these periods she had literally nothing to do, and she found them difficult times.

She was aware of continual movement and noise. She could feel the rocket swaying as the thin desert wind hit its flanks; and there was a succession of thumps, bangs and shudders, as ancillary equipment was moved to and from the booster. She was very aware that she was suspended at the top of a thin, fragile steel tower housing thousands of tons of highly explosive propellant.

There were cameras all over the cabin, focused on her face behind its open visor, their black lenses glinting in the floods. She tried to keep her expression clear, her movements calm and assured.

She felt a deep nervousness gnaw at her, more worrying even than the prospect that some catastrophe might claim her life, today. If something went wrong, if the mission was aborted, was it possible that she would somehow be blamed?

Jiang was not Han Chinese. She was a Turkic Uighur, a Muslim minority which emanated from the westernmost province of Xinjiang. Jiang’s family came from the desert capital Urumqi; her family had moved to Beijing when she was a child when Jiang’s father, a mid-ranking Party cadre, was posted to the Minorities Institute in the capital in the 1970s. Since her father was both an official and a Uighur, the family had been treated with a special deference reserved for select representatives of minority groups who served as symbols for the Party’s efforts to build ‘socialist solidarity’ between central China and the non-Han regions. In Beijing, Jiang had attended a special ‘experimental’ school reserved for the children of the Party élite.

Among the Han astronaut trainees there had been some resentment at her promotion – sometimes suppressed, sometimes not. And there had been genuine surprise when she had been selected for the honour of this first flight, ahead of the Han candidates.

Jiang believed that it was on the basis of her superior abilities. Perhaps that was true. But she knew that she could not help but accrue rivals and enemies, now, as she moved into national, even international prominence.

Meanwhile the xiaodao xiaoxi – the back-alley scuttlebutt – was that the Chinese space program, in its thirty-year history, had already killed five hundred people. Even worse, it was said, one astronaut had already lost his – or her – life, in a clandestine suborbital test of the Lei Feng-Long March system.

Jiang Ling believed some of this, but not all. She would be a fool to try to deny that she was exposing herself to enormous risks, here in the Lei Feng. Perhaps more risks than any other astronaut from East or West since the first pioneers themselves.

But for Jiang it was worth it. And not for the glory – for being what the People’s Daily called a jianghu haojie, a modern-day knight errant – and certainly not for the ‘iron rice bowl’ which her status afforded her. To Jiang, it was simply this moment, the hours and days to come: to be thrust into orbit, to look down on the Earth like a glowing carpet below. To Jiang, that was worth any risk.

As she’d come to the pad, a technician had told her the Americans were claiming to have found life on Titan, moon of Saturn.

Lying here now, Jiang tried to absorb the news. What could it mean? Could it be true?

In the end she dismissed the speculation. What value was a mission to Saturn? What use was life on Titan, even if it existed? Perhaps the stars were for America, but Earth was for China.

And now the holds started to clear up, and her mood lifted.

Jackie Benacerraf didn’t know what to expect of JPL. She certainly didn’t rely on the descriptions from her mother, the famous spacewoman.

She drove her hired car out along the Glendale Freeway, out of downtown LA, along tree-lined roads. She drove through swank suburbs, following the softscreen map in the car, and was surprised when she rounded a turn, and came upon JPL.

At first glance JPL could have been any reasonably modern corporate or college site, maybe a hospital: it was spread over two hundred acres, nestling in the eroded, green-clad shoulders of the San Gabriel Mountains, the blocky office buildings interspersed with Southern California palms. She caught glimpses of some kind of campus inside the security fences, fountains and trees.

But the roads here were called Mariner Road, and Surveyor Road, and Ranger Road. For the Jet Propulsion Laboratory had built and run spacecraft which had reached every planet in the Solar System, save only Pluto. And, right now, the scientists here were gathering information from the moons of Saturn.

She parked her car. Isaac Rosenberg was there to meet her at the visitors’ reception. ‘Jackie. Thanks for coming in.’

‘Isaac, it’s good to meet you again.’

He pushed his John Lennon spectacles a little further back up his nose. ‘Rosenberg. Everybody calls me Rosenberg.’

‘Rosenberg, then.’

He was somewhere in his mid-twenties, she figured, maybe a couple of years older than she was. He didn’t look as if he lived too well; his face was pale and badly shaved, and his prematurely thinning black hair, none too clean, was tied back in a pony tail.

But none of that mattered, compared to the look in his brown eyes.

He said, ‘Thanks for coming out. Listen, you want me to get you a coffee? A doughnut, maybe?’

‘No, thanks, Rosenberg. I want you to tell me about your results. At the party the other night, you were so –’

‘Out of it.’

‘Were you serious? Are the press reports true? How come the official spokesmen won’t answer questions on it?’

‘Come see the results for yourself.’

He led her through the reception area and across the campus, to a long, low building he called the SFOF, for Space Flight Operations Facility. He took her up to the second floor, to a big windowless loft of a room, painted grey, with grey carpeting. It was divided up into rows of cubicles, within which worked – Rosenberg said – the engineers and scientists who controlled Cassini’s systems. So this is a spacecraft control center, she thought. It was about as lively as a bank’s back office.

They crossed the engineering room, and then passed through a hall to a science area, and entered a new warren of cubicles, the science back room. Rosenberg took her to his own cubicle, which was cluttered up with papers and rolled-up softscreens and an old-fashioned hard-key calculator. There were reproductions of the covers of antique science fiction magazines taped to the cubicle walls, she saw: By Spaceship to Saturn, and Raiders of Saturn’s Rings, and Missing Men of Saturn.

He showed her a Packard Bell softscreen, stuck to one wall, which was cycling through displays of what turned out to be a thermal profile through Titan’s atmosphere, as sampled by the descending Huygens lander. Grabbing a mouse, he cleared down the screen and pulled up data from a fresh database.

She’d met him a few days before at a party at her old fraternity at Caltech, where he was getting steadily drunk on ice beer and talking too much, loud and fast and humourlessly, about his work here at JPL on the Cassini/Huygens mission. He’d attracted a rotating audience of student types, some intrigued, some argumentative; as the group cycled, Rosenberg would happily launch into his obsessive monologue again, as far as Jackie could tell pretty much from the beginning.

He was talking about biochemistry – the chemistry of life – on Saturn’s moon, Titan.

Jackie was intrigued. Here was a classic loser magnet, but with a story of such compelling intensity that it was attracting a crowd, if a transient one. And she got even more interested, when the sensational claims about life on Titan had started appearing in the press and the net.

She was in the middle of a new effort to revive her once-promising career in journalism, which had been pretty much dormant since her second kid was born. If she was going to progress, she knew, she was going to have to develop a nose for a story, her own story, something dramatic and compelling – but out of the way, far from the attention span of the big boys.

And maybe – she’d thought, listening to this skinny monomaniac mouthing off to a bunch of strangers about weird chemistry results from Titan, and with his eyes shining – maybe, she’d found it.

Before the end of that party she’d buttonholed Rosenberg and arranged to meet him here, at JPL. She’d figured it was a better than evens chance that he would have forgotten all about her, in which case she would have driven all this way out here to the arroyo for nothing. But when she’d arrived at the security gate, she found he’d left a media pass for her to collect.

Soon the softscreen was covered by chemical notation and complex molecular structure charts.

He said, ‘How much biochemistry do you know?’

Actually, she’d picked up a little in her graduate days. But she said, ‘Nothing.’

‘All right. I’m working in the group responsible for the GCMS results.’

‘GCMS?’

‘Gas chromatograph and mass spectrometer. In-situ measurements of the chemical composition of gases and aerosols in Titan’s atmosphere, and at the end of Huygens’s descent, a direct sample of the surface. The lead scientist is a guy at Goddard. On the lander, a slug sample was drawn in through filters and into an oven furnace, which –’

‘Enough. Tell me what you do.’

‘I’m working on high atomic number results. Complex molecules. Look – what do you know about conditions on the surface of Titan?’

‘Only what I’ve seen in the pop press the last few weeks.’

‘All right. Titan is an ice moon, with a thick layer of atmosphere. The only moon with a significant layer of air, anywhere. In a lot of ways, Titan right now is like primeval Earth – say, four and a half billion years ago. Its chemistry is mostly based around carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen. And chemistry like that produces a lot of the key molecules of prebiotic chemistry.’

‘Prebiotic?’

‘The components of life. But there’s a crucial difference. Titan has no liquid water. It’s too cold for that. The importance of water on primitive Earth is that it was a solvent. It allowed the polymerization of volatile reactive organics and the hydrolysis of prebiotic oligomers into biomolecules … I’m sorry. Look, you need water as a solution medium, so that the components, the building blocks, can assemble themselves into proteins and nucleic acids, the main macromolecules of our form of life.’

Our form of life. That phrase made her shiver. ‘But maybe there are other solvents.’

‘Correct. Maybe there are other solvents. In particular, ammonia. And we knew before Huygens that there is ammonia on Titan. Now. Look here. Look what the Huygens GCMS found.’ He pointed to a diagram of a molecule shaped like a figure eight on its side, with some of its edges highlighted in blue for double covalent bonds.

‘What is it?’

‘Ammono-guanine. That is, guanine with the water chemistry systematically replaced by ammonia.’ He looked up at her, the multicoloured diagram reflected in his glasses. ‘Do you get it? Exactly what we’d have expected to have found, if some ammonia-based analogue of terrestrial life processes was going on down there. Look at these ratios.’ He pulled up another image. ‘See that? Here, close to the surface, you have a depletion of methane and gaseous nitrogen, and a surplus of ammonia and cyanogen, compared to the atmosphere’s average. The analogy is clear. Methane and nitrogen are being used in place of monose sugars and oxygen, and you have ammonia and cyanogen instead of water and carbon dioxide –’

‘What are you saying, Rosenberg?’

‘Respiration,’ he said. ‘Don’t you get it? Something down there has been breathing nitrogen, and exhaling ammonia.’

‘So, could it mean life?’

He looked puzzled by the question. ‘Yes. That’s the point. Of course it could.’

She frowned, staring at the molecular imagery. It was exciting, yes, but it was hardly the electric thrill she’d been hoping for. Even those blurred images of the microfossils in that meteorite from Mars had had more sex appeal than this obscure stuff.

‘What do you think we should do about this?’

‘Send another probe, of course,’ he said, staring into the screen. ‘It ought to be a sample-return. We’ve just got to follow this up. Look at this.’

He studied his results, and Jackie studied him.

Right now, her own mother was on orbit, in Columbia.

In the long months of her mother’s work absences, Jackie had often wondered why it was always people with no life of their own on this planet – Rosenberg, her own mother after her lawyer husband walked out with his secretary – who became obsessive about finding life on others.

Anyhow it was academic. The funding just wasn’t there. Maybe not for the rest of your working life, Rosenberg, she thought sadly. This data, here, might be all you’ll ever see.

Rosenberg flexed his fingers, as if itching to thrust them into the ammonia-soaked slush of Titan.

‘Lei Feng Number One, there are five minutes to go. Please close the mask of your helmet.’

Jiang obeyed, locking the heavy visor in place with a click of aluminum. ‘My helmet is shut. I am in the preparation regime.’

‘Four minutes and thirty seconds to go.’

As her helmet enclosed her she was aware of a change in the ambient sound; she was shut in with the sound of her own voice, the soft words of the launch controllers in the firing room, the hiss of oxygen and the scratch of her own breathing.

Impatience overwhelmed her. Let the count proceed, let her fly to orbit, or die in the attempt!

Still the holds kept off: still she waited for the final, devastating malfunction which might abort the flight completely.

But the holds did not come; the counting continued.

The voices of the firing room controllers fell silent. There was a moment of stillness.

Jiang lay in the warm, ticking comfort of her xiaohao, the little Mao bell motionless above her, the couch a comfortable pressure beneath her, no sound but the soft hiss of static in the speakers pressed against her ear.

She closed her eyes.

And so the countdown reached its climax, as it had for Gagarin, Glenn and Armstrong before her.

BOOK ONE Landing

As the pilots prepared for the landing, Columbia’s flight deck took on the air of a little cave, Benacerraf thought, a cave glowing with the light of the crew’s fluorescent glareshields, and of Earth. Despite promises of upgrades, this wasn’t like a modern airliner, with its ‘glass’ cockpit of computer displays. The battleship-grey walls were encrusted with switches and instruments that shone white and yellow with internal light, though the surfaces in which they were embedded were battered and scuffed with age. There was even an eight-ball attitude indicator, right in front of Tom Lamb, like something out of World War Two; and he had controls the Wright brothers would have recognized: pedals at his feet, a joystick between his legs.

There was a constant, high-pitched whir, of environment control pumps and fans.

Lamb, sitting in Columbia’s left-hand commander’s seat, punched the deorbit coast mode program into the keyboard to his right. Benacerraf, sitting behind the pilots in the Flight Engineer’s jump seat, followed his keystrokes. OPS 301 PRO. Right. Now he began to check the burn target parameters.

Bill Angel, Columbia’s pilot, was sitting on the right hand side of the flight deck. ‘I hate snapping switches,’ he said. ‘Here we are in a new millennium and we still have to snap switches.’ He grinned, a little tightly. It was his first flight, and now he was coming up to his first landing. And, she thought, it showed.

Lamb smiled, without turning his head. ‘Give me a break,’ he said evenly. ‘I’m still trying to get used to fly by wire.’

‘Still missing that old prop wash, huh, Tom?’

‘You got it.’

Amid the bull, the two of them began to prepare the OMS orbital manoeuvring engines for their deorbit thrusting. Lamb and Angel worked through their checklist competently and calmly: Lamb with his dark, almost Italian looks, flecked now with grey, and Angel the classic WASP military type, with a round, blond head, shaven at the neck, eyes as blue as windows.

Benacerraf was kitted out for the landing, in her altitude protection suit with its oxygen equipment, parachutes, life-raft and survival equipment. She was strapped to her seat, a frame of metal and canvas. Her helmet visor was closed.

She had felt safe on orbit, cocooned by the Shuttle’s humming systems and whirring fans. Even the energies of launch had become a remote memory. But now it was time to come home. Now, rocket engines had to burn to knock Columbia out of orbit, and then the orbiter would become a simple glider, shedding its huge orbital energy in a fall through the atmosphere thousands of miles long, relying on its power units to work its aerosurfaces.

They would get one try only. Columbia had no fuel for a second attempt.

Benacerraf folded her hands in her lap and watched the pilots, following her own copy of the checklist, boredom competing with apprehension. It was, she thought, like going over the lip of the world’s biggest roller-coaster.

On the morning of Columbia’s landing at Edwards, Jake Hadamard flew into LAX.

An Agency limousine was waiting for him, and he was driven out through the rectangular-grid suburbs of LA, across the San Gabriel Mountains, and into the Mojave. His driver – a college kid from UCLA earning her way through an aeronautics degree – seemed excited to have NASA’s Administrator in the back of her car, and she wanted to talk, find out how he felt about the landing today, the latest Station delays, the future of humans in space.

Hadamard was able to shut her down within a few minutes, and get on with the paperwork in his briefcase.

He was fifty-two. And he knew that with his brushed-back silver-blond hair, his high forehead and his cold blue eyes – augmented by the steel-rimmed spectacles he favoured – he could look chilling, a whiplash-thin power from the inner circles of government. Which was how he thought of himself.

The paperwork – contained in a softscreen which he unfolded over his knees – was all about next year’s budget submission for the Agency. What else? Hadamard had been Administrator for three years now, and every one of those years, almost all his energy had been devoted to preparing the budget submission: trying to coax some kind of reasonable data and projections out of the temperamental assholes who ran NASA’s centers, then forcing it through the White House, and through its submission to Congress, and all the complex negotiations that followed, before the final cuts were agreed.

And that was always the nature of it, of course: cuts.

Hadamard understood that.

Jake Hadamard, NASA Administrator, wasn’t any kind of engineer, or aerospace nut. He’d risen to the board of a multinational supplier of commodity staples – basic foodstuffs, bathroom paper, soap and shampoo. High volume, low differentiation; you made your profit by driving down costs, and keeping your prices the lowest in the marketplace. Hadamard had achieved just that by a process of ruthless vertical integration and horizontal acquisition. He hadn’t made himself popular with the unions and the welfare groups. But he sure was popular with the shareholders.

After that he’d taken on Microsoft, after that company had fallen on hard times, and Bill Gates was finally deposed and sent off to dream his Disneyland dreams. By cost-cutting, rationalization and excising a lot of Gates’s dumber, more expensive fantasies – and by ruthlessly using Microsoft’s widespread presence to exclude the competition, so smartly and subtly that the anti-trust suits never had a chance to keep up – Hadamard had taken Microsoft back to massive profit within a couple of years.

With a profile like that, Hadamard was a natural for NASA Administrator, in these opening years of the third millennium.

And even in his first month he’d won a lot of praise from the White House for the way he’d beat up on the United Space Alliance, the Boeing-Lockheed consortium that ran Shuttle launches, and then on Loral, the company which had bought out IBM’s space software support division.

Hadamard planned to do this job for a couple more years, then move up to something more senior, probably within the White House. The long-term plan for NASA, of course, was to subsume it within the Department of Agriculture, but Hadamard didn’t intend to be around that long. Let somebody else take whatever political fall-out there was from that final dismantling, when all the wrinkly old Moonwalker guys like Tom Lamb and Marcus White got on the TV again, with their premature osteoporosis and their heart problems, and started bleating about the heroic days.

Hadamard was under no illusion about his own position. He wasn’t here to deliver some kind of terrific new Apollo program. He was here to administer a declining budget, as gracefully as he could, not to bring home Moonrocks.

There had been no big new spacecraft project since the Cassini thing to Saturn that was launched in 1997, and even half of that was paid for by the Europeans. There sure as hell wasn’t going to be any new generation of Space Shuttle – not in his time, not as long as a couple of decades’ more mileage could be wrung out of the four beat-up old birds they had flying up there. The aerospace companies – Boeing North American, Lockheed Martin – did a lot of crying about the lack of seedcorn money from NASA, the stretching-out of the X-33 Shuttle replacement program. But if the companies were so dumb, so politically naive, as not to be able to see that NASA wasn’t actually supposed to make access to space easy and routine, then the hell with them.

The car turned onto Rosamond Boulevard, passed a checkpoint, and then arrived at the main gate of Edwards Air Force Base. The driver showed her pass, and the limo was waved through.

He folded up his softscreen and put it in his breast pocket.

They arrived at the center of the base, the Dryden Flight Research Center. The parking lot was maybe half full, and there was a mass of network trucks and relay equipment outside the cafeteria.

He shivered when he got out of the car; the November sun still hadn’t driven off the chill of the desert night. The dry lake beds stretched off into the distance, and he could see sage brush and Joshua trees peppered over the dirt, diminishing to the eroded mountains at the horizon. Hadamard looked for his reception.

Barbara Fahy settled into her position in the FCR – pronounced ‘Ficker’, for Flight Control Room. She was the lead Flight Director with overall responsibility for STS-143, and the Flight Director of the team of controllers for the upcoming entry phase.

Right now, Columbia was still half a planet away from the Edwards Air Force Base landing site at California; the primary landing site, at Kennedy, had waved off because of a storm there. Now Fahy checked weather conditions at Edwards. The data came in from a meteorology group here at JSC. Cloud cover under ten thou was less than five per cent. Visibility was eight miles. Crosswinds were under ten knots. There were no thunderstorms or rain showers for forty miles. It was all well within the mission rules for landing.

Everything, right now, looked nominal.

She glanced around the FCR. There was an air of quiet expectancy as her crew took over their stations and settled in, preparing for this mission’s final, crucial – and dangerous – phase.

This FCR was the newest of the three control rooms here in JSC’s Building 30; the oldest, on the third floor, dated back to the days of Gemini and Apollo, and had been flash-frozen as a monument to those brave old days. Fahy still preferred the older rooms, with their blocky rows of benches, the workstations with bolted-in terminals and crude CRTs and keyboards, all hard-wired, so limited the controllers would bring in fold-up softscreens to do the heavy number-crunching. Damn it, she’d liked the old Gemini mission patches on the walls, and the framed retirement plaques, and the big old US flag at front right, beside the plot screens; she even liked the ceiling tiles and the dingy yellow gloom, and the comforting litter of yellow stickies and styrofoam coffee cups and the ring binders full of mission rules …

But this room was more modern. The controllers’ DEC Alpha workstations were huge, black and sleek, with UNIX-controlled touch screens. The display/control system, the big projection screens at the front of the FCR, showed a mix of plots, timing data and images of an empty runway at Edwards. The decor was already dated – very nineties, done out in blue and grey, with a row of absurd pot-plants at the back of the room, which everyone ritually tried to poison with coffee dregs and soda. It was soulless. Nothing heroic had happened here. Of course, Fahy hoped nothing would, today.

Fahy began to monitor the flow of operations, through her console and the quiet voices of her controllers on their loops: Helium isolation switches closed, all four. Tank isolation switches open, all eight. Crossfeed switches closed. Checking aft RCS. Helium press switches open …

Fahy went around the horn, checking readiness for the deorbit burn.

‘Got the comms locked in there, Inco?’

‘Nice strong signal, Flight.’

‘How about you, Fido?’

‘Coming down the center of the runway, Flight, no problem.’

‘Guidance, you happy?’

‘Go, Flight.’

‘DPS?’

‘All four general purpose computers and the backup are up, Flight; all four GPCs loaded with OPS 3 and linked as redundant set. OMS data checked out.’

‘Surgeon?’

‘Everyone’s healthy, Flight.’

‘Prop?’

‘OMS and RCS consumables nominal, Flight.’

‘GNC?’

‘Guidance and control systems all nominal.’

‘MMACS?’

‘Thrust vector control gimbals are go. Vent door closed.’

‘EGIL?’

‘EGIL’ was responsible for electrical systems, including the fuel cells. ‘Rog, Flight. Single APU start …’

And so it went. Mission Control was jargon-ridden, seemingly complex and full of acronyms, but the processes at its heart were simple enough. The three key functions were TT&C: telemetry, tracking and command. Telemetry flowed down from the spacecraft into Fahy’s control center, for analysis, decision-making and control, and commands and ranging information were uploaded back to the craft.

It was simple. Fahy knew her job thoroughly, and was in control. She felt a thrill of adrenaline pumping through her veins, and she laid her hands on the cool surface of her workstation.

She’d come a long way to get to this position.

She’d started as a USAF officer, working as a launch crew commander on a Minuteman ICBM, and as a launch director for operational test launches out on the Air Force’s western test range. She’d come here to JSC to work on a couple of DoD Shuttle missions. After that she had resigned from the USAF to continue with NASA as a Flight Director.

As a kid, she’d longed to be an astronaut: more than that, a pilot, of a Shuttle. But as soon as she spent some time in Mission Control she realized that Shuttle was a ground show. Shuttle could fly itself to orbit and back to a smooth landing without any humans aboard at all. But it wouldn’t get off the ground without its Mission Controllers. This was the true bridge of what was still the world’s most advanced spacecraft.

She’d been involved with this mission, STS-143, for more than a year now, all the way back to the cargo integration review. In the endless integrated sims she’d pulled the crew and her team – called Black Gold Flight, after the Dallas oil-fields close to her home – into a tight unit.

And she’d been down to KSC several times before the launch, just so she could sit in OV-102 – Columbia – and crawl around every inch of space she could get to. As far as she was concerned the orbiter was her machine, five million pounds of living, breathing aluminum, kapton and wires. She liked to know the orbiter as well as she knew the mission commander, and every one of the four orbiters had its own personality, like custom cars.

Columbia, especially, was like a dear old friend, the first spacegoing orbiter to be built, a spacecraft which had travelled as far as from Earth to the sun.

And now Barbara Fahy was going to bring Columbia home.

‘Capcom, tell the crew we have a go for deorbit burn.’

Lamb acknowledged the capcom. ‘Rog. Go for deorbit.’

The capcom said, ‘We want to report Columbia is in super shape. Almost no write-ups. We want her back in the hangar.’

‘Okay, Joe. We know it. This old lady’s flying like a champ.’

‘We’re watching,’ the capcom, Joe Shaw, said. ‘Tom, you can start to manoeuvre to burn attitude whenever convenient.’

‘You got it.’

Lamb and Angel started throwing switches in a tight choreography, working their way down their spiral-bound checklists. Benacerraf shadowed them. She watched the backs of their heads as they worked. The two military-shaved necks moved in synchronization, like components of some greater machine.

Lamb grasped his flight controller, a big chunky joystick, in his right hand. ‘Hold onto your lunch, Paula.’

‘Don’t worry about me.’

Lamb blipped the reaction control jets.

Columbia’s nose began to pitch up. Benacerraf watched through the flight deck’s airliner-cockpit windows as Earth wheeled. The huge, wrinkled-blue belly of the Indian Ocean dominated the planet, with the spiral of a big swirling anticyclone painted across it.

Now Columbia flew tail-first and upside down.

‘Houston, Columbia. Manoeuvre to burn attitude complete.’

‘Copy that, Tom. Columbia, everything looks good to us. You are still go for the deorbit burn.’

Lamb replied, ‘That’s the best news we’ve had in sixteen days.’

Angel said, ‘The Earth is real beautiful up here, pal. I wish you could see how beautiful it was …’

‘Okay, let’s go for APU start,’ Lamb said. ‘Number one APU fuel tank valve to open.’

‘Number one APU control switch to start. Hydraulic pump switches to off.’

‘Confirm I got a green light on the hydraulic pressure indicator. Houston, Columbia. We have single APU start, over.’

‘Copy that …’

The APUs were big hydrazine-burning auxiliary power units. They powered the orbiter’s hydraulics system. During the launch, they had swivelled the big main engines, and now they would be used to adjust Columbia’s aerosurfaces during the descent. During its glide down the orbiter would be reliant on the APUs; without them, and without engines to provide power, it would have no control over its fall to Earth. The power units were clustered in the orbiter’s tail, beneath the pods of the OMS – rhyming with ‘domes’, the smaller orbital manoeuvring system engines which would slow Columbia out of its orbit.

‘Okay, let’s arm those babies,’ Lamb said. ‘Digital pilot to auto mode.’

‘Left and right OMS pressure isolation switches to GPC. Engine switches to arm/press.’

‘Gotcha. Houston, OMS engines are armed, over.’

‘Roger, you are go for burn countdown.’

Lamb scratched the silvery stubble on his cheek. He looked sideways at Angel. ‘What do you say? Shall we fire these old engines, or take another couple of swings around the bay?’

‘Aw, I’m done sightseeing.’

Lamb pressed the EXEC button on his computer keyboard. ‘Five. Four. Three. Two.’

There was a jolt, and a remote rumble, and then a steady push at Benacerraf’s back.

The CRT displays cycled between a complex display of the orbiter’s horizontal position, and a burn status screen.

‘… Hey.’ Angel shifted; something about his body language changed. He was looking at a panel in front of him. ‘I got a warning on prop tank pressure, in the right OMS engine pod.’

‘High or low?’

‘High. Two eighty-five psi.’

Lamb grunted. ‘Well, the relief valve should blow at two eighty-six. Anyhow, we only need another few minutes.’

The burn continued.

Fahy’s controllers saw the excess pressure immediately.

‘Flight, Prop.’

‘Go.’

‘I’ve got some anomalies in the right-hand OMS engine pod. The relief valve has just blown and resealed, the way Tom said. That brought us down to the operating range. But now I’m seeing a pressure rise again.’

‘Will we get through the burn?’

‘Uncertain, Flight. The trend is unsteady.’

‘All right. Anyone else got anything in that OMS engine pod? EECOM, how about you?’

‘Flight, EECOM. The temperature in there looks okay. I guess the heaters have been functioning.’

‘You guess?’

‘Flight, the data looks a little flat to me …’

That meant the environment control people thought they might be seeing some kind of instrumentation fault with the wraparound heaters which kept the fuel lines from freezing up.

Fahy wasn’t too worried by the anomaly, obscure as it was. At the back of the orbiter, in the OMS engine pods, was a complex, interconnected system of engines and fuel and oxidizer tanks. For safety the tanks were situated in the two separate OMS engine pods, on either side of the orbiter. But they could feed, through isolation valves and crossfeed lines, both the big orbital manoeuvring engines and the smaller reaction control engines in either pod.

Even if there were a real tank defect of some kind in the right pod, it was highly unlikely that it could affect the left pod. The left pod’s tanks could then keep feeding both left and right OMS engines through the pod crossfeed lines. If the defect were severe enough to kill the right OMS engine itself, the left engine could keep firing to complete the burn. And even if both OMS engines were lost, the smaller reaction control engines manoeuvring jets could fire and maintain the burn, using up the excess OMS propellant.

There was a lot of redundancy in Shuttle.

It was a nagging worry, though.

She knew that those OMS engine pods, and their contents, were rated for a hundred flights; the pods flying today had completed eight and nine flights respectively. But the refurbishment schedule had been cut down in the last couple of years, by the United Space Alliance, the private consortium to which Shuttle ground operations had been outsourced.

She made a mental note to recommend the strip-down of that right OMS engine pod, maybe the left as well.

There were only a couple of minutes left in the burn anyhow. She watched the big mission clock on the display/control screen at the front of the FCR, counting down to the end of the burn.

That was when the master alarm sounded.

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.

Lamb pushed a glowing button on a central panel, above a CRT; the lights and the tone died. ‘Now what the hell?’

Benacerraf heard her breath scratch in the confines of her helmet.

A master alarm. Shit.

… But, she realized, the tone hadn’t been a siren, which would have been set off by the smoke detection system, or a klaxon, which would have meant loss of cabin pressure.

Whatever was coming down, it couldn’t be as bad as that, at least.

She tried to steady her breathing. She was supposed to be here to help, after all.

At the center of the cockpit consoles there was a forty-light caution /warning display. A small panel marked ‘right OMS’ glowed red. The engine, then.

Angel said. ‘I think –’

There was a jarring bang, sharp and abrupt.

The orbiter shuddered; Benacerraf felt the rattle through her canvas seat, and she heard the creak of stressed metal. Long-wavelength vibrations washed along the structure of the orbiter, powerful, energy-dense.

She could feel it. The thrust of both OMS engines had died, halfway through the burn.

The master alarm sounded again. Now both left and right OMS lights on the caution/warning light array glowed red.

Lamb killed the noise with a stab at a red button. ‘Goddamn squawks.’

Angel seemed to have frozen; he turned to Lamb, his mouth open. ‘That bang was like a howitzer in the back yard. What was it, some kind of hard light?’

Lamb was pressing at an overhead panel. ‘Losing OMS pressure,’ he barked. ‘Losing OMS propellant.’

Angel seemed to come to himself. ‘Okay. Uh, Houston, we seem to –’

‘Houston, Columbia,’ Lamb broke in. ‘We have a situation up here. We lost OMS.’

The master alarm sounded again; Lamb killed it again.

It was like the worst simulation in the world, Benacerraf thought.

Tell me this isn’t happening, Fahy thought. She stared at the numbers on her screen, at the flickering alarm indicators, unable, for the moment, to act – unable, in fact, to believe her eyes.

The capcom said, ‘Can you confirm that, Columbia?’

‘We lost both OMS, halfway through the burn.’

‘Copy that.’

The capcom – a balding trainee astronaut called Joe Shaw – turned and looked to her for guidance, for instructions on what to say next.

Fahy tried to think.

‘EECOM, tell me what you got.’

‘I see a sealed can, Flight.’

EECOM was telling her that the spacecraft was intact; the crew still had a life-sustaining environment. That was always the first priority, in any situation like this. It gave her time to react.

‘DPS, how about you?’

‘We think there’s maybe a telemetry problem with a wraparound heater.’

‘Where?’

‘On one of the right OMS engine pod propellant lines.’

‘EECOM, you got a comment on that? It’s your heater.’

‘It’s possible, Flight. That heater might be down. We don’t have the data.’

In which case that fuel line could be frozen. Or melting, depending on the situation.

‘All right. Prop, talk to me.’

‘Prop’ was the propulsion engineer. ‘I’ve lost nitrogen tet and hydrazine pressure in the OMS tanks,’ Prop said miserably. Nitrogen tetroxide was the oxidizer, monomethyl hydrazine the fuel for the OMS engines. ‘If my telemetry’s right.’

‘Which tanks?’

‘Both.’

‘What? Both pods? But they’re on opposite sides of the bird.’ And besides, the OMS engines – because of their importance – were among the simplest systems in the orbiter. They were hypergolic; fuel and oxidizer ignited on contact, without the need for any kind of ignition system, unlike the big main engines. There was hardly anything that could go wrong. ‘How the hell is that possible?’

‘We’re working on that, Flight.’

‘How much of a loss are you seeing?’

‘I’m down to zero. It’s as if the tanks don’t exist any more. There has to be some telemetry screw-up here.’

But we have that report from Lamb, she thought. We know the OMS have shut down. This is something real, physical, not just telemetry.

Another call came in. ‘Flight, EGIL. I got me an unhappy power unit. Number two is in trouble.’

‘What’s the cause?’

‘We can’t tell you that yet, Flight.’

‘Can you keep it on line?’

‘For now. Can’t tell how long. Anyhow performance should still be nominal with two out of three APUs.’

‘Could that be linked to this OMS issue?’

‘Can’t say yet, Flight.’

Christ, she thought.

‘Flight, Capcom.’ Joe Shaw, at the workstation to her right, was still looking across at her. ‘What do I tell the crew?’

For a moment she listened to her controllers, on the open loops. Every one of them seemed to be reporting problems, and batting them back and forth to their backrooms. Fido and Guidance were worried how the orbiter was diverging from its trajectory. EECOM was concerned about excessive temperatures in the main engine compartment at the rear of the orbiter. He was shouting at DPS, worrying about the quality of the rest of his telemetry following the heater defect. And Egil, in addition to his worries about the power units, thought the warning systems, pumping out their multiple alarms, were giving false readings.

Thus, most of the controllers seemed to think some kind of instrumentation problem or flaky telemetry was screwing their data. They couldn’t recognize the system signature they were getting. In such situations controllers had a bad habit of retreating into their specialisms, thinking in tight little boxes, blaming the data.

Except there had also been a crew report. Something real had happened to her ship up there.

Behind her, the FCR’s viewing gallery was starting to fill up. Bad news travelled fast, around JSC.

STS-143 was falling apart, and on her watch.

Another call: ‘Flight, Prop. I’m reading RCS crossfeed. It’s Tom Lamb, Flight. I think he’s going to burn his reaction thrusters.’

He’s trying to complete the burn, Fahy thought.

Lamb thumbed through a checklist quickly. ‘All right, Bill, I’m going to feed the RCS with my left pod OMS tank. I’m assuming I’ve still got some pressure in there, despite what these readouts say … Here we go. Aft left tank isolation switches one, two, three, four, five A, three, four, five B to close, left and right …’

Lamb was, Benacerraf realized, intending to burn the reaction control engines, without waiting either for the okay from Houston or even for burn targets. He was just, in his can-do 1960s kind of way, going ahead and doing it.

Angel was watching Lamb. He was working switches on an overhead panel. His gestures were hurried, careless, Benacerraf thought. His blue eyes were shining; he grinned, and his face was flushed. He was enjoying this, she realized, enjoying being stuck in the middle of a deorbit burn with two failed engines. Relishing a chance to show off his competence.

She felt a deep and growing unease.

Lamb grasped his flight control handle. ‘Initiating burn.’ He pushed the handle forward, keeping his eye on his displays. ‘Houston, Columbia. RCS burn started.’

‘Copy that.’

‘Please upload burn targets for me.’

‘We’re working, Tom. Hang in there.’

Benacerraf said, ‘Are we committed to the deorbit yet? Maybe we could just abort the burn and stay up a little longer.’

Tom Lamb glanced back at her, still holding down the flight stick. ‘The rear RCS bells are back in the OMS engine pods, remember. If something big has taken out the OMS, we don’t know how long we’ll have the RCS.’

My God, she thought. He’s right. We have to use the reaction control system while we have it, use those smaller thrusters to try to complete the burn. Because it’s all we have, to get us home.

Her perspective changed. It was, she realized, perfectly possible that she wasn’t going to make it through; that suddenly – so quickly – it had become her day to die.

For the first time since the events of this incident had started to blizzard past her, she felt real fear.

And, she thought, Lamb figured all of that out, in the first couple of seconds, in the middle of this roller-coaster ride. And made the right choice, took the appropriate action.

‘Okay, Columbia, Houston.’

‘Reading you, Joe,’ Lamb said.

‘We want to confirm you’re doing the right thing. We’re figuring those burn parameters now. Uh, I have the targets. They’re being uplinked now. And I’ll voice up the parameters to you, Tom.’

Lamb nodded at Angel, who fumbled for a scratch pad, and copied down the timings the capcom read up.

The residual burn lasted a full seven minutes.

‘Okay, Columbia, Houston. Counting you down out of the burn.’

‘Good. My arm’s getting kind of stiff, Joe,’ Lamb said.

‘Ten. Five. Three, two, one.’

Lamb released the flight control stick. He checked the orbiter’s attitude, altitude and velocity using his analogue instruments, and compared them to the CRT. ‘Hey, we got a good burn. How about that.’

‘Copy that, Columbia. Residuals are three-tenths. You’re a little off US One, a little delayed, but we figure you can recover on the way in.’

Benacerraf found she was gripping her checklist so hard her fingers hurt.

Is that it? Is it over?

The master alarm sounded, jarring.

More lights appeared on the caution/warning array, and on another display to Angel’s right hand. Lamb killed the alarm.

‘Uh oh,’ said Angel. ‘There goes power unit two.’

The capcom said, ‘Copy that, Columbia. We confirm, APU two down.’

Lamb said evenly, ‘Well, we still have two out of three APUs up and running, so we’re still nominal.’ But Benacerraf thought she could see something in the set of his shoulders.

The auxiliary power units sat in back of the orbiter, close to the OMS engine pods. And they already knew something serious had happened back in that part of the ship. Lamb, she sensed, was starting to fear that the problem back there, whatever it was, might be spreading.

The cabin darkened; Columbia had flown for the last time into the shadow of Earth.

Hadamard took his seat on the podium for NASA officers, astronauts and guests, at the end of the press line. The PA was intoning the usual incomprehensible timeline technicalities, mixed in with the crackle of air-to-ground loops. A bunch of Morton Thiokol executives came to sit with Hadamard; they were clutching their blank commemorative stamp covers, that they could get stamped at the Base post office later. Everybody loved spaceships and astronaut pilot heroes, even these crusty aerospace types. Hadamard felt sour.

A plane, sleek and white, flew low over the landing site. Hadamard recognized it; it was a Shuttle Training Aircraft, a modified Grumman Gulfstream executive jet with a computer on board that modified the plane’s handling characteristics so that the astronauts could train for the orbiter’s unique landing approach. There used to be two STAs; Hadamard had cut one, soon after he got his job. It was a waste of money. There just wasn’t the demand for that many new Shuttle pilots.

He looked out over the landing site.

The lake bed was a plain of dried-out, cracked mud, stretching all the way to the mountains that shouldered over the horizon. The runway was just painted on the surface, as simple as that. It was fifteen thousand feet long, twice as long and wide as most commercial runways, with a five-mile overrun stretching off into the lake bed. Hadamard could see a team working its way along the runway on foot, looking out for foreign objects that might have settled there. Where the desert mud had been scuffed by feet and tyres, it had turned to a fine powder that blew in the soft breeze across the press stands; Hadamard could see it settling on his patent leather shoes.

Beyond the runway Hadamard recognized the big blocky gantry of the mate-demate device, that would lift the orbiter onto its transport aircraft for the trip back to the Cape. It looked like some huge car-wash. A recovery convoy had gathered in a parking area, within sight of the runway. There was a big white-painted fire-tender in the middle of it all, and towing tractors, and a vapour dispersal truck with its big blowers, and there were the ground power and purging vehicles with their long, dangling umbilical hoses. There was a feeling of business, of competence, out there in the desert heat.

To Hadamard, a city boy whose haunt was Washington, D.C., this was a bleak alien place, inhabited by incomprehensible machines; he might as well have been transported to Mars.

There was a stir in the crowd around him.

He looked around, seeking its source. Some of the grizzled old veteran-type astronauts were looking up at the PA stands, shielding their eyes against the low sun. The air-to-ground loop sounded a lot tenser than before, with a lot of chatter about orbiter components called APUs.

Something, evidently, was going wrong.

Despite the gathering warmth of the sun, he started to feel cold.

He sure as hell didn’t want any major malfunctions showing up during this landing, or any other. It was a thought he hauled around with him constantly, during every one of these damn missions. As illogical as it might be, he knew he’d carry the can for any new Challenger-type débâcle.

Not that he’d hesitate to take several others down with him.

A couple of small, slim needle-nose jets went screaming overhead, heading up into the blue dome of the sky. They were T-38s. Hadamard knew that sending up chase planes like that wasn’t routine.

He looked around for someone to explain to him what was happening.

‘What the hell happened to APU two, EGIL?’

‘I can’t tell yet, Flight.’

‘Are the other power units stable?’

‘I’m still looking at high temperatures back there.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Maybe a fire, Flight. I can’t tell yet.’

A fire, Fahy knew, would mean the orbiter could lose all three of its power units. Loss of power units at this point of the entry would put Columbia right in the middle of a non-survivable window in the mission profile: without the power units, without hydraulics, Columbia couldn’t work its aerosurfaces, and control its glide. Without the power units, Columbia would tumble and burn up.

A fire would mean they would lose the orbiter.

Jesus, she thought.

Prop was coming up with a diagnosis of the OMS flame-out.

‘We’ve been studying the temperature rise in the fuel feeds, just before OMS loss. We figure we must have had a slug of hydrazine, frozen in there.’

‘How could that happen?’

‘Maybe during the EDO thermal tests … if we had a failed wraparound heater –’

‘Copy that.’ During the long hours in orbit, when the payload bay had been held in shadow – to test the extended-operations pallet’s tolerance to cold – maybe a little hydrazine had actually frozen in a fuel line, wrapped in a faulty heater, with no telemetry to indicate anything was wrong.

‘Then, when the burn came, and that slug heated up … The data’s chancy. The line might have exploded, Flight.’

‘What would that do?’

‘It would have gone off like a small grenade. It would have made a hell of a mess of the OMS engine pod. If the lines were ruptured, you’d have fuel and oxidizer sprayed all over that pod.’

‘But what about the second pod?’

‘Flight, there’s a crossfeed to take propellant from one pod to the other. We figure that’s how the fire crossed over. Maybe the slug was even in the crossfeed. There’s also a crossfeed to the RCS, from the OMS propellant tanks. We’re lucky we didn’t lose the RCS as well, before the burn was completed.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Flight, Egil. APU one and three temperatures still rising …’

On it went. And now the surgeon started talking about the stress levels manifesting themselves in the biotelemetry from the orbiter. There wasn’t much Fahy could do about that, any more than she could manage down her own stress levels. And behind her, she could hear the MOD manager talking quietly into his microphone. The mission operations directorate manager was a link from the FCR to NASA and JSC senior management.

It all continued to unravel.

Fahy tried to get a handle on all of this, to make some decisions.

None of her training, her experience, her orderly approach to contingency management, seemed to be helping her think her way through this. The problems here weren’t to do with her control, or with her team, but with the crummy technology which was falling apart in front of her. Even so, she was aware that she wasn’t handling this well, that Tom Lamb, with his fast decision to go for the reaction control burn, had actually achieved a lot more in this crisis than she had. With that action he might have saved the mission, in fact.

Multiple failures would always get you; it was impossible to plan for every contingency.

But maybe, she thought sourly, if the orbiter mission preparation process hadn’t been cut back to the bone, somebody might have caught this problem, before it blew up in their faces.

The master alarm sounded again.

Marcus White, Tom Lamb’s commander from his Apollo mission, was at JSC that day, for a Gemini fortieth anniversary dinner. When he heard what was going down over in Building 30, he came over fast. Now, he stood in the viewing gallery at the back of the FCR and watched as Barbara Fahy and her team of kids struggled to understand what was happening.

Unlike Lamb, Marcus White had long since retired from NASA. After his Moon landing he was passed over for the Skylab missions and ASTP. He went into training for the Shuttle flights. But when the development delays started to hit, and the first flights were pushed back past the end of the 1970s, he got a little pissed off at kicking his heels around JSC.

So he retired from NASA. At least his wife was pleased about that. He joined McDonnell Douglas out at Long Beach, and watched from outside as NASA and Rockwell between them royally screwed up the Space Shuttle program.

If Columbia failed today, it would be a horror, but not a surprise, to Marcus White. He hated Shuttle; he always had. Its flaws went all the way back to the compromises that were involved in its design in the first place, back in the ’70s. You put solid rocket boosters on a manned ship, you’re going to get a Challenger. You turn your spacecraft into an unpowered glider for the entry, you’ll have this, a Columbia. His only regret was that now, in its final failure, Columbia might take Tom with it.

Angel pushed the red button again. ‘APU temperature this time.’

‘There’s nothing we can do about that,’ Lamb said briskly. ‘Let’s position for entry.’ He grasped his control stick again, and pushed.

Under the control of her RCS jets the orbiter somersaulted gracefully forward, briefly as graceful as a 2001 space clipper. Earth wheeled, the cabin light shifting, until the planet showed before the front windows.

Columbia was facing forward now, her nose pitched up at an angle of about thirty degrees. Earth was spread out below the cockpit, a glowing blue carpet, subtly curved. The orbiter was the right way up, and descending.

Suddenly, it started to feel like a landing to Benacerraf.

‘Houston, Columbia. We are in entry attitude.’

‘Copy that, Columbia. Looking good at this time. Are you ready for your entry switch checklist?’

Lamb grinned at Angel. ‘Just like the other five times I’ve done this, Joe.’

‘I’m glad it’s you up there, Tom, if we’ve got to have a bad day.’

‘Wish you were here too, Joe. Okay, Bill. Cabin relief A and B enabled. Antiskid on. Nose wheel steering off. Entry roll mode off. Throttles full forward …’

‘Okay,’ Lamb said. ‘Loading the entry software.’ Confidently, as Benacerraf watched, he punched in OPS 304 PRO. Angel said, ‘Throttle to auto. Pitch, roll, yaw auto. Body flap to manual.’

‘Columbia, Houston. Rog. Moving right along, Tom. Nice and easy does it. We’re all riding with you.’

‘Roger that … Paula. Don’t miss the view.’

Benacerraf leaned forward and peered through the picture windows. She could see no stars, and Earth was a carpet of city lights below the prow of the craft.

She saw flashes of colour, red and green.

Angel grinned. ‘The lights of the reaction engines, reflected from the upper atmosphere. Pretty.’

‘Yes.’

Lamb said, ‘Houston, Columbia. Entry interface.’

Four hundred thousand feet, Benacerraf thought. The informal gateway to the atmosphere.

Home again.

The burn had knocked Columbia out of its orbit. But they were still more than five thousand miles from Edwards, still moving with a near-orbital velocity of Mach 25, and from now on without engines. After all they’d been through already – with a disabled engine system, and power units and RCS motors in an unknown condition – the key entry steps had still to come; the orbiter still had to shed most of its kinetic energy, and glide on home.

Now Columbia, with a rattle of reaction control solenoids, levelled its wings, and tipped up to a new angle of attack.

‘Columbia, Houston. Ready for loss of signal.’

‘Yeah. See you at Mach 12, Joe.’

A pinkish glow gathered beneath the windows, diffuse and pure, then deepening to orange. The orbiter was colliding with the thicker layers of air. The orange glow brightened, and turned white. In the corners of the windows, Benacerraf could see some kind of turbulent flow, swirls of superheated plasma. It looked like drops of rain on a car window.

Now, for the first time in sixteen days, Benacerraf felt a feather-touch of gravity, a soft pressure pulling her down into her seat.

The altimeter was steadily clicking off.

The telemetry on the controllers’ consoles turned briefly to garbage, then blanked out. A static hiss filled the air-to-ground loop.

All around the room, Fahy saw the posture of her controllers shift, subtly. They sat back from their terminals, from the suddenly empty screens, and stared at the big TV images of Edwards Air Force Base at the front of the room.

The plasma shield building up around the orbiter would soon block all transmissions, voice and telemetry, between the orbiter and the ground. The blackout would last twelve minutes, on a nominal entry anyhow. During that time the ground would have no way of influencing events on the damaged spacecraft.

And it was during the blackout that Columbia would become reliant on her aerosurfaces. It was entirely possible, Fahy thought, that if the power units failed now, Columbia wouldn’t emerge from her blackout at all.

It was going to be a long twelve minutes. Fahy felt past and future hinge around her.

It just shouldn’t be like this, Marcus White thought. We should never have built the Shuttle for the money they allowed us. We should have just refused.

When McDonnell’s DC-X experimental rocket project came along – a step towards a new generation of launch systems – White had just grabbed onto it.

He liked working with the McDonnell boys again. It was a relief after NASA. McDonnell had built both Mercury and Gemini, and it was on Gemini that White had cut his teeth. And with the DC-X, just like with Gemini, the guys at McDonnell had rolled up their sleeves and got on with it. They built their prototype for just sixty million bucks: less than the cost of two replacement microgravity toilets on Shuttle, for Christ’s sake. White liked to say that the DC-X’s liftoff weight was less than that of the paperwork required for each Shuttle launch. And so on.

But that had all changed, when the original McDonnell project ran out of money in 1993, and the DC-X was moved into the suffocating embrace of NASA. McDonnell had been forced to take the bird back to the factory at Huntingdon Beach, and bolt in all kinds of fancy modifications, like a new graphite epoxy hydrogen tank, a lox tank made from some kind of goddamn Russian aluminum-lithium alloy, and an oxygen-hydrogen reaction control system that used excess fuel from the main tanks.

It was all typical NASA. Not one of these ‘innovations’ had upgraded the bird’s performance, as far as White could tell; but they had all increased costs, reduced reliability, and sent the testing schedules spiralling off to eternity.

White wasn’t surprised when, at the end of a test flight in 1996, they let the damn thing fall over and blow up.

White just couldn’t understand it. To him, things were simple. You built ships, and you flew them. And you took the risks that went with it. That was all. He couldn’t see why the hell things should be any different.

The truth was – in White’s view – the US government was scared of developing cheap launch systems.

An SSTO, a single-stage-to-orbit new-generation bird, would come up against a lot of vested interests. It took an empire of nine thousand people to launch the Shuttle, and a lot of money went flowing out of NASA to the contractors. That was a lot of turf to be defended.

What if it was possible to demonstrate that you really only needed a launch and maintenance effort of a few per cent of NASA’s huge investment? What if it was demonstrated that every country in the world could afford its own SSTO launcher, flying out of existing airports?

The optimists said there would be an explosive expansion into space. Huge industrial efforts up there, new multinational stations, a fast return to the Moon. Blah blah. The military analysts said that von Braun visionary stuff was for the birds. What would be the military consequence of every tinpot country in the world having access to space? How about another Saddam Hussein?

Private launch contractors weren’t pushing too hard either. One or two SSTOs could mop up the whole of the world’s launch capacity, and force all the existing commercial operators out of business.

Nobody wanted SSTO. And that was why – as far as White could see – it was NASA’s job to kill programs like the DC-X: to kill it with bureaucracy, with study groups and change review boards and new, ineffective technologies.

NASA’s purpose, consistent over three decades, was to block access to space, not to build for it. Which was why Marcus White’s good buddy Tom Lamb was up there now, hanging out his hide trying to save a thirty-year-old piece of shit called Columbia, risking his life for a monumental lie.

It wasn’t good enough, for Marcus White.

As angry as he’d felt in years, White made a decision.

He marched out of the viewing area, and round into the FCR, and went straight up to Barbara Fahy. He’d been all the way to the Moon with Tom Lamb, he said, and now he was going to capcom Tom all the way home.

Benacerraf was forced deeper into her seat as the orbiter shed velocity.

Under the control of its guidance software, the orbiter tipped itself up, to change its angle of attack, and then banked slightly, to increase its sink rate into the atmosphere. Right now, the orbiter was flying blind, its external sensors overwhelmed by the plasma. Lights flickered over a panel ahead of Lamb, showing how the orbiter’s software was working the RCS jets.

The idea of the antique, crippled spacecraft doing its level best to survive, to bring home its human cargo, was somehow touching, to Benacerraf.

‘I got ten psi,’ Lamb said now. ‘Roll thrusters off. Here we go, twenty psi. Pressure climbing fast. Pitch thrusters off. Elevon control. Three hundred thousand feet.’

‘Maximum heating,’ Angel said. ‘Our leading edges are up to three thousand degrees.’

Columbia was already too deep in the atmosphere, now, to manoeuvre like a spacecraft with its reaction thrusters. From now on the orbiter had to fly like an aircraft: elevons, flaps in the trailing edge of the wings, would now control the craft’s pitch and roll. If the hydraulics worked.

The sky was a rich, deep royal blue. Looking out, she could see the curve of Earth, and the closed curvature of the horizon. She could make out the whole of the western seaboard of the USA, it seemed, from San Francisco to Mexico.

Columbia broke into sunrise, abruptly. Earth was still dark below, and the plasma glow was fading back to orange. Against the black landscape, she could still see the plasma glow, but where the sun was rising, there was a blue stripe on the horizon before her. For a second she was looking through the atmosphere at the sun, and shadows of clouds fled across the ocean towards her. But then the cabin was flooded with light, forcing Benacerraf to shield her eyes.

… She’d felt like this once before. She rummaged through her memories.

1969. A wonderful family holiday, up in the woods of British Columbia; she was ten years old, the perfect age to be a child. She hadn’t wanted to come home, to climb back down.

She had the grim feeling that she would never, quite, get over the memory of all this wonderful light, and lightness.

The Gs continued to mount, impossibly heavy. The deceleration pulled her down into her chair, and she felt as if she couldn’t keep her neck straight, as if her head was a huge, heavy box filled with concrete.

The master alarm clamoured again.

Lamb punched it off. ‘What now?’

Angel checked. ‘We’re losing hydraulic pressure, Tom. Shit.’

And suddenly the orbiter dropped like a stone.

‘Flight, Egil. I got you a diagnosis on the APU situation.’

‘Go.’

‘We think we got a fire back there, Flight. In fact the system signature is looking a little like STS-9.’

STS-9 had been John Young’s last flight. During the final landing approach on that flight, the power units had caught fire; all but one had failed on the way to the ground.

Egil said, ‘Probably we have a hydrazine leak from one of the APUs. If that’s the case, we’ll have volatile hydrazine spraying over the hot surfaces in there.’

‘STS-9 was survivable,’ Fahy said. ‘The crew got down safely and walked away.’ That was true; the power unit fire – even a subsequent explosion – hadn’t been detected until the orbiter was back on the ground.

‘But on STS-9 the leak occurred just before touchdown. Here, the leak came a lot earlier, during entry …’

‘Flight, Prop. If we have had some kind of rupture of the OMS fuel lines, maybe that’s linked to these APU problems. The position of the APU tanks, in the tail section –’

‘Save it for the board of inquiry. Egil, Flight. What’s the worst case?’

‘That we’ll be looking at an APU loss scenario. We’ll have to recommend a ditch, Flight.’

Fahy remembered, now, that the orbiter on STS-9 had been Columbia.

For long seconds, it was like a roller-coaster ride – what the controllers called a phugoid mode – as the control system tried to stabilize the trajectory. When the oscillations stopped, the orbiter was still deep in blackout.

Lamb flexed his gloved fingers, and closed his hand carefully around his hand controller. ‘Let’s see how this mother flies.’

Benacerraf knew it was time for the first big manoeuvre in the atmosphere, a wide, banking S-turn. On a nominal descent, the automatic systems were generally allowed to fly the orbiter most of the way home. Today, it looked as if Tom Lamb wasn’t going to trust the automatics any more than he had to. Looking at the broad back of Lamb’s gloved hand wrapped around the control stick, Benacerraf felt obscurely reassured.

‘ADI rate switch to high. Roll/yaw switch to the control stick …’ Lamb clenched his hand. He pulled the stick to the left.

The orbiter banked to port. The Pacific tipped up, a glittering blue skin in the morning light. Shadows shifted across the cabin, sending complex highlights from the instrument surfaces.

The master alarm sounded. Angel killed it. ‘We lost another APU, number three. Number one still online.’

Lamb leaned into his control, and the orbiter pitched over further.

‘I’m only showing seventy degrees bank,’ Lamb said. ‘It’s all I can get.’

‘You figure the elevons are screwed?’

‘It’s that low hydraulic pressure. Or maybe the last APU is going down. God damn this. I’m at the edge of the envelope, here.’

Now, at Mach 18, Columbia rolled to the right. Below the prow, Benacerraf could see the coast of California, a brown line coalescing along the misty horizon, tipping up as the orbiter rolled.

‘– Houston. Columbia, Houston. Can you hear me, Tom?’

The blackout was over. Benacerraf felt a surge of relief, illogical, profound.

Lamb said, ‘Columbia, copy. Holy shit, Marcus, is that you? How do you read?’

‘Columbia, Houston. We read you fine. Tom, we read you low on energy, and off the ground track.’

‘Tell me about it. I went phugoid back there and came out low energy. Houston, we’re down to one APU up here, and I think we may be losing hydraulic press. The elevons aren’t responding too well. Going into the second S-turn.’ Lamb leaned to the left, dragging the control stick.

‘Copy that. We see you rolling right. We have you at a hundred and fifty thousand feet, Mach 9. Looking good. Just like barnstorming old Copernicus, huh.’

‘Like hell,’ Lamb said dourly. He pulled back on the speed brake handle. That opened flaps on the vertical stabilizer at the back of the orbiter; Benacerraf could feel the increased drag. ‘Brake indicator shows a hundred per cent. Initiating third roll.’ He pulled the stick across to the right, and the orbiter tipped again.

The coastline of America fled beneath the prow of the orbiter, impossibly quickly.

Bill Angel said, ‘What a way to visit California.’

Voices crackled on the air-to-ground loops of the PA.

There was a ragged cheer from the press stand. The blackout had seemed to last for ever, but here was physical proof that the orbiter was back in the atmosphere, at least.

Now four big rescue helicopters went flapping over the press stand. They were like metal buzzards, Hadamard thought.

A couple of people had climbed out of the press stand and had tried to get over closer to the runway. A NASA car was patrolling back and forth, keeping them back.

Hadamard began to calculate what the fallout would be, depending on how this damn thing worked out.

There were a number of scenarios: the crew could survive, or not; the orbiter could survive, or not.

If everything came through more or less intact there would be a lot of bullshit in the press about NASA’s incompetence, and Hadamard would be able to come down hard on whichever contractor had screwed up this time, and the whole thing would be forgotten in a couple of days.

At the other end of the scale – if he was looking at another Challenger, here – Hadamard expected to be facing some kind of shutdown. There would be inquiries, both internal and external, forced on NASA by the White House and Congress. And Hadamard himself would be thoroughly fucked over in the process, he knew.

But in between those extremes there were a whole range of other contingencies. If the crew walked away from this, then you were looking at an Apollo 13, not a Challenger. And that could give him a lot of leverage. Hadamard had always thought NASA threw away the bonus of Apollo 13’s world attention and PR, a real gift from the political gods if ever there was one.

Hadamard wouldn’t waste a similar opportunity, if it was presented to him. He began to calculate, figuring which of his personal goals he might be able to advance on the back of the events here today.

Someone pointed up towards the zenith.

Squinting, Hadamard could make out a tiny white spark, trailing contrails. Chase planes closed in on it, streaking across the sky.

‘Flight, Egil. Number one APU is still online. But I can’t give you a prediction of how long for.’

‘All right. What else? Fido?’

‘We’re in good shape for a contingency landing, Flight. We’re well off the runway, but we’re flying down into a lake bed, after all …’

‘Inco?’

‘No problems, Flight.’

Fahy allowed a seed of hope to germinate. Maybe she could get through this after all, without losing her ship.

‘Fido, Flight. You got a recommendation?’

The Flight Dynamics Officer – FDO, Fido – had the role of recommending intact abort options. The controller – fat, young, sweating – turned to face Fahy across the FCR. ‘We ought to egress, Flight. As soon as possible; the orbiter has to hold steady during the egress manoeuvre, and if that last APU goes down that won’t be possible.’

Egress. He meant, abandon the orbiter.

Fahy suddenly felt faint, and her senses seemed to be fading out; she grabbed onto the edge of her workstation, as if holding onto reality.

Egress. The crux of history. On this moment, on her decision now, she sensed, pivoted her own life, the destiny of the mission, maybe the future of the space program.

‘You’re sure about that, Fido?’

‘Flight, get them out of there.’

At bottom, Fahy did not want to become the first Flight Director to lose an orbiter since 51-L, Challenger. But she knew Fido was right.

Hope died.

‘Marcus. You may instruct the crew.’

Emerging from the blindness of the blackout, Columbia was now able to use external sensors to confirm its state vector, its map of its position and trajectory.

To Benacerraf, now that the alarms had stopped sounding off, Lamb and Angel seemed tense but calm. Suddenly, it was like the sims once more.

… But now the capcom was saying: ‘Columbia, Houston. We, ah, we recommend you prepare for egress. Emergency egress.’

Angel stared at Lamb.

‘Say again, Marcus.’

‘Recommend you prepare for egress. The status of your APUs –’

Lamb said, ‘We’re bringing this bird home yet, Marcus.’

‘Tom, I’m instructed to remind you that an orbiter ditching is not survivable.’

‘And landing on the Moon without a fucking radar is not survivable either, and we did that,’ Lamb said. ‘Ninety thousand feet. Speed brake back to sixty-five per cent.’

‘Copy,’ Angel said.

‘Tom,’ the capcom said, ‘you must make a decision at sixty thousand. A decision on the egress. We’ve little confidence in that last power unit holding out through the landing. Tom? Do you copy that?’

The deceleration mounted; Benacerraf was forced forward, against the straps of her harness.

‘God damn it,’ Lamb growled. ‘Yeah, I copy, Marcus. But we ain’t at sixty thou yet. Fourth roll reversal.’

For the last time, Columbia banked over. When the orbiter straightened up, Benacerraf could see Columbia was flying over the town of Bakersfield, the bleak landmark at the fringe of the Mojave.

Almost home, Benacerraf thought. They were flying through the atmosphere of Earth. Egress – abandoning the orbiter now – seemed absurd.

But the ground was approaching awfully quickly. And they were miles off track.

Lamb checked his altitude. ‘Sixty thousand feet. God damn it all to hell. Bill, Paula, get down to the mid deck.’

‘Tom –’

‘Move it, Bill! You’ve got ninety seconds. I’ll configure the computer mode for egress, then follow you out. Do it, guys.’

Angel stared at Lamb for maybe five seconds. Then he unclipped his harness and stood up, shakily.

Benacerraf, her heart pounding, unfastened her lap belt. She had to lift her harness back over her head, and disconnect her oxygen tube from her thigh, and unhook the hose bringing her cooling water. She stood up, cautiously. She started to hunt for the egress cue card.

Now the decision was made – now that Lamb, up there in the hot seat, had actually concurred – Fahy began to feel a little calmer.

On the open loop, she said, ‘All right, everybody. Let’s keep things nice and tight, now. This is STS-143, not 51-L. And we’re still Black Gold Flight, remember. In a couple of minutes we should have our crew out of there. Let’s follow the book, and bring those guys home. Capcom, you want to start Tom on his checklist?’

White said, ‘Rog, Flight.’

‘Guidance, DPS, let’s get that bail-out software mode loaded and running in the GPCs.’

‘Affirm, Flight.’

‘Fido, get a good hack on the trajectory. I want no mistakes during the egress …’

As Columbia went subsonic, it hit Mach buffeting. The orbiter shuddered, like a car going over a gravel road, as the airflow over its wings adjusted.

Leading the way, Benacerraf clambered through the narrow interdeck opening on the left of the cabin. Her legs felt shaky, microgravity-attenuated, but they held her up, despite the rattling of the orbiter.

She scrambled down the ladder to the mid deck area. The four mission specialists – Chandran, de Wilde, Gamble and Reeve – were sitting in their orange pressure suits, strapped into their fold-away metal and canvas seats. They looked at her through their big bubble visors. There was only fear in their faces, none of the forced banter she’d endured on the flight deck.

Phil Gamble – an orbiter systems specialist, tall, slim, bald – had thrown up, Benacerraf saw; the vomit had splashed against the lower half of his visor, and was pooled inside his helmet, at his neck.

The mid deck – brightly lit by fluorescent floods behind translucent ceiling panels – had been roomy living quarters during the flight. Now, with the return of gravity, it seemed cramped, awkward, crowded out by the airlock and the big avionics bays at the back, full of metal angles and places to bang her knees. She felt an odd stab of nostalgia, for the days she had spent safely cocooned here, on orbit.

‘Egress,’ she said briskly. ‘Chandran, you’re the jump master.’

Sanjai Chandran was sitting in the leftmost forward seat, in front of the big bulge of the airlock. He was around fifty but looked older; his lined face and grey moustache peered out at her, full of concern. He tried to smile. ‘Yeah. But I didn’t sign up for this.’

‘Who the hell did? Come on, Sanjai –’

Chandran released his restraints. He reached down to the floor, lifted a cover and pulled a T-handle. Benacerraf heard a sharp pyrotechnic crack; a valve had blown to equalize air pressure. Then Chandran hauled on another T-handle set in the floor. More pyros exploded around the hinge of the big circular wall hatch. The noise was violent, startling, and for an instant the mid deck was filled with dense smoke. But then three small thrusters blew, pushing the severed hatch out and away from the orbiter.

The hatchway became a hole, through which Benacerraf could see the sky. Wind noise forced its way into the crew compartment, drowning any other sound. The opened hatchway was like a wound, cut into the side of the cosy den of the mid deck.

Suddenly, Benacerraf’s heart was racing. It was as if, cocooned in the warm, gentle comfort of the orbiter, she’d not accepted the reality of the obscure technical failures which had plagued the landing. But that hole in the wall was a violation, a rip in the universe.

Chandran reached down, stiffly. He pulled a pin and worked a ratchet handle.

A telescopic escape pole sprouted out of the ceiling over the hatch opening, forced out by spring tension. The steel pole snaked out of the hatch and bent backwards like a reed, forced back by the wind beyond the hull.

Chandran pulled a lanyard assembly out of a magazine close to the hatch. This was a hook suspended from a Kevlar strap. Chandran wrapped the strap around the pole, and fixed the hook to his pressure suit.

Holding the Kevlar strap in his right hand, he stepped up to the hatchway.

At the last second he turned. His mouth was half-open, a spray of spittle over the inside of his visor.

With awful slowness, he turned again. Clinging with both hands to the Kevlar strap, he stood on the rim of the hatchway. Then, ponderously, he let himself fall out.

Benacerraf could see Chandran sliding down the bent pole. He was twisting in the sudden gale, his orange pressure suit flapping against his flesh. Thread stitching on the Kevlar strap tore, absorbing some of Chandran’s momentum. He slid off the end of the pole, and started to fall away from the hull. Benacerraf could see his parachute opening, like a slowly blossoming flower.

For a moment, the egress seemed to have worked.

But then a gust picked up Chandran, and he soared in the air, his limbs loose as a doll’s.

He caromed into the black leading edge of the orbiter’s big port wing, against the toughest heatshield surface the orbiter carried. He fell over the wing’s upper surface, his parachute limp and trailing, and smashed into the big OMS engine pod at the rear of the orbiter.

After that he fell out of Benacerraf’s sight.

Sanjai Chandran – astrophysicist, father of two – was gone. It had taken just a second.

Benacerraf felt her stomach turn over, and saliva pooled at the back of her throat.

As the crew tried to bail out – tried to work through that dumb-ass tacked-on Shuttle egress system – Marcus White tried to focus on the job he’d volunteered for.

… He remembered coming down to the surface of the Moon, with Tom Lamb at his side:

He leaned forward in his spacesuit, against the restraints that held him standing in his place, trying to see. The LM went through its pitchover manoeuvre, and suddenly there was the Moon below him, a black and white panorama, as battered as a B – 52 bombing range, the shadows long in the lunar morning. There was too much detail, almost a crowd of craters. Really, it was nothing like the sims, with their little cameras flying over plaster-of-paris mocked-up landscapes.

But there was his target, the little collection of eroded craters they’d dubbed the Parking Lot, almost lost in that black and white sea of craters. ‘Hey, there it is,’ he’d said. ‘Son of a gun, Tom. Right down the middle of the road …’

The Moon’s surface had plummeted up to meet them; they were coming in like a bullet, and he’d tipped the LM back to slow it, and the eight-ball had tilted sharply …

Shit, shit. Focus, you old asshole.

It was Benacerraf’s turn.

She took a fresh lanyard assembly from the magazine, hooked into her suit, and slid it over the pole. Then she stepped up to the rim of the hatch. She clung to a handhold there, facing the air, framed by metal.

She could sense the wind, just inches away from her. The hull of the orbiter was still hot from the frictional heating of the entry, and she could feel its warmth, seeping through her boots. To her left, the wing and tail assembly were huge, blocky, black and white shapes.

And, far below, astonishingly far, she could see the Mojave. It was a brown plain, gently curving like a shallow dome, crisscrossed by pale road surfaces, and the dry salt lakes shone like glass.

Bill Angel grabbed her shoulder. ‘I know it’s hard,’ he shouted. ‘But Sanjai knew the rules. You got to play the hand you’ve been dealt, Paula. Godspeed.’

She turned and looked at him. His eyes were shining. This was, she realized, Bill’s apotheosis, what he lived for.

She thought of Chandran, and felt disgust at such bullshit.

She loosened her grip on the handhold –

– she would never have the guts to do this, to follow Sanjai –

– she leaned over the lip of the hatch, feeling the pole taking some of her weight –

– and she pushed herself out of the hatch, kicking against its sill as hard as she could.

She skimmed down the pole. She felt the brisk rip of the breakaway stitching. The hook, sliding roughly over the pole, made a noise like a roar. In a second she reached the pole’s end, and she fell away into the air.

It was like slamming into a wall. The breath was knocked out of her. And there was nothing beneath her feet for four miles. There were sharp tugs at her back as her pilot and drogue chutes opened automatically. She felt herself being hauled sideways and upwards.

She looked up.

She was already dropping away from the orbiter. She’d fallen under the port wing, and the orbiter was a huge delta shape, hanging in the sky only a few yards above her, the big silica tiles on its underside scarred and scorched. Black smoke trailed from the fat OMS engine pods on the tail.

Then it was gone, falling away into the huge air around her, trailing contrails. The white felt of its upper heatshield seemed to shine in the low morning sunlight.

Her main chute opened above her, and she fell into her harness with an impact that jarred the wind out of her.

She was no longer falling. She was just dangling here, and when she looked at her feet, she could see the thinly scattered towns of the Mojave rim, still miles below, obscured by mist. And there was the orbiter, a white delta shape, dropping like a stone, already beneath her. Skimming above the mist, it was the most vivid object in the world, receding rapidly.

She looked up. She could see four more chutes, opening out in the air.

Of Sanjai Chandran, of course, there was no sign.

She felt a sudden warmth between her legs, as her bladder released.

Gently, Lamb worked his pedals, and the control stick. He felt the crippled orbiter respond to his touch. He’d flown big aircraft, 747s and KC-135s. In them there was always a certain lag. But the orbiter was much more responsive, given its size more like a fighter than a liner; he could feel he was flying a big craft, but the responses to the controls were positive and crisp.

Today, though, Columbia was sluggish.

It was time for his own egress …

Things were calming down, though.

The master alarm hadn’t sounded for, oh, three or four minutes. And when he scanned his instruments, when he put it together, the data from his eight-ball and his CRT and his alpha-mach indicators told him that things weren’t too bad. He still had, in fact, enough energy and altitude for a feasible landing profile. Miles from the runway, maybe, but feasible, out on a dry lake somewhere.

He felt as if he’d spent half his life in front of these displays. Maybe he had, he thought. He felt at home here, in this busy, competent, glowing little cockpit.

Just a day at the office.

Lamb didn’t want to throw his life away. On the other hand, if Columbia was lost, that was the end of the space program, for sure.

Maybe it was time to rewrite the rule books, one last time.

He thought his way ahead, through the uncertainties of the next few minutes. He would have to manage his energy. He actually had to accelerate, to get to the ground with enough airspeed; by the time he got down to ten thousand feet he needed to have picked up to two hundred and ninety knots, plus or minus a few per cent.

He pitched Columbia’s nose down. His airspeed rose sharply.

‘Flight, Surgeon. I got six bail-outs. We lost one.’

‘… Six? Capcom –’

White said, ‘Columbia, Houston. What’s going on? You’re dropping out of fifteen thousand. Tom, you asshole, are you still on the flight deck?’

Fahy climbed away from her workstation and crossed to the capcom’s station. She plugged her headset into White’s loop. ‘Tom, this is Fahy. Get your ass out of there.’

‘You’re breaking up, Barbara. Anyway, since when has a Flight Director spoken direct on air-to-ground?’

There was a stir among the controllers.

A picture of the orbiter had come up on the big screen at the front of the FCR. It was hazy with distance and magnification. White contrails looped back from the wings’ trailing edges. And black smoke poured from the OMS engine pods.

Thirteen thousand feet.

Lamb looked down at the baked desert surface. It was flat, semi-infinite, like one huge runway. It was why Edwards had been sited out here in the first place.

Columbia flew over the straight black line of US 58.

This would make a hell of a tale to tell the boys over a couple of Baltics at Juanita’s, like the old days.

Fahy was still talking.

Patiently, he said, ‘If you’re going to be the capcom, give me my heading.’

‘Tom –’

‘Give me a heading, damn it.’

‘Uh, surface wind two zero zero. Seven knots. Set one zero niner niner. Tom –’

Now he was down to ten thousand feet, and that dip had earned him around three hundred knots extra velocity. Not so bad; he ought to be able to land within six or seven miles if he worked at it …

He got another master alarm. Main bus undervolt. That last power unit was giving out on him. But it wasn’t dead yet.

He punched the red button to kill the clamour.

There was no sound at the press stand, save the barking crackle of the PA’s air-to-ground loop.

The recovery convoy was racing off across the desert surface, towards the orbiter’s projected touchdown position, miles from the runway. They raised a dust cloud a thousand feet tall.

The orbiter was huge as it came in, impossibly ungainly. It was gliding down a steep entry path, as smooth as if it were mounted on invisible rails.

You could tell the bird was sick. Even Hadamard could see that, at a glance. There was some kind of black smoke billowing out of the fat engine pods at the orbiter’s tail. The pods themselves were badly charred and buckled. And there were yellow flames, actual flames, licking along the leading edge of that big tail fin. The public affairs officer said that was hydrazine, leaking out of ruptured power units over the orbiter’s hot surfaces.

But it wasn’t a disaster yet. In the distance Hadamard could see five billowing white parachutes, like thistledown, drifting down through the air.

Hadamard tried to think ahead. He was going to have trouble with that arrogant old asshole Tom Lamb, when he emerged from this, covered in fresh glory. He’d have to be kicked upstairs to somewhere he and his old Apollo-era buddies could be kept quiet, once the first PR burst was over …

Arrogant old asshole. Suddenly he pictured Tom Lamb sitting on the flight deck of that battered old orbiter, alone, struggling to bring his spacecraft home.

His calculation receded. Hadamard found he was holding his breath.

To increase his rate of descent, he pushed forward on his stick. The back end of the bird came up a little, and the attitude change increased his sink rate.

It was a steep descent: at seventeen degrees, five times as steep as the normal airliner approach, dropping three feet in every fifteen flown. He was pretty much hanging in the straps now, falling fast. He tried to keep his speed constant, by opening and closing the speed-brake with the throttle lever. He could feel the brake take hold, dragging at the air.

Way to his right, he could see where the runway had been painted on the bare desert surface, remote, useless. Beyond it was a group of drab, dun buildings: it was the Wherry housing area, where he’d once lived, when he’d flown F-104 chasers for the X-15s. But that had been in the middle of a different century, a hundred lifetimes ago.

Two thousand feet.

‘Beginning preflare.’ Using his hand controller and his speed-brake, he started to shallow his glideslope to two degrees.

Columbia responded, sluggishly, to the manoeuvre. But his speed was about right.

It was still possible. Even if the landing gear collapsed, even if the orbiter slid across half the Mojave on its belly. As long as he held her steady, through this final couple of thousand feet.

The baked desert surface fled beneath the prow of the orbiter, already shimmering with heat haze.

At a hundred and thirty-five feet, the orbiter bottomed out of its dip. He lifted the cover of the landing gear arming switch, and pressed it. At ninety feet, he pushed the switch.

He heard a clump beneath him, as the heavy gear dropped and locked into place.

‘Columbia, Houston. Gear down. We can see it, Tom.’

‘Gear down, rog. I’m going to take this damn thing right into the hangar, Marcus.’

‘Maybe we’ll dust it off a little first.’

Just a few more feet. Damn it, he could jump down from here and walk into Eddy.

‘Coming in a little steep, Tom.’

‘Yeah. Could do with a little prop wash right here.’

‘Hell,’ said White, ‘stop complaining. You never had to nurse a sick jet home to a carrier, in pitch darkness, in the middle of forty-foot Atlantic swells. Even a black-shoe surface Navy guy like you can handle this …’

Now for the final manoeuvre, a nose-up flare, to shed a little more velocity.

But now the master alarm sounded again. He didn’t have time to kill it.

According to the warning array, the last power unit had failed.

He jammed on the speed-brake, and shoved at his stick. If he could pitch her forward, get her nose flat – maybe there would be just a little hydraulic pressure left –

But the stick was loose in his hand, the throttle lever unresponsive.

The orbiter tipped back.

He heard an immense bang from the rear of the craft, as the tail section struck Earth.

Columbia was still travelling at more than two hundred knots.

The orbiter bounced forwards, tipping down as its aerosurfaces fluttered. He could feel the bounce, the longitudinal shudder of the airframe. And then came the stall. The orbiter had lost too much of its airspeed in that tail-end scrape to sustain lift.

The nose pointed to the ground.

Now – with the master alarm still crying in his ear, and the caution/warning array a constellation of red lights – the Mojave came up to meet him, exploding in unwelcome detail, more hostile than the surface of the Moon.

Barbara Fahy watched every freeze-framed step in the destruction of OV-102.

The second impact broke the orbiter’s spine. The big delta wings crumpled, sending thermal protection tiles spinning into the air. The crew compartment, the nose of the craft, emerged from the impact apparently undamaged, trailing umbilical wires torn from the payload bay. Then it toppled over and drove itself nose-first into the desert. It broke apart, into shapeless, unrecognizable fragments. The tail section cracked open – perhaps that was the rupture of the helium pressurization tanks – and Fahy could see the hulks of the three big main engines come bouncing out of the expanding cloud of debris, still attached to their load-bearing structures and trailing feed pipes and cables.

The black smoke billowing from the tail section was suddenly brightened by reddish-orange flames, as the residual RCS fuel there burned.

The orbiter’s drag chute billowed out of its container in the tail. Briefly it flared to its full expanse, a half-globe of red, white and blue; then it crumpled, and fell to the dust, irrelevant.

White thought of Tom Lamb. It was like a vision, blinding him.

… Tom came loping out of a a shallow crater, towards White. Tom looked like a human-shaped beach ball, his suit brilliant white against the black sky, bouncing happily over the sandy surface of the Moon. Tom had one glove up over his chest, obscuring the tubes which connected his backpack. to his oxygen and water inlets. His white oversuit was covered in dust splashes. His gold sun visor was up, and inside his white helmet White could see Tom’s face, with its four-day growth of beard …

Damn, damn. It was as if it was yesterday. That was how he was going to remember his friend, he knew; as he was during those three sun-drenched days they’d had together on the Moon, both of them feeling light as feathers: the most vivid moments of his life, three days that had shaped his whole damn existence.

He turned away from the FCR screens.

The morning California sunlight was bright. It illuminated the expanding cloud of dust and smoke, turning it into a kind of three-dimensional, kinetic sculpture of light, set against the remote hills surrounding the dry lake beds.

Hadamard, beyond calculation, knew he would spend the rest of his life with this brief sequence of images, watching them over and again.

Jiang gazed at the glistening curvature of Earth: the wrinkled oceans, the shadow-casting clouds stacked tall over the equator. Outside the cabin, all the way to infinity, there was no air; just silence. She felt small, fragile, barely protected by the thin skin of the xiaohao.

Where she passed, she relayed revolutionary messages, reading from a book she had carried in a pocket of her pressure suit. ‘Warm greetings from space,’ she said. ‘Everything that is good in me I owe to our Communist Party and the Helmsman of the Country. This date is one on which mankind’s most cherished dreams come true, and also marks the triumph of Chinese science and technology …’

The words were so familiar to her, homilies from classes in politics, as to be almost meaningless. And yet, here, alone in the blackness of space, with the blue light of Earth illuminating the pages of the book, she felt filled with a deep, unfocused nostalgia. She felt growing within her an abiding attachment for her huge country, for the billion-strong horde of her countrymen: the brash entrepreneurial class in the bustling coastal cities, the peasants still scratching at their fields as they had done for five millennia. She was of them, and so of the Party which, after seven decades, still ruled; she would, she knew, never be anything more or less than that.

But now the ground controllers were telling her, in clipped sentences, of some disaster involving the American Space Shuttle. They sounded jubilant, she thought. They had her intone words of sympathy, of fellowship, broadcast from orbit.

The truth was she felt little concern, for whatever might have befallen the American astronauts. This was her moment; nothing could diminish that.

Though she knew she would be under pressure to become an ambassador for the space program, for the Party, and for China, Jiang intended to battle to stay within the unfolding program itself. The Helmsman had stated that a Chinese astronaut would walk on the surface of the Moon before 2019: the seventieth anniversary of Mao’s proclamation of the People’s Republic. Jiang felt her grin tighten as she thought about that. It would be a remarkable achievement, an affirmation that China would, after all, awake from her centuries-long slumber and become the dominant world power in the new millennium.

And it was only fifteen years away.

Jiang would still be less than fifty. Americans and Russians had flown at much greater ages than that …

And so she read the simple words of soldier and Party leaders, as she sailed over the skin of Earth.

Paula Benacerraf, suspended, could hear sounds, drifting up to her from the huge, empty ground below. Her own breathing was loud in her ears.

This was the end of the US space program, and the end of her own career.

Earth was claiming her. For the rest of her life.

She could see her future, mapped out. Her destiny was no more than to be a survivor of Columbia, and somebody’s mother, somebody’s grandmother, for the rest of her life.

She’d never get back to space again. She’d never again drift in all that light, never see the lights of her spacecraft as it drifted in its own orbit beneath her.

Like hell, she thought. There has to be an option.

She tucked up her legs, keeping away from the Earth as long as she could. But the impact in the dirt, when it came, was hard.

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 rumours 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 pot 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 roughhewn 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 colour 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 fibres, 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 like 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 So, 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 colour, 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 colour. 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 mélange 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 US 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 US assembly flight; it would have delivered the first US 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 ’oo 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 II 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 US 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 rumours 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 the 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 per cent, 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 favourite 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 faeces.

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, Sean 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 résumé. 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: boiler-plates, 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 42, Site I –”’

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 practised 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’ heatshields.

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 hard-line 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, and 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, colourful, 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 vapour 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, labouring 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 honoured 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 per cent and the colour 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 stalked 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 colourless 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-coloured 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, Ji-ang?’ 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 ethnic? 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 endeavours. 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 US. The rest of Apollo – the later flights, even the rest of the Apollo II 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 colours, 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.’

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