For Keeps

by J. R. Dunn

He banged against something as he came in. The sound rang out in the hangar’s quiet, that achingly pure quiet you get only in rooms facing vacuum. I closed my eyes against the whirling stars. I knew who it had to be, even as I turned to look. This thing was going to end no better than it had begun. I’d known as much since I’d seen his name on the Tycho shuttle manifest this morning, but hope dies hard.

With an expert grab at an anchor line, he halted himself beneath the door of a Coelus GTV. His suit was open, his helmet under one arm with the gloves stuffed inside. Setting them within easy reach, he started buttoning up. He didn’t see me. I was floating in plain sight in front of the port and difficult to miss, but he wasn’t expecting me either. He was clearly preoccupied, his eyes never shifting from the tiles at his feet.

I kicked off from the window. Halfway across the hangar, I called out: “Hey, Doug.”

His head shot up. With narrow eyes he took in my approach, not quite startled and even less pleased. At last he allowed himself a smile. “Gid.”

I pulled up ten feet or so away. He resumed closing the suit. The years hadn’t changed him much; he was still the blond, blue-eyed Plains kid walked out of the pages of a Cather novel. A few lines around the eyes, a touch more firmness to his features, no more than that. The Filipino princess and the All-American boy. I’d forgotten who had called them that. It had been a while.

“So how’s Luna?”

“Luna?” He sounded as if he’d scarcely heard of the place. “It’s okay. It’s fine. They keep you busy. It’s …” He looked around him, his face a mask. I wondered how the place appeared to him. His last glimpse of it had been filled with panic, and cries, and acrid yellow-brown fumes. I swallowed against a bad taste at the back of my throat, as if those fumes had never quite fully dispersed.

“… it’s all new up there, Gid.” He shrugged. He’d never been what you’d call eloquent. A blue tag on the GTV’s door handle told me it had been prepped. He’d know the current operations codes too. He still had friends at this station. “That your ride?”

His expression went cold. “You know what I’m here for.”

“Could only be one thing.”

He paused with the helmet at chest level. “You won’t pull regs on me, Gid.”

“Why don’t we-”

“You won’t pull regs on me.” Slipping the helmet over his head, he started dogging it down.

“You notify, uh … night ops?”

“Night ops?” His face reddened beneath the shadow of his visor. “That what you call her now? No name. Just ‘night ops’. Can’t say I blame you.”

His hands touched the helmet ring, then dropped back. “Yeah. I notified her. You’re damn right. No answer, so I e-mailed her.” He half-swung toward the entrance, left hand instinctively gripping the line. “And she’d better damn well show, or I will track her down and drag her here as soon as I … when I …”

He fell silent. Flicking shut the final helmet catch, he lifted his right arm to begin the suit diagnostic. “When I get back.”

“You want help with-“

“No!” He glared a moment before going on in a calmer voice. “No, Gid. I’ll run the checks myself.”

“Fine.” I drew my legs up into what some people call my “orbital swami” pose. “Tell me somethin’-“

“Later, Gid.”

I raised my hands in surrender, then glanced at the operations board under the control room window. The light glowed amber, showing that a vessel was out. Doug hadn’t noticed that either. The mission clock beside it clicked over to twenty-six as I watched. Twenty-thirty minutes to rendezvous, same duration back … We didn’t have long to wait, actually.

Keys clicked as Doug started his check. I quirked my lips. He hadn’t even asked what I was doing there.

My eyes dropped to the port, to the bright stars turning in their slow, unending circles. It had started right here, in this very space, under the light of those stars. I had been thinking about it when he came in. There was really no way I couldn’t.

· · · · ·

I don’t often give personal tours to newcomers, but I’d found time for Miriam Espinosa. Above and beyond her looks, she was the kind of woman you wanted to do things for. Not an uncommon quality; all women have it to some degree, the same way all women in some way resemble Deneuve or Gong Li. Nor was I alone in that opinion-the entire Flashlight engineering team halted work as one the moment we cleared the lock.

“It’s so different.” She’d seen the hangar when she’d arrived two days ago, but being chased through with twenty queasy tourists is a less-than-complete experience. “It looks … empty.”

I supposed it did, with the shuttle gone back to dirt. I was about to mention as much when her hair caught my attention. Most women who spend any time up cut their hair short. Not Miriam, not yet. I found myself hoping the thought would never occur to her. I gestured at the billowing halo, which was moving as if with a life of its own. “Best you see to all that.”

“Oh yes.” She began searching her bag. I took her elbow-a standard microgravity courtesy that she didn’t flinch from the way many do-and steered her toward the port. We passed a couple GTV’s, a satellite undergoing repair, and the Flashlight, surrounded by assorted no-account techs. I gestured a warning at them behind her back. Their leader, Doug Hearn, winked and set a tool twirling in midair. She ignored him. “Right here, Mimi, you’ll see a GTV. General Transfer Vehicle, the Gooney Bird of LEO. Go anywhere, do anything-“

“What’s a Gooney Bird?” Miriam asked, hair on its way to tidy bowhood.

By the time I got that explained, we’d reached the port. Five by twenty, set in the center of the hangar door. She let out a little sigh, exactly as I thought she would. There really aren’t many places on the Rock where you can see outside-the restaurant, the observatory, Irwin’s penthouse-fewer where the view is as good as here, with pure night only two inches away. She didn’t notice when I let go her arm.

She whispered something that sounded like, “… to the red limit.” One finger reached out to touch the pane, exactly as she might have done as a child, as if, were she to push hard enough, she could break through and take one of those big bright stars for her very own. She tilted her head and smiled at me, as if aware that it had been a lot of work throwing it all together and that she appreciated it. “But you can’t see Earth?”

“In a little bit.” The Rock is tilted the way it is for good reasons, though it does precess enough to bring the Blue Marble into sight at regular intervals. I looked at my watch. “But first, check this out.”

A second or two passed before an object drifted into view from the window’s bottom left-hand corner. A shapeless blob, strangely hazy against the sharpness of the stars. Several bright spots within changed configuration as it moved diagonally across the window, and sudden glows and shafts of light appeared and vanished at different points. “What is it?”

“That’s 243 Ida. Third and final Apollo-Amor asteroid inserted into Earth orbit.” After what happened to this one, they’d be parked at L2 from here on in. We were looking at a salvage job-Ida had not weathered insertion at all well. Asteroids are not solid objects; they’re collections of debris ripped apart time and again by collisions and close planetary approaches over the epochs, held together by forces little stronger than sentiment. The Rock is no exception.

Though Lennie Irwin had selected it due to its relatively solid core, quite a few pieces had been allowed to go their solitary ways while it was being wrestled into Earth orbit. (It was funny-when Miriam had asked me about Lennie, it had been in breathless terms-Lennie, lassoer of asteroids, the man who had grabbed an Apollo-Amor body using Russian boosters and a polyglot crew. It had been a long time since I’d thought of Lennie that way-to me he was the dumpy, middle-aged guy with the Bronx accent constantly whining about his “power requirements.” Sic Transit Gloria Mundi.)

This bunch-a Japanese-Canadian group with rumored Mideast backing-was greedier, and was paying the price. The crews out there were working overtime to avoid a bank-busting series of UN fines. It would take a hell of a lot in the way of iron, platinum, and water ice to pay those.

“You think they’ll make it?”

I had my doubts, but couldn’t come up with a diplomatic way of putting it. “What’s this red limit here, now?”

“Edge of the universe,” she said impatiently, as if to a child. She turned back to the glass and smiled. “All the way out.”

“Where’d you come across-“

Miriam’s bag let out a beep. She slipped out a pocket transcriber.

“You’re recordin’ this?”

“I’m interviewing you.”

“Me? Why?”

“You’re the manager of a space station.”

“Assistant director. Don’t get me in trouble with the boss, now.”

“The only boss here is-“

Behind me someone whistled. I shot a glare over my shoulder, held my tongue when I saw Doug Hearn standing alone. He smiled. “Theah’s a spacecraft a-comin’ in right this-here minute, Hound Dog. Best you-all cleah the hanguh space.”

The light beneath the control room window went red. “Okay, Doug. We-uns hears.”

Miriam looked at me wide-eyed. “A ship’s docking? Right now?”

“You heard the man.”

“Can we watch?”

“Not from here. You don’t want to be near that door when it opens.” Ida 243 slid from view, the Rock’s rotation making it appear to be scooting back the way it had come. Thank God it wasn’t my problem.

I started us across the hangar, surprised and pleased to find Doug nowhere in sight-I’d been convinced he had plans. My judgment must be slipping.

We passed through the main lock. It’s difficult to shepherd a novice through microgravity while avoiding the swing-that-bale effect. I was concentrating on that chore and complimenting Miriam on her efforts at assistance when Lorne Mills emerged from the control room. She took one look at Miriam and shot off.

“See, I’m getting good at this,” Miriam said.

“Sure. Day or two more …” I gazed after Lorne. Miriam’s looks provoked more than one reaction. There was admiration, and there was envy, and there was this: a product of the unpleasant recent history they brought to mind. Miriam was in fact a Desterrada. She shouldn’t have been … Oh, I know, the Expulsions shouldn’t have happened to anybody. But Miriam’s people were Filipinos, not quite the Latino “ethnic parasites” the Diamondback mobs were after. A kind of overelaborate politeness was the rule. Open rudeness-that was a whole ‘nother piece of nevermind, as my granny would have put it. The kind you’d expect from Lorne.

I halted outside the control room door. A touch overconfident, Miriam kept going. I was kicking off after her when an arm reached from beyond the frame and grabbed her. Doug Hearn floated into view, smiling as wide as you please. So he did have plans. Burt Zogby was at the board, with Marc Lurey, resident expert on orbital debris, keeping him company. By the time I finished introductions, the hangar door was swinging open.

Zogby gestured at the craft waiting outside. “That’s a GTV-“

“Uh-huh,” Miriam said. “Gooney Bird of space.”

The conversation turned gladiatorial, each male present trying to outspeak all others for the right to explain things to Miriam. All but me. I sat back and enjoyed the spectacle. Age has its privileges.

“It’s spinning to match our rotation. See how the stars are moving-“

“That’s automatic. A program handles that during approach-“

“Like on the shuttle.”

“-now Mimi, watch while we move it in-“

“-no closer than ten yards in free flight. Regulations-“

“We shoot out the boom … Why don’t you show Mimi how that works, Burt?”

The boom telescoped to the GTV’s anchor, and the clamps shut tight. Zogby checked the readouts then drew the ship inside.

“Can’t they just fly in?” Miriam asked.

“They could, but during design phase-“

“They’d dirty up our nice clean tiles,” Doug said. I liked Doug. He was the kind of guy you wanted out in the dark with you. Smart, sharp, good-looking. A lot like me at that age. Second man down on his particular totem pole, the guy who got the work done.

Miriam bent toward the window. “Nobody’s in there?”

“See-” Zogby began. Lurey had already dropped out, as was perfectly correct, he being close to my age, and as an astrophysicist shy around girls by divine fiat.

“She’s empty,” Doug spoke with the firmness of a man certain of victory. “No sense wasting anybody’s time on a routine mission. That one was shipping … what, Burt? Right-superconductor cable to the new rock.”

“The asteroid. We just saw it. In fifty pieces.”

“More than-“

A sudden noise overbore all talk. No familiar sound, nothing at all you’d hear on Earth. A cross between a clang and a thud that seemed to hang in the air, reverberating for long seconds on some level at the edge of hearing. We all remained silent a moment before Zogby breathed, “Whoo-“

“Second one this week.”

“Third,” I said.

Mimi looked between us, her expression all surmise. “Third what?”

“We just got gonged, Mimi.” Doug’s tone was proprietary. “What we call ‘orbital debris.’”

“A meteor?”

“Coulda been …”

Or a satellite component, a dropped tool, asteroid spill, or any other piece of junk lost in LEO in the seventy-odd years since Sputnik I separated from the R-7 booster. Orbital debris was one of a class of problems that might be called “do-it-tomorrows”: the tooth that twinges now and then, the squeak in the suspension that comes and goes, the ethnic minority who are better off as they are. Letting them slide works for a while, and, the universe being what it is, that’s often the best you can do. But it doesn’t work forever, and eventually the makeshifts have to be pushed aside for drastic action.

Tomorrow had come for orbital debris. Decades of neglect had turned Low Earth Orbit into a four-dimensional, ever-shifting minefield. We’d endured no deaths as yet, but it was only a matter of time. In the past six months, Slattery had lost an arm to an unidentifiable metallic scrap, and a Russian whose name I could never recall had been splattered with shrapnel. The toll on equipment was far worse: nineteen satellites destroyed, and three times that number hit. Crews were taking bets on which manned flights got dinged. A year ago it was which day the Rock would suffer, but nobody was interested in covering the present odds. Ida’s breakup was the last shovelful. We were being shotgunned out of orbit by our own trash.

Doug snapped a finger at me. “Don’t look so grumpy, Gideon. We’ll fix it.”

“Sooner the better, Doug.”

He gestured in the general direction of Earth. “Wasn’t me postponed the launch, Stonewall.”

Miriam frowned. “Launch what?”

Lurey nodded at Doug. “This man’s in charge of the Flashlight, Mimi.”

“The laser thing?” Her face lit up. “I’m supposed to talk to you!”

A dozen vague daydreams evaporated with those words. All just as well-I had no time for daydreams, no matter how sweet. I turned to Zogby. “Check the surface crews, will you?”

Doug was pointing out the window. “That’s the laser thing, there in the corner.”

“Doesn’t look like much.”

“You haven’t seen it up close.”

Mimi bit her lip as if considering it. “Show me.”

“Everything cool topside,” Zogby told me. “They didn’t even notice it.”

“Good.” I’d been there when Slattery was brought in, his arm swinging loose, his face masked with blood from the blowback. I didn’t want to see that again. I gestured at Mimi. “You two go ahead. Doug, she wants to see Little Europe.”

“Sure thing.” Doug ushered her out. “Gid can’t go there. They got a warrant out for him.”

The GTV was down, the boom detached and retracting into the ceiling. Zogby closed out the flight report. As I signed, I noticed the damage frame blinking red. It figured.

I was dropping to hangar level, my mind on something Doug had said, when Lorne popped out quickly enough to startle me. “Who the hell is she?”

The first thing to be said about Lorne is: She’s the only person I’ve ever met with violet eyes. The second is that she’s the type who cultivates an entourage, with everything implied. I had a run-in with her three days after I arrived, at a welcome dinner thrown by the staff. I was watching my alcohol intake, the way you do in a low-gee environment, and she made some remark about Southern men who couldn’t hold their liquor. I don’t even remember what I told her, something about the fluid sure running to somebody’s head. It fixed her well enough. Since then we’d maintained a truce. I’d even, somewhat against my better judgment, signed off on her promotion to safety director. But we understood each other.

Lorne (somebody’s wide shot at “Lauren,” I would guess) swung her eyes toward the hangar. “Her,” she said, as if there were any question about whom.

“Miriam’s the name.” I considered asking how she figured it to be her business, but that might be considered enemy action. “She’s a reporter.”

Lorne absorbed that and with a snort kicked away. I looked after her, reflecting that some women could sway even in microgravity. I was glad I’d never been tempted.

I heard laughter as I passed the hangar entrance. I would have paused had I not been in midflight. But I was twice her age, and Doug was better than most, and I had work to do.

· · · · ·

Work can be defined as that form of activity that expands despite all efforts applied to it.

Proof of that axiom was winking at me from my message system as I stepped into my office. A half-dozen calls, each claiming priority A status: Dino Ferrante, two congressional staffers, the East Wing protocol office, some agency I’d never heard of, and the code I’d learned to recognize as Roy Laxton’s.

I knew what they were about: Potus was coming. Potus (that’s what they insisted on calling him, all but Laxton, who referred to him as “the Principal”) had looked up one day to behold the Rock crossing the southern horizon and decided it was time to set foot there. We’d had visits from film stars, diet gurus, retired Latin generalissimos, Nobel Laureates, rock singers (walking nightmares, both of ‘em), mobsters (they’d behaved better), and even royalty. But for some reason it had never crossed my mind that I’d ever play host to the President of the United States, which is what Potus stands for.

I didn’t mind. I’d voted for him, and it could be argued that he owned the place. What I did mind was the tidal wave of imbecile makework that preceded him. For a trip that was supposed to be secret-so secret that only I of all personnel aboard the Rock was allowed to know about it-the news seemed widespread along the Potomac. Dino, the official majordomo of this floating palace, based himself in Washington and was in a position to intercept most of the nonsense. But Dino was also a veteran of that agency whose name cannot be spoken aloud and was conditioned to cringe. As a result, enough in the way of clerks, bureaucrats, politicians, junior officers, and assistants to secretaries slipped past to bedevil my days and bring my plans to naught. As far as I could gather, the calls from the unknown agency, the protocol office, and the staffers were of this pest category-the staffers in particular: They’d been warned against such presumption.

Which left Dino, who could wait, and Laxton. As Secret Service agent in charge of Presidential security, Laxton was a special case. He and I had got off on the wrong foot last week when I put a block on his calls along with those of the interns and secretaries. Matters had not improved in the interim. We’d been playing phone tag the past two days, Laxton being inexplicably absent from his office. Another hour or two wouldn’t hurt him either.

It had occurred to me to wonder why Potus had chosen this particular time for his visit, with only ten days’ warning to boot. I suspected that Doug had provided the answer without even being aware of it, a surmise I wanted to get straight in my mind before speaking to anybody. Switching on my monitor, I retrieved his last memo concerning the Flashlight.

There is one sure way of dealing with orbital debris. Oh, I’ve seen all the proposals: the magnetic scoops of cunning design, the smart nets, the solar-powered lobster traps. My favorite took advantage of the GODS effect, the variation of the upper atmosphere under the impact of solar activity. Somebody at SRI suggested a bank of mirrors to create a “dramatically enhanced, though localized, atmospheric expansion.” Only the fantastic engineering requirements (those mirrors would have been a kilometer-plus in diameter) halted the destruction of every man-made object in LEO.

The sole practical solution remained the Flashlight, formally known as the strategic orbital laser. Lasers aren’t news. I doubt anyone will forget the day the first pair, snuck into orbit as “surveillance satellites,” shut down the Third Kashmir War as it was about to go nuclear. They’ve been fired more often than many might guess since then. Now, after fifteen years, the original SHEL-1s were being replaced. Fitted with new engines and refueling capability, they’d be let loose to wander between LEO and GSO and back, vaporizing small pieces of litter and sending larger ones into the atmosphere through thermal shock.

Doug Hearn had been working on the project three months, about double the allotted time due to inevitable delays. But this last snag hadn’t been a program rewrite or a missing part. Not trusting memory, I wanted another look.

Naturally, the phone readout, flashing the bright red signifying none other than Roy Laxton, started ringing the minute the memo appeared. Envying my descendants of ages to come, when relativistic effects will put an end to offhand calls from Washington, I picked up. “Cummins.”

“Your answering machine down?”

Laxton didn’t sound angry. He never sounded anything. His voice never changed. Always that smooth, efficient, thinking-cog tone. It got spooky after a while. You spent your time trying to second-guess him, to figure out what he was really saying. As a result, conversations tended to go his way. “I’ve been running my station.”

“God made beepers.”

“He also made messages. I got yours.”

“Same here. And that’s what we’re going to cover now. Namely, what is your problem with the security program?”

“Hold one,” I told him. I hit the keys. The screen flickered, then displayed the seal of the U.S. Secret Service and the title DRAFT SECURITY PROGRAM-POTUS VISIT IOS. Laxton would flip if he saw how casually I was handling the file, supposedly a 128-bit cypher document. I scrolled down a page or two. “Here we are. ‘Track all pedestrian traffic along facility’s passageways, noting number of passersby, direction of travel, and average composition. Establish a detailed log for every hour of each twenty-four, seven-day period-’”

“Wait-“

Wait, hell. I jumped a page. “‘Catalog by type, cross-indexed with make and usage, all power and lighting equipment, electronic devices, kitchen utensils and equipment, and related items. Include model number, manufacturer’s name and address, year of manufacture …’ Somebody wrote in ‘lab equipment’ and ‘entertainment devices’ too. I admire completeness, Laxton.”

“Director-“

“I could go on. The photos, for instance. Current shots of everybody, staff, tourists, what have you? I’m supposed to do that, evidently. Take their pictures.”

“Director-“

“You know what you get, you give me a camera? Picture of my thumb. Your people will be after my thumb.”

“Cummins, can you give me access?”

“My pleasure.”

Almost immediately, he made something like a grunt of pain. “You’ve got the draft version.”

“That’s what it says.”

About five seconds passed. “I’m sending you the working-“

“Hold one, mister.” I wasn’t thinking that some staffer’s mistake had handed me the initiative over Laxton. I really wasn’t. I don’t play those kind of games. But there was a point or two I wanted clarified, and this was the first opportunity to come my way. “Before you do that, tell me something. I can’t remember you ever explaining why you think the Principal … the President of the United States, is in danger of attack on my station.”

“Because it’s possible.”

I shook my head. Laxton had a way with unexpected, unanswerable statements. But at the moment, I was simply not in the mood. “Good answer, Laxton. I thought I’d heard ‘em all the past week, but-“

“Because it’s possible. You have a UN office.”

“You’re not scared of the UN.” It had been three years since a handful of UN officials had been discovered instigating coups in favor of Unimondism. Our half-dozen UN people were uniformly polite and well behaved.

“No, Cummins. You’re right. I’m scared of this …”

The text on screen vanished, replaced by a week-old news photo of an explosion at a Tonga tracking station. The damage was so complete I couldn’t have identified it without the caption.

“And this …”

A wrecked car of an unfamiliar make. It took me a moment to recognize the dead driver’s name, another for the twinge of sadness that followed. I’d known him: a Chilean satellite technician I’d met at the Cape.

“And this …”

The State Department seal, a WARNING heading. A terrorism alert against attacks on “… space-related installations, facilities, and companies, not necessarily owned or connected to the U.S.”

“You read that alert, Director. I know you did. You’re a serious man. You read it, you thought about it, and you blew it off. Because the Terror Conflicts have been over a dozen years. Because the troglodytes are tamed. Because we’re all civilized now, and civilized people never act that way. Am I correct?”

It seemed to me that graciousness was the only route open. “Point taken, Agent Laxton.”

“You have eighty-odd Europeans on your station. Who are displeased with the Yankee Millennium. Who think the universe is not big enough. Who would like to see us knocked back to their level, and who are going to lose it when the Principal’s trip is announced. They make it possible. And because it can happen, it will. That’s how I have to play it. An engineer can go by probabilities. I don’t have that luxury.”

“Understood.”

“Good. Now, I am sending you the working program. I would like you to go over it carefully. I would like you to isolate anything you believe superfluous, and inform me. I would like the remainder undertaken as soon as possible.”

“Fine.” An impulse seized me. “Superfluous. The Flashlight stuff, for instance.”

“Beg pardon?”

“Flashlight. The laser.”

He was silent so long I thought I’d said too much. “They actually call it that?”

“Engineers.”

“Cute. Well, that … may be necessary.”

I switched screens to Doug’s memo. Damn well right it was.

“I’ll be at the Cape. We finished training ahead of schedule-I spent the past two days banging around the back of a KC-10. We’ll be up Thursday.”

“See you then.”

I sat staring into space for a minute. Laxton had that effect on you. I couldn’t disagree with him. Yes, the President’s trip was important. Yes, there were dangers. Yes, we all had to pull our weight. But there was something about the way Laxton handled it … Hard to pin down, difficult to put into words, but …

I just couldn’t help thinking how nice it would be if his job was being done by somebody who said what he meant.

At last I turned back to the screen. Like most engineers, Doug was no writer. His memos were contradictory, subgrammatical, never to the point. But this one was clear enough: “Houston says hold on launch 1 week. Dunno why. New date is the 24th.”

In other words, Monday, the second day of the President’s visit.

President Carl Vecker was making the trip to give his imprimatur to the Flashlight system. Lend it some of his considerable clout. Perhaps even see it off. What better climax to the first presidential trip into space than overseeing the launch of the system that would keep us there? It was clear even to me, politically naive as I was, that a lot could be done with it. A fine gesture, clever and bold, very much in Vecker’s style.

It also shed new light on Laxton’s concerns. Europe was worth being scared of. The sick man of the millennium, with its internal passports and surveillance, the system it called “socialism,” though better described by a more Italianate term, the swordpoint relations among its own members and the world at large. The Europeans had effectively sat out the terror campaigns only to be cheated (as they saw it) of the bounties that had followed with the opening up of the liberated Southern Hemisphere states. Sullen and fearful, the Europeans hated the idea of lasers firing at will in orbit, if only at would-be meteors. That was the reason for decommissioning the weapons and replacing their stealth armor with bright civilian casings. A related attempt at conciliation by giving the EU subcontractor status ended with Spatiale dropping the project due to “ministerial changes.” Several nasty statements from Bruxelles had been recently overtaken by silence. Laxton was no fool. The President, lasers, and Europe were a bad combination.

So maybe I should have worried. Maybe my good spirits represented a failure of seriousness. But they weren’t all glee at discovering something I shouldn’t. It simply felt better knowing. Knowledge brought certainty, and with certainty came confidence. The Flashlight put a period on events. All I had to do was see it launched, and I couldn’t picture anything stopping that.

The news report had popped on screen again, as lousy software will. That vista of wreckage, those figures expressing puzzlement and frustration by their very stances. You can never defeat terror completely. Terror is a weed. You stamp it out one place, it pops up another. For the very simple reason that, properly applied, it works.

I pressed exit once, then again for the memo. The standard palm-to-screen security ritual opened the new document. I was pleased to find it much shorter. Halfway through, it occurred to me that Mimi had a nice little story coming.

· · · · ·

I didn’t get a break until two days later. One minor item the Service required was headquarters space next to the presidential suite, with extra exits, electrical wiring, and about three times the number of broadband cables as anyplace else in the station. A lot of work, particularly since I couldn’t mention what it was for and had to rely on personality for urgency. Personality got quite a workout dodging questions.

When Wednesday and the weekly dance rolled around, I decided I was too tired, changed my mind, then changed it back again even as I was checking the final wiring job. I settled at last on a short walkthrough. With Laxton’s people due tomorrow, I needed a break and, frankly, wanted more than just a glimpse of Miriam.

The dances were the idea of a couple tour directors intent on taking advantage of the station’s low gees. Enamored with microgravity, they’d originally requested use of the hangar, an idea I put to sleep immediately, along with the notion that the dances would be reserved for tourists only, with staff and mining crews left to gnash their teeth in outer darkness. Raves in Space were a solid success, not the least because they allowed tourists to mingle with the wild and strange systems engineers and orbital retrieval specialists in their natural habitat.

The music ceased as I reached the door. I waited while the dancers returned to their seats. The “dance hall” was actually the auditorium with tables added. Not small, but not your big-city ballroom either.

I pushed through the tables. Nobody recognized me; no reason they should. A lot of moneyed Turks and Ukrainians-gengineered crop kings, I gathered. A package tour, everyone a little stiff, the men in suits, the women dressed for the Sultan’s coronation.

I crossed the Slav belt, the tables claimed by the Russians that Irwin liked to hire. They recognized me, all right, and were eager for me to sit down and drink a toast. I’d done that once and learned my lesson. They’d kept me there half the night, trying to teach me songs in Russian between shots of vodka (the hall serves only wine and beer, but they bring their own).

I’d just spotted Miriam when Blazik from Supplies caught me: “Whatzis IID jazz, anyway? What’s going on over there?”

“IID? What about it?”

“Room off IID. They been driving me nuts. Gimme fifty yards of this. Two dozen that. And they all got work orders signed by you.”

“Oh, that room? That’s nothing. It’s like gargoyle-mafia-helicopter-amoeba, y’know? Hey there, Mimi! Yeah, I’m comin’ … Check back with me on that, Blaze. Tomorrow, yeah …”

The kiss that greeted me made me glad I’d changed my mind. “I missed you!” she cried.

“I missed you too.” I’d seen her whizzing by more than once, always with a wave and a laugh, always with Doug. The casual observer might have thought they’d taken over the Rock by force majeure and were inspecting their conquest. Maybe they had.

Doug sat smiling broadly, as if he’d gone to great lengths to arrange this meeting and was pleased with the outcome. Burt Zogby and his wife Jays (I never knew what that was short for) shared the table.

I gestured Miriam close. “Doug treatin’ you right? You sure? He’s from one of them Box States, y’know. All farmers round there. Don’t know how to look after a woman.”

“Box States!” Doug threw his head back and let out a long, loud peal of laughter. “Don’t you worry, Colonel Gid. I went through Bama once. They done learned me how to treat womens down there.”

“Bama?” said Zogby. “They got women there?”

“Oh yeah. Plenty of ‘em. There was this roadhouse with a dirt floor and a mattress-“

“Hey!” Miriam slapped his hand. “Be nice!”

“Yeah, Doug.” That was Jays. She was from Tennessee and thus almost civilized. “Leave Bama alone.”

The music started back up. It was Zydette, not my favorite-if I want synthesized accordions, I’ll listen to Norte. Miriam grabbed my arm. “Dance with me!”

“Oh no!”

“He’s put women in the clinic doing that, and this at half a gee,” Burt Zogby explained.

“Yeah, but they were kinda sick already …” My smile faded at the sight of Burt and Jays staring past me with barely-concealed expressions of horror.

Lorne Mills was approaching the table. A Lorne new to me, one I couldn’t recall seeing before, dressed in a set of shimmering, multicolored, tourist-shop tights that outlined every curve of her body from collarbone to calf. A pair of four-inch heels threw her butt out and chest forward. Her face bore enough in the way of cosmetics to make her look like a deep-sea creature, and her hair was slicked up into what I call the “dropped from a fifty-story building” style.

She strode to Doug without a glance at the rest of us. His smile didn’t so much as waver as she bent to whisper in his ear. With a shrug and a wink at Miriam, he got to his feet. Lorne’s eyes swept past Miriam without pausing, as if her chair were empty of anything more than a beer spill or the odd stale peanut.

“So Mimi!” Jays said brightly. “What do your folks think about you coming to the Rock?”

“Oh, my dad was out of his mind. Some kind of explosion happened at the Cape when he was a kid, and he kept saying-“

My perch on the adjoining empty table gave me a clear view of Doug and Lorne sweeping in and out among the other couples. At first things merely looked intense, Lorne speaking through gritted teeth while Doug maintained his smile. An eddy in the tide of dancers whirled them out of sight.

“… my aunt. She calls it ‘espace.’ ‘Miriam, what will you do in espace?’ I couldn’t get it across. She thinks I’m out here making films about comets or something …”

When they reappeared, Lorne had drawn herself up to glare at him eye to eye. Doug spoke, and she reared back, her hand flashing so quickly I nearly missed it. Doug didn’t: Catching her wrist inches from his face, he laughed and shook his head.

“Hemisphere Newsnet-I never watch that. Too much south-of-the-border stuff …”

“Burt, what a thing to say!”

“You’ll watch it now, right? Well, that’s why they sent me here, Burtie.”

There was some action at floor level that I couldn’t make out clearly, though I suspected Lorne was trying to kick him. Shifting his grip, Doug grabbed her elbows and lifted her off the floor. Doug was a big boy, and as much of a build as Lorne might have, she didn’t mass more than fifty-odd pounds in this acceleration. He could haul her around for a good long time without breaking a sweat, and that seemed to be just what he had in mind.

Making a show of it, he carried her to the edge of the crowd and began a circuit of the dance floor. Lorne hung there in frustration, unleashing a fruitless kick or two before bending her head and methodically cursing him out. A good thing it wasn’t audible above the music.

“Say Chevy, Mimi.”

“Burt, stop that-“

“Ah, I think it’s cute. C’mon, Mimi.”

“Don’t worry, Jays. He can’t make me say that. No way I’m just going to pop out and say Chayvay-” Covering her mouth with both hands, Miriam let out a little scream. I turned to Burt. Instead of laughing as I’d expected, he was staring open-mouthed at the dance floor, having just caught sight of Doug and Lorne. Jays nudged him with her elbow. Miriam, bless her, paid absolutely no attention.

The tourists, under the impression it was some kind of exotic low-gee custom, clapped and whistled. The Russian miners knew better. I heard catcalls from them. I considered stepping in-staff were throwing me glances from the other tables. Lorne’s temper wasn’t unique; Doug was known to blow his top on occasion. Time for me to show the tin star … I was moving to get up when somebody poked my leg. “Say ‘interplanetary,’” Burt demanded.

“What?”

“‘Interplanetary,’” Burt repeated.

“You get.”

“Please, Gid,” Jays said. “Say something in Bamese.”

“I will do no such damnfool thing-“

Burt cheered, and the women clapped their hands. “Very good, Gid!” Jays said. “Now let’s hear ‘interplanetary.’ It has at least three Hs his way,” she explained to Miriam.

“What’s all this?”

I looked up to see Doug returning from the dance floor.

“Gid’s speaking in Bamese,” Miriam said.

Doug stopped to stretch, as well he might. “I do that better.” Dim as the room was, one half of his face seemed more red than the other. He hadn’t gotten away unscathed. “Who’s for something to drink?”

“Not me-” I began, just as somebody, this being my night to get poked, touched my shoulder. It was Ziegler, the Rock’s resident conspiracy nut. A valuable resource, Zee, his constant reiterations of a vast plot encompassing every event from Pearl Harbor to the last satellite shutdown balanced by the fact that he kept his eyes open. “Russians, Chief,” he growled at me.

I followed his pointing finger. Across the room, a clutch of miners were tossing somebody toward the ceiling, to see how close they could get without him actually touching. “Aw-I told ‘em not to do that …”

“Oh my …” Miriam clenched a hand at her throat. “Someone could be hurt that way.”

“People have been hurt.”

The victim’s clothes caught my eye. “Zee, is that a tourist?”

“Yeah. Ukrainian.”

I set out without another word. All we needed was a brawl. Damn that Irwin. Never heard of discipline; did nothing but pamper those stilyagi of his …

I got it broken up with no casualties-the tourist was somebody’s cousin. After that I was required to drink at least one toast, which brought my tiredness home at flood tide. Deciding to call it a night, I looked around for Miriam, finding her on the dance floor. As I watched, Doug, hands circling her waist, lifted her high. She threw her head back, hair streaming as they whirled together.

I passed Lorne on the way out. Sitting alone, staring at the dancers, finger tapping the rim of an empty glass.

· · · · ·

“How long does it take to get used to this … lightness?”

“It’s a half-gee.” I considered telling Laxton that you needed a rotational axis of over a hundred-meters-plus for full gee equivalent without ill effects, but decided to let it go. “Less than a day and you’ll be right at home.”

“Wasn’t expecting it.”

“You always miss something.”

Laxton gave me a glance that said maybe I always did. He was as tall and muscular as I’d expected, balding, but in a way that didn’t hurt his looks. A closed face, cold blue eyes. I couldn’t guess his age.

The Secret Service detail had arrived two hours earlier, six agents (though it seemed like more) along with two White House staffers. That pair-Matt and Jennie-seemed harried to the point of hysteria, while the agents moved in smoothly and quietly, as if they’d been born on the Rock.

We were walking up A, the main corridor, about to pass III. The place was bustling, as it had been since I’d announced the news over the PA. The excitement was palpable among both staff and tourists, the atmosphere crackling as I’d never before known it.

“Little empty, isn’t it?” Laxton paused to gaze down the length of cross-corridor III. Lots of doors and windows, not many lights.

“We’re just gettin’ started. Year or two, we’ll be filled up and cuttin’ more.”

He nodded and moved on. “You had a list of people we can consult, Director?”

“That’s right. Files too-“

“We have their files.”

“I got ‘em handy. Shoot ‘em to you soon’s your system’s up.”

“It’s up.”

I suppressed a frown. He hadn’t laid eyes on his office yet. It was nice to be so sure. “Right away, then.”

“I appreciate it. All reliable, I assume.”

“Sure. But hey, that’s true of all my people-“

“Really.” He came to a stop and without a change in tone or expression informed me that John Doe was wanted for a hit-and-run in Costa Rica, while another was a suspect in a still-open murder investigation in Oregon, and somebody else had successfully overcome a crack habit.

I took a deep breath. Fortunately, none were on my list. “Sorry we don’t meet your standards.”

“Oh, you’re pretty good. A group of two hundred plus, there’s always problems. I’ve seen worse. Our range as law enforcement officers is narrow, and they’re outside it. We’re concerned with one thing: threats against the President. And the sources of those threats are well understood: untreated chronic schizophrenics, schizoid misfits, and …” He paused. I followed his gaze. Miriam was approaching, an intent expression on her face.

“Ms. Espinosa,” Laxton called out. “Could I see you a moment?”

“I’m on my way.” She was dressed in a black, loosely draped jumpsuit that worked better for her than the tights had for Lorne. Drawing near, she reached out and pinched my sleeve. “Gid, why are you wearing a turtleneck?”

I’m one of those people who like it hot. Eighty and up is comfortable, anything under, freezing. I can live with the Rock’s mid-70s average, but some days it gets to me, and this was one of those days. “Only thing I had clean.”

“You didn’t care what history would think?”

I shrugged. “I did not.”

“Ms. Espinosa …”

She faced him, hands clasped before her. “Agent Laxton.”

“You’re free this afternoon? Good. You know where my office is? I’d like you to drop by in half an hour or so.”

“Sure,” Miriam said. “But since I have you …” Her recorder appeared. “Are you enhanced, Agent Laxton?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Our audience is fascinated by the topic of bioenhancements. They can’t get enough of it. Do you understand that? Neither do I. But there it is.”

“I’m afraid I’m not free to answer.”

“Uh-huh. Then how many of your agents are enhanced?”

“That’s classified too.”

“But … more than a few.”

“Most of them, Ms. Espinosa. Let’s continue this at the office.”

“As you wish.” Crossing her eyes at me, Miriam moved on just as a voice called her name. Doug, hands on hips, stood glaring straight through me at Laxton. I’d noticed that he’d grown a little protective of Miriam lately. “Hey, suit-” he called out as she joined him. Miriam waved him to silence.

If Laxton heard, he didn’t show it. “Politicals, Director. People with a political gripe. Say, a Latina victimized by-“

“Her people are from the Philippines.” The low-voiced argument faded down the hall, Doug’s voice loud enough to underline a few choice references to “bureaupunks.”

“My mistake. Who was victimized during the Diamondback disturbances and may well have a chip on her shoulder, as many do.”

“Excuse my skepticism at a government agent lecturing me about the Expulsions.” Virtually nobody on government payroll, federal through local, had made a single move against the Diamondback mobs.

“I understand,” Laxton said. “Some of us acted better than others. Some stood on the barricades in Houston stopping the trucks from getting through. Some of us just stood around.”

I dropped my eyes. Gorton, known to history as the “semi-president,” had sat out the Expulsions at Camp David in preference to any move that might be construed as leadership. The Diamondbacks controlled a lot of votes, and you could find people who claimed that the disturbances had come at an awfully convenient time for the Gorton administration.

By its very nature, the Secret Service is a nonpartisan organization, but men being political animals, everyone has a line beyond which he cannot remain aloof, and the Expulsions violated that line for many Service personnel. They didn’t speak out, they didn’t protest, they did nothing but hover. All of them, on duty and off. Staring at Gorton in his bathrobe when he got up, in his jogging shorts as he ran, in the old work shirt worn to make him look like a man of the people. It must have been quite an ordeal for someone as spineless as Gorton to be forever leading a silent parade of some of the most foreboding-looking individuals on the planet. After three days of it, he fired them and brought in the Marines as replacements.

I knew what Laxton was telling me. He was one of the stand-ups. He had nothing to be ashamed of. I’d spent a large part of my adult life demonstrating, to myself as much as anyone else, that I was not an example of the kind of country the Diamondbacks had made it seem. I wondered how much harder it had been for Laxton.

He resumed walking. “You get along with her quite well, don’t you?”

“Good policy to be friendly with the press.”

“That reporter from Gaianet a year ago.”

“Him?” The guy invaded my office after somebody mentioned the Rock’s small effect on the Earth’s magnetic field, screaming that we were “violating Mother Gaia’s aura.” “She will reject you,” he screeched. “She will thrust you from her womb!” I had rejected him, and thrust him from the Rock. “I try. Don’t always succeed.”

“It doesn’t strike you as odd-her showing up when she did, getting close to not only the station chief, but the engineer in charge of the laser project?”

I glanced behind me. Mimi and Doug had vanished. “Where’d you hear that?”

“I have sources.” His blue eyes studied me as if deciding what size box would do and what could best be trimmed if I didn’t fit. Finally he smiled. “I just need to talk to her, Director. That’s all.”

We’d reached that point where A ceases being a corridor and changes its nature to “tunnel,” its unfinished walls stretching the six-hundred-odd feet to Little Europe. He took in the distant lights. “I was annoying just then. Deliberately. But we have to be. The nature of the mission. You understand me, I’m sure.”

“You’ve got an edge, and you can’t lose it.”

“Exactly!” He looked pleased, an authentic expression at last. “I can’t claim we won’t be trouble. I’d be lying. If we aren’t the biggest pains in the ass you’ve ever encountered, we would not be doing our jobs. But it’s not personal. And I can tell you this, Gid: It’ll be worth it. You’re in for a tough five days, but you’ll be proud when it’s finished.”

“Don’t let me slow you down, Roy.”

He gestured with his chin. “This is about as far as you go, isn’t it?”

The first and only time I went to Little Europe, they acted as if I were ringing a leper’s bell. An honor guard of steering officials pretending English was as dead as Latin while their security glowered and the tourists tittered. The message could not have been clearer. “You could put it that way.”

“How do you tolerate it?” Another agent, wearing a suit identical to Laxton’s, appeared at his elbow.

“I don’t tolerate it, I revel in it. Everything they send me, be it complaint, demand, or threat, goes right down the chute. They didn’t box me in-they boxed themselves out.”

I couldn’t tell if Laxton’s nod was directed at me or the agent whispering in his ear. “I’m wanted,” he told me.

“Go right ahead. I’ll schedule a general meeting early.”

“We’ll be talking.”

I watched them go, sorting out conflicting impressions, trying to shake the feeling that my measure had been taken. That ceased when I caught sight of Lorne.

The Rock’s safety office is located on the main corridor to make it easy for tourists to find, should they have a question or need reassurance. At the moment, Lorne was standing at the door watching Laxton pass, a smug look on her face. I was glad she’d come out. I required a word with her.

I called to her as she turned to go inside. For a moment it seemed that she’d just keep moving, but at last she paused. She held a coffee mug and looked her age this morning.

“That’s our presidential bodyguard,” I told her.

“I know.”

“He’s a toughie. Doesn’t miss a single thing. Somebody could cause a mess of trouble fixin’ him wrong.”

She made a face. “You have a point?”

“The point is you’d best drop it, whatever it is.”

“Who the hell are you to talk to me like that?”

I considered asking if she needed a fax of the station’s organizational chart, but that would be playing it her way. “You know what I heard this mornin’? I heard that Miriam Espinosa pulled a train last night for the entire Russian mining team. Now where’d that come from, Lorne?”

“Ooh … You got some nice friends, Gid.”

“It was Dolly told that story.”

Lorne went bright red. Dolly, a food service tech, was one of Lorne’s ladies-in-waiting. But if I believed embarrassment would shut Lorne Mills down, I was much mistaken.

I thought of Doug the night before as she lunged at me. “Now you look here: Your interference with my personal life is to cease and desist this instant. You have sided with that brownie slut against one of your own staff, and that is as far as you go. My boyfriends are mine, and I will decide when somebody can start picking through my trash.”

Spilled coffee dripped from her hand. With a snarl, she splattered the rest across the corridor. “I wasn’t finished with that son-of-a-bitch yet!”

I shook my head. “Lorne, I do hate it for you, but-“

“Piss off, you hick.”

The door slammed in my face. A thin door, like the others on the station, one that would crack readily with one swift kick. But that would be playing it her way too. Instead, I took a deep breath and started down the corridor.

One of Laxton’s people, a blond who looked as if she’d never shared the same universe as guns or terrorists, approached me with the wave of a handset. “Director, I’m doing traffic analysis, and I have a question or two …”

I wondered how this one had been enhanced. “Fire away.”

· · · · ·

The mission clock read thirty-eight minutes. Back then it had been smaller and off in a corner where clutter made it difficult to see. I changed it around during the restless weeks following the Presidential visit. I’d considered a complete redesign of the hangar, but I’d dropped that idea. Close as I could figure, I needed to hold Doug another fifteen to twenty. He was taking his time, which was fine by me. The more he helped, the better I liked it.

I hadn’t heard much about him from Luna. Oh, the everyday “I saw Doug,” or “the Hearn kid was around,” but beyond that-what projects he was working on, who had hired him, how he was doing-zero. I should have heard something. He should have made an impact wherever he went. The few e-mails I sent were unanswered. After a while, I was half-convinced he’d entered the monastery.

He drifted out of sight as he checked the boat. I heard the beeps of his notebook interfacing with the GTV’s IR ports. I wondered how he planned to handle launch. Even with the proper codes, he couldn’t leave without somebody running the board. Not legally, anyway. Would he dare try to override with me watching? In LEO, taking out a vehicle without proper clearance was more than a violation, it was in the nature of a sin. No way an offense of that magnitude could be covered up. It would end his days in space.

Swinging into view, Doug halted himself on a payload strut, losing hold of a glove in the process. It shot in my general direction. I stretched, certain that I’d miss it until I felt the rough carbon-fiber weave smack against my palm. Steadying myself, I winged it back to him.

He waved it in the old rigger’s gesture: Got it-thanks. His eyes went quizzical. “You’re not wearing your turtleneck.”

“Did I always wear a turtleneck?”

“No, but … that’s how I picture you.” He rubbed his nose, transformed the gesture into a wave at the boat. “Y’know, I’m paying for the fuel and everything. Maintenance. All covered.”

“I’m not worried about that.”

“Well, you should be,” he said sternly. “You’re the boss.” He let out a piece of a laugh. I allowed myself a smile.

“You don’t think much of what I’m doing, huh?” He shook his head. “I don’t blame you. But … I’m not here for trouble, Gid. I just want this over with.”

His face took on a faraway look. “You know, on Luna, Earth’s always there. You’re outside on a job, and you look up, and bang, it just hits you. It’s like there’s nothing else. And when you can see Earth … you can see the Rock. You can’t miss this place either. Nights when I can’t sleep, I go up and I look and I think …”

He pointed at the hangar’s right-hand corner, a spot he couldn’t see from where he stood, a spot I’d hoped he hadn’t noticed. “That’s where the exhaust hit, right? Sure it is. You know, I never saw that, I didn’t know it was there. But if you woke me up on Luna and asked if there was a stain, and where, I could have told you.

“How do I get away from that, Gid? Where do I go?” He raised his hands. “There is no place.”

Beware the Thunderbolt. That’s what the Italians call it: the Thunderbolt, the all-embracing passion, beyond logic, beyond sense, beyond sanity. Doug had been struck in the worst possible way, the one person who could have saved him forever beyond his reach, leaving him to suffer alone. I wondered if there was any alternative for him. I wondered if I would do the same.

“I’m not gonna lay a hand on … Night Ops, there.” He gestured with his head. When he went on, his voice was thick. “But she’s got to look. Just once. So she knows. So-“

A sudden clatter from outside cut him short. He squeezed his eyes shut and slowly turned around.

A figure wearing gym trunks, a pair of sneakers, and nothing else bounded into the hangar and snagged the first static line. Anatole, one of Little Europe’s hotel recreation consultants and a fitness nut to beat them all. He was typical of what Europe was sending us these more easygoing days. I occasionally found myself feeling nostalgic for the sullen apparatchiks. “Ah-directeur! It is you. Just this moment, I notice the light and thought, ‘interesting-’”

“Anatole-“

“So I mount the ramp, and who do I see-“

“Anatole, look here-“

“You note the time, eh? Now, what are you up to?”

“Doug, will you give him a taste of your boot?”

Anatole frowned. “I see I intrude.”

“Yeah, you intrude. Now get.”

With a faint snort, Anatole got. Doug watched him go. “Am I wrong, Gid, or are people getting weirder?”

“Have I got stories for you.”

The alert buzzer sounded, in rhythm with the blinking red alert light. Doug regarded it with surprise. “Ah, Gid … I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you might be in the middle of something. I should have guessed. Is it important?”

“Yeah, it is.” I swung myself toward the nearest lock. Even as the line left my hand I recalled which lock it was. But it was too late to change.

· · · · ·

The iron hand has no place in running a space station. Mir and Alpha, each in its different way, demonstrated that clearly enough. In fact, I’d argue that you can’t run a space station at all, in the accepted meaning of the term.

A sociologist up to study “the modalities of hierarchal systems in a synthetic environment” called my method “the higher hypocrisy.” He was being neither facetious nor insulting. As he put it, the two poles of operating a complex organization are “bureaucratic legalism,” the way of the anthill, the army, and the old agency, and the “communitarian” approach, which, all unknowing, was the way I did things: a light touch (“exploiting the unwritten social codes”), a blind eye to inevitable misdemeanors (“employing a carefully balanced regime of hypocrisy”), and dealing with larger breaches on a personal level (“assuring that, officially, nothing at all happens”). The system polices itself, authority is preserved by not being tested, and irritants of the Lorne Mills variety are controlled by allowing the “social norms” to have their play. Even unintegrated elements-the hotel staff, the military, and Lennie’s pirate crew-obey the unspoken consensus. It was very convincing. I only wish I’d asked how the Europeans fit in.

Eventually, people smarter than me will come up with refinements. The prof implied as much: “The key is the tension between authority and informality. I wonder if you’ve found the proper mix. It works now, but in a crisis situation …”

Too bad he didn’t hang around. (He went on to Luna to study the monastery: “An internalized authority structure in a pioneer milieu. Fascinating.”) The longed-for crisis had arrived, revealing drawbacks in the Cummins method.

The staffers were the first challenge. Matt was a whiner, Jennie the half-crazed compulsive so familiar in White House personnel this century. Neither viewed the station with approval. Our software was crude. There was no band to greet the President. Our facilities were rather basic, weren’t they? Not a novel syndrome; you see it all the time in tourists, who spend the first day up thinking that they’ve blown a hundred grand on something merely strange, with no perceptible positive aspect. The situation was complicated by a series of practical jokes instigated by people who should have known better, taking advantage of the basic properties of zero gravity and called “curb shots.”

Putting an end to the bouncing, I explained that this was a frontier, which meant certain limitations that should best be viewed as opportunities. I suggested some solutions, assigned advisors-the very people who had been utilizing them as cue balls-and let the norms get to work. That took up Thursday night.

But even as I got the staffers off my back, the Service clambered on. Nobody, needless to say, had been goading them into racing up the hangar ramp. The shoe was on the other foot where Laxton’s mob was concerned.

“Gideon, there are men in my kitchen. They’re opening things and looking in them.”

It was seven in the morning, and I wasn’t thinking straight, so instead of making the concerned parties come to me, a process I’ve found gives people a chance to cool down on the way, I went to the cafeteria myself. Halfway there I discovered I’d left the phone in my other pants.

I expected Laxton to be leading the posse, but I was mistaken. Instead, I found two junior agents who weren’t quite certain who I was and cared even less. It took me the better part of twenty minutes to get them straightened out, allowing, all unknown, chaos to have its way all over my end of the Rock.

I didn’t discover the depths of it until I reached the office. A blinking message light was waiting. “Play back,” I said, expecting another wailing department head. Instead, I got a breathy and quite unfamiliar female voice identifying itself as AsiaPac NewsNet, recommending that I call immediately to be interviewed on the (sigh) upcoming Presidential visit.

I erased it and went on. “Hey, Gid.” It was Blazik down in supplies. “I open up and this pair of doofuses in suits came in pokin’ around. Long story short, I threw ‘em the hell out. Said they’re gonna report me to Laxton. Who’s Laxton? Gimme a buzz.”

It occurred to me to look at the message counter. The total read fifty-three. At prior to eight in the morning. I held my breath, waiting for the next beep.

“Director, Laxton. More of the same, I’m afraid. An individual in a black t-shirt interfered with my people’s inspection of the kitchen …”

I patted my black t-shirt. I’d told him we’d start out with a meeting, hadn’t I?

“… worse instead of better. Call me when you get around to it.”

“Captain Cummings … Nancy Solo, from MSANPBS. How are ya this evening?”

“Erase,” I said.

“Chief, this is Security. We have a tourist report of a man concealing a weapon under a suit jacket …”

“Erase.”

“Director, Laxton. Call number four. I have a message from a Lorne Mills, stating that she is aware of …”

The phone rang. I grabbed the receiver, possibilities running through my head. I decided an official tone would cover them all best. “Cummins,” I said in as clipped a voice as possible.

“Gideon!”

The island accent was so thick I couldn’t identify him until the third full sentence as Neville Sprague, crown prince of the Rock’s resident physicists and acting director of the Institute. The message came through clearly enough: I, Gid Cummins, had let him, the Institute, and science in general down. I had allowed Bobtail and his Crew to make free with the labs at all hours of the morning, disturbing and imperiling experiments on matters so arcane there was no point in identifying them. They had menaced the assistants and grad students, causing one to fall into weeping. They had handled items both fragile and expensive and failed to return them where they had got them from. This fellow Laxton, a hard man, demanded that Doctor Sprague personally describe the use of every single piece of equipment on premises …

“Laxton’s there? Put him on.”

No, Laxton was no longer present. He might have been so had Gideon returned the call when it was first placed, a half an hour and more ago … No, Sprague had no notion where they were bound. He was not in the habit of questioning the itineraries of armed men.

“Neville, I’ll take care of it. They won’t be back.”

“I should hope not. Really, Gideon, it shakes a man …”

The phone clicked with an incoming call. As I switched over, the door opened and Mimi slipped inside.

“Cummins,” I said, holding up a forefinger. She nodded demurely and smiled with the air of an adult witnessing an episode of character-building.

“Commander?” the receiver barked. “This is Commander Cummins?”

“Ahh … yes.” The voice had pronounced it “Coomins.”

“Very good. And how is the weightlessness this morning, ha-ha?”

“Fine. Never better.” Making a face, Mimi pulled out a pad and jotted something down. With a wink she tore off the sheet and set it on the desk before retreating toward the door.

“This is Indra Network News, broadcasting live to the quarter-billion Gujarati market. If you please, Commander, share with us the excitement of the day.”

Little tip, the note read. “No comment” works wonders. I looked up to see the door shut behind her.

“Commander Coomins?”

I made static noises into the phone, a technique that serves me well in battling assorted bureaucrats. It rang again as I hung up. I rattled the carriage and keyed supplies. A glance at the tracker showed it up to fifty-eight. Blazik answered after only one ring.

“Understand you had a visit.”

“Yeah. Two jackasses in suits. The President’s comin’. For what? Pick up a spare welding nozzle?”

“This was when?”

“Ten minutes ago. I says, you boys seem confused. Lemme help you out-“

“They mentioned Laxton?”

“Yeah. Go get him bring him back, they says. I told ‘em, tell you somethin’: Every door has two sides, one you push, other hits you in the ass you go out …”

“They say where?”

“Down the hangar.”

“Thanks, Pete.”

I got no answer from the control room. Accessing the PA gave me what sounded like feeding time in the monkey house: hoots, whistles, screeches, little of it coherent, and that obscene. Yelling into the receiver gained me the same result as every other effort of the morning. In the corridor I encountered a matronly tourist convinced that we were undergoing some kind of disaster-she was old enough to recall the Skylab reentry-due to the fact that people had been “shouting loudly” and here I was “moving quickly.” I calmed her down with chatter about the big visit and sent her to breakfast only to be intercepted by two shop owners with Secret Service tales. I was longer in shaking them. Passing II, I spotted the agents from the kitchen being searched by taser-wielding station security. One saw me and called me by name. Now they knew who I was. I kept going.

The hangar was empty. I was considering implications when Burt Zogby hollered from the control room.

“Laxton? Just missed him. He came by to look around.” Zogby started flicking though various papers clipped above the board. “Saw everything except the laser.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. The crew started messing with him. Making ape noises and bouncing off the walls and stuff.”

“And where were you?”

“Oh, I went down to keep an eye on things.”

“I see. And Laxton?”

“Didn’t pay any attention. Looked over Lorne’s setup instead. Seemed real pleased with it.”

“Where is he now?”

“Headed for Little Europe.”

I rubbed my temples. Little Europe. What the Devil was he after over there?

“Aha.” Zogby spotted a rogue sheet in the corner next to the ventilator grid and stretched to snag it.

“And what is this?”

“Notes. From Laxton.”

Crumpling it up, I jammed it into the disposal. I eyed Zogby for a moment. “How’s the weightlessness today?”

He frowned. “Okay, I guess.”

“Good.” I turned and headed out.

Back at the office I found another sheet headed “Laxton-Notes.” So the man had found the copier. I sent it after the first and checked the message counter. It clicked over to eighty-six as I watched. I cleared my throat. “Global erase,” I said, and switched to PA. “All department heads lock up and report to me.”

That was Friday morning.

· · · · ·

“Who’s this Alexander?”

“Hotel desk,” Ziegler shifted his toothpick. Chewing toothpicks as a substitute for smoking was his sole vice apart from compulsive conspiracy theorizing. The result was something of an internal debris problem. Microgravity areas grew dangerous, with toothpicks winding up in experiments, machinery, and eyes. These days Zee was allowed a toothpick only in his own spaces, with the door closed, a rule he was not quite violating, having just finished eating. “Blond, muttonchops. Up about eight months.”

The latest message from Laxton contained the names of three individuals to be “monitored” during the visit. The murder suspect and the hit-and-run I’d expected, but this Alexander puzzled me, as did the lack of Miriam’s name. “What they have on him?”

“He’s some kinda libertarian. He said something. Kill all the pols.”

“And they heard him.”

“Sure. They got somebody up here.”

“Go on, Zee.”

“That’s how they do it, Gid. A tourist. Down Little Europe too.”

“Then why all the …” I threw up my hands. Yesterday’s meeting had served to calm things, even featuring an appearance by Laxton late in the proceedings. But improvement was marginal, from my point of view. The department heads pissed and moaned, Laxton watched and listened, and the sole concrete result was a general agreement that Acting Director Cummins would serve as a moderator to avoid conflicts.

I hadn’t gotten a minute’s peace since, particularly after unknown parties began feeding the Service irrelevant tidbits about the station designed to create work and confusion in about equal measure, such as the fact that the Rock’s surface also served as the floor.

Somebody more imaginative than Laxton had immediate visions of people crawling across the exterior unnoticed by miners, traffic control (or, for that matter, Lennie Irwin, playing Big Brother over his private vid system), accurately guessing at the right spot, digging through the eight to ten feet of regolith flooring the hotel suites, and doing the Pres a mischief. My suggestion for a guard of bluesuit junior officers from the Rock’s ODC unit was dismissed out of hand: “It has to be our people.”

I explained that it required a two-week training course and a half-dozen group trips to qualify for surface duty, along with a personally-tailored suit. The Zoomies were not only qualified, they possessed clearance to fire anything up to a million-watt laser. That did the trick. At least, I didn’t hear about it again.

Instead, they hit me with Irwin’s windows.

Zee made a vague gesture. “All the what, Gid?”

My phone buzzed with the particularly obnoxious tone I’d assigned to Laxton’s calls. I snapped it open. “Cummins.”

“You get the list?”

“I did,” I told him, watching Doug enter the cafeteria and glance elaborately in every direction but mine. I raised a hand to call him over, but thought twice about Laxton overhearing me. I’d catch him before he left. “What’s ‘monitored’ mean?”

“Bugged and under surveillance. I’d like them put on rigorous duty someplace else.”

“I’ll run ‘em ragged. That make you happy?”

“I’ll be happy when myself and the Principal are back on terra firma.”

That made two of us. “Okay. What else?”

“About the windows …”

The President was scheduled for a big dinner in Irwin’s tower, presumably the same chitlins-in-glop his French-Algerian chef dished out for everybody. The problem was the dining-room windows, which “provided a clear field of fire across the entire surface.” A solution already having occurred to me, I refrained from pointing out that the field of fire actually extended all the way to Mimi’s red limit. Instead, I arranged for Irwin’s Russians to string a line of floods around the windows, shining in all directions to ruin any potential sniper’s aim.

“… those lights. Is it true the crew were foreign nationals?”

I lowered the phone. “Can you send somebody out to check the lights? Thanks. Roy, it’s done … That was Ziegler.”

“Ah, Zee.” For some reason, possibly mutual esteem among paranoids, the two of them had hit it off while Ziegler was showing him the station infrastructure. “Ziegler is a good man, and you are wasting him as head of maintenance.”

“Maintenance is the most important department on this Rock. It’s what keeps us breathing. What you think he is, the janitor?”

“One last item. The laser. Your project chief is stonewalling. If he knew his girlfriend was not under suspicion-“

An expression crossed my face quite beyond my control. “You want me to tell him?”

“It’ll sound better coming from you.”

“Consider it done.” A search of the room revealed no sign of Doug, damn him.

“Today, Gid.”

“Of course today. Circus comes to town tomorrow.”

I slipped the phone back on my belt. “That man will drive me to the clinic. Now it’s the Flashlight. U.S. armed forces equipment, being refurbished by an ex-service engineer-“

“Didn’t the Frenchies work on the engine?”

“Yeah, for about two weeks. What difference that make? Who the hell would take a pop at the Pres out here? Alexander?”

Ziegler let out a sigh. “Anybody. Anybody, Gid. You’re thinking rationally. Politics is not rational. I ask you: When the Europeans decided to freeze you out, what were they thinking? Gideon Cummins is the font of evil of the Millennial era. He’s a baby-eater. He’s the one killed them college girls that time. No-course not. They thought what?”

“It’s what I represented.”

“Yeah. You were a symbol. And what did it get them? Nothing. But you know what? They’re happy.”

“And they’d do it again.”

“Righto. Same with Vecker. The minute he took office, he stepped out of the rational world into Wonderland. He stopped being human and became an archetype: the American President. And you don’t need reasons to attack one of those. That’s what presidents are for: to get shot at by nuts.”

Europe had gone predictably wild over the Pres’s visit, the news even drowning out threats of an Iberian secession: The Eagle was flying too high. The orbital scepter was being wielded. The Yankee Nero had stepped out to view his domain. Very much in the customary mode, in tone if not volume. But all the same I thought of Tonga and Chile, of Laxton’s quick reconnaissance the other day (which neither he nor the Europeans had commented on), of the uneasy conjunction of two great symbols-the President and the Rock. Terrorists like symbols. The WTC, the Pentagon, the Vatican-no better target existed for the kind of misfit who turned toward terror in the first place. Of course, we’d always been out of the reach of Al Qaeda and Harb al’Islam, but times had changed, as Laxton had so cheerfully pointed out.

I noticed that Zee was smiling. On the other hand, how much credence can you give a man who believes that the Mob made Taxi Driver to get Reagan shot?

“You missed it,” he told me. “Lorne poked her head in, spotted you, and took off like a bat.”

“Lorne. That’s who ought to be monitored.” I’d had Zee hint to Laxton that anything coming from Lorne ought to be discounted. I was proud of that little touch.

“You want me to mention-“

“I do not.” I slid my cup across the counter.

“Y’know, if I was Lorne, and I wanted to mess somebody up-“

“I don’t feature hearing this, Zee.” I headed for the door.

The station was coming to life, tourists lining up for their swim through zero-gee, half-awake staff padding around in ragged old sweatpants and tights (I clearly had to crack the whip on the dress code), the inevitable agent taking it all in. Bringing up my system, I got to work. There was plenty to do, a station to run, President or no President, and I wouldn’t have much in the way of time over the next two days. I got through most of it before word arrived that Miriam had been taken into custody.

· · · · ·

As I passed IID, Tabitha told me Laxton was headed for the hangar. I caught up with him as he reached the ramp, accompanied by two younger agents. I’d heard they’d been practicing in microgravity. It showed: They handled the gradient nicely.

Hearing his name, Laxton grabbed the railing to bring himself to a halt. He stared beseechingly at the ceiling before looking back at me.

I raised one hand. “You were plannin’ to inform me when?”

Laxton descended the ramp, passing between the two impatient-looking younger men. “Now’ll do. A half-hour ago we received an e-mail containing a recording of Ms. Espinosa’s voice uttering threats against the President.”

“Aw, come on, Laxton. You know that’s-“

“It did not originate from here. It was sent from downstairs.”

“You mean-official?”

“No, anonymous. And before you go on, yes, I am aware of a half-dozen ways it could be faked. But it doesn’t matter, because I cannot ignore it.”

He halted at about one-third gee. I gestured him to descend the rest of the way. “Look here-let’s get hold of Lorne Mills and-“

“I tried.”

“You’re lyin’.”

“He is not lying,” the harder-looking of the younger agents said.

“You stay out of this, sonny-“

“Pasquale …” Laxton made a restraining gesture. “It happens that Lorne Mills was last seen trotting in the direction of Little Europa. I lack jurisdiction there.”

“So you drop in on Doug Hearn instead. That’s good thinkin’.”

“Maybe he hasn’t heard.”

“You know damn well he has.”

“In that case, Gid, it’s a good thing I’ve got the boss along.” He started back up. “Let him through.”

I sprinted after him. “What you plan on doin’ with her?”

“Lock her up until I can send her back.”

“Lock her up where?”

He slowed down on reaching full microgravity. I took a shortcut-a kick to the storeroom ramp overhead, a somersault to the hangar entrance itself-and got ahead of him. “Where?”

“You got a lockup and a pair of rent-a-cops, don’t you?”

So he planned to dump it on me. Before I could give him the reply he deserved, the other two joined him, and, ties billowing (if there is one item of clothing with no place in zero gravity, it is a tie), all three headed into the hangar.

By my estimate, the phone call had beat us by about half a minute. Doug and his engineering specs, all his age, were floating in a clump outside their work space. They turned as one when Laxton appeared. Red-faced as only a blond can be, Doug breathed raggedly through clenched teeth. The others merely looked grim.

Laxton advanced alone. “Mr. Hearn, I require your expertise.”

“Where is she?” Doug approached him in the effortless manner of someone used to microgravity.

“My office. Soon as we’re finished, you can-“

“Is she … are you holding her?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“‘Cause she wouldn’t bend for you. Yeah-you think I didn’t hear that?”

I was about to call Doug aside when I noticed the two other agents discreetly arranging themselves in suitable positions to back up Laxton. That changed my mind-I didn’t like the idea that they’d worked it out beforehand.

“She didn’t tell you that-“

“Did I ask you to talk? You threatened to send her down, didn’t you? You think I didn’t know-“

“Hearn-“

“You think I-You think-”

Someone had gone over microgravity defensive techniques with Laxton. Even as Doug launched himself, Laxton, moving more quickly than I’d have expected, jammed a heel against the nearest footrest and ducked. Doug struck him glancingly, with no weight behind it. As he flailed overhead, Laxton backhanded him, then, with a twisting motion of his torso, flung him on his way.

Spence, one of Doug’s boys, stood facing an agent, wrench in hand, while the other two stalked the one named Pasquale. I kicked off up and over Laxton’s head, catching a static line and swinging myself around and down. My feet hit the floor with a ferocious bang. “That’s it!” I shouted. “Break it up. Now!”

The engineers glanced among themselves and backed away. Doug lay entangled with a wall net, feeling his bloody nose. Laxton, staring coldly into space, ran a hand over his scalp. Confused voices swelled from the entrance. I didn’t bother to look.

“Laxton, stay where you are. Doug, you too.” I gestured Spence to go look Doug over.

“Don’t you take him out of here,” Laxton said. “He is showing me that machine.”

“He is showin’ you jack, because you just crossed the line.”

Laxton swung his icy gaze toward me. “Director-“

“‘Director,’ nothin’. Ya’ll have woken the Rebel in me.”

Regimes of hypocrisy aside, a space station is not quite the same thing as an earthbound port. It also shares the attributes of a vessel, and as its director, I possessed the absolute authority of a sea captain. I wondered if Laxton understood that. If not, he was due to be enlightened.

With raised hands, I curtailed his second effort to speak. “No sir. I require no words from you. I have had it. I am departin’ this hangar for communications, where I intend to notify Washington that the International Orbital Station is no longer tenable for a sojourn by the President. And you will leave this space as well for that office of yours, where you will remain until you again hear from me.”

Laxton regarded me a moment longer before gesturing to his men. The onlookers at the entrance got out of his path quickly enough. As he swung from sight, I heard him say something about “… getting us a new director.”

Doug was on his feet, a bloody cloth pressed to his face. I glanced around for stray blood globules-few things are as unpleasant as running into one-but I didn’t spot any. I tapped him on the shoulder and told him to come along. Everybody else I sent back to work. We’d returned to gee before Doug spoke.

“You sure straightened him out, Gid.”

I walked on without answering. People stared as we passed. I’m sure we made quite a spectacle.

“No, I mean it.”

I waved a hand, as much to stifle him as in acknowledgment. Encouraged by the response, he quickened his pace. “You backed me up, and I appreciate-“

“Doug-don’t you commence.” I shot him a glare. “You, I oughta lock up. Did you really believe that line about Miriam and Laxton?”

“Look, somebody told me-“

“Who?”

“Whatsername, down the cafeteria.”

“Dolly?” My right hand swung high, and I believe I would have clouted him if it hadn’t been for his nose. I shook my head instead. “You better stick close to me.”

I have an actual desk in my office. I fought for that desk. My contention was that my position as de facto head of operations required something with more presence than the pressboard-with-baskets everybody else made do with. One vacation I hit the antique store circuit, bought the finest executive-style oak desk I could find, drove it to Kennedy, and told them to hold it until I sent for it. BuSpace resisted to the last ditch: That heavy a framework was unnecessary in half a gee. The weight was too great to justify it. It wasn’t government standard. But I knew damn well that a quarter of the cargo space on the tourist flights went unused, and I held out until they shipped it in three separate launches, frame in one, top in the second, and drawers in the third. There are some traditions that must not, under any circumstances, be allowed to fade.

It was truly worth it. Even as I sat down behind that mass, all uncertainty vanished and my strategy began to coalesce. I’d have to call Dino, make an official complaint. But he’d dither. Before that … Miriam’s home office in Panama City. No; better yet, Hemispheric’s U.S. office in Miami. That was it. They’d roar loud enough to get the Net buzzing, and then I’d call Dino: Haven’t you heard? The drudges got hold of it. It’s leading every single post. The phones are ringing off the hook up here. What do I tell ‘em?

“Gid, you really gonna cancel the visit?”

Grabbing the phone, I punched for the number and sat back in the swivel chair that had come up on the fourth flight, a present from the Kennedy staff.

“I mean, can you do that?”

“No, he can’t.”

Roy Laxton pushed the door wide and settled against the jamb. Doug shot to his feet. “Hemispheric,” a sweet voice said in my ear.

“One minute, please.” I raised my eyebrows at Laxton.

“Ms. Espinosa has been asked to interview the President.”

“My mistake.” I hung up.

“I believe he wants to make a gesture concerning the Expellees. You’ve heard him say nothing’s too much where they’re concerned.”

“I see. I suppose they investigated her thoroughly.”

“That’s right.”

“Well, Roy … You don’t have their resources.”

“Aw, screw him.” Doug made as if to throw the bloody rag at Laxton, but checked the gesture.

“I did come to tell you, Mr. Engineer.”

“Where is she now?” I interjected quickly.

“Arranging things over the phone. It’s like she knew it was coming. You got a bright penny there, kiddo.”

“So keep your dirty mouth off her.”

“Doug.”

“I need to see that laser.” Laxton spoke to me rather than Hearn.

“Fucker’s there. Go look at it.”

“Doug, drop it.”

Laxton gestured out into the corridor. The agent named Pasquale appeared. “Will he do?”

“Doug, give that man a thorough briefing.”

“I don’t know a thing about lasers, Roy,” Pasquale said.

“Do I?” Laxton stepped away from the door. “You’ll learn something.”

Doug gazed at Pasquale for several seconds. At last he smiled. “Short course, you silly bastard.”

· · · · ·

That night I walked the station, as I occasionally do. I like it in the still hours, when the corridors are empty of tourists and staff, and some of its ancient strangeness as one of the Sun’s lost children returns.

I passed a window set into the wall to display a geological anomaly, this one a collision weld. I paused to take in the multicolored tapestry of melted and rehardened minerals, still furiously aboil to the untutored eye. I bent to brush away an imaginary speck of dust with my sleeve and went on. Far down III one of the security guards, out checking doors, gave me a wave.

After tomorrow, the Rock was unlikely to be the same. The visit represented another boost to the station’s reputation and “salability,” as they call it. I’d seen several such milestones since I’d started, first as hangar chief, then assistant ops manager, finally prince of the Rock in all but name (a thought I never allow myself in the daytime, rest assured). Our first actress, Stephanie Boyd; our first wedding; our first tourist death-that one had thrown me until a close psychologist friend explained it. This visit was another. Eventually the place would be running twenty-four hours a day, like any Terrestrial resort, and there would be no more quiet hours.

Nearing II, I heard somebody singing. It puzzled me until I remembered the private party at the restaurant, rescheduled so as not to clash with the visit. At the corner, I saw three people approaching, a middle-aged man and woman and what must have been their daughter. They were in evening clothes, the women gowned in the fashion that only the French can attain, the bulky veilleurs-the antikidnapping bracelets worn by anyone in Europe with money-encircling one wrist. The man, slightly the worse for the evening, was for some reason carrying his shoes. It was him I’d heard singing.

Their eyes lit up when they spotted me. “Le directeur!” That was one change already encompassed: For the first time in my career, people knew who I was. The newsnets saw to that. After working through everything important, they’d gotten down to me, the “legendary Gideon Cummins,” who had “overseen every aspect of the station’s development since Leonard Irwin first presented it to the United States” (that he’d done it to avoid bankruptcy went unmentioned). I guess legends come cheap these days.

Wasn’t it exciting? Such luck, to be vacationing just now! They were so looking forward to it. The old lady (obviously German-that kind of threw me, intermarriage being illegal in most of Europe) was concerned that I wouldn’t get enough sleep. Her husband said something along the lines of: No no, he must make his final rounds.

I was trying not to stare at the daughter. As she emerged from the shadows, I’d seen she was wearing a mask-not a domino or Mardi Gras mask, but a full-face affair that looked as if it were made of beaten bronze and portrayed … Well, I couldn’t tell you-something on the order of what older folks back home would call a “hoodoo.” I’d heard of the like, vaguely-who pays any mind to French fashions? But confronting one was something else. Here was a young girl, in an off-the-shoulder dress, her hair up in a novel but attractive style, with a face that amounted to two eyes gazing through this … thing. I felt awful silly smiling in her direction, I’ll tell you.

Her father was staring pensively at the floor. When he looked up his eyes had grown clear. “Directeur-what is the intent?” He paused to take in my expression. “Vecker,” he added helpfully.

On hearing the name, his wife grabbed his arm and hissed something. He sighed and rolled his eyes.

It seemed they’d gotten turned around coming out of the restaurant, don’t ask me how. I got them started back to Little Europe. Passing the display, the man looked it over. “Mysteries,” he cried. He swept his shoes about him. “When I was a boy, all this …” He shrugged, his expression half Gallic pique, half plain admiration. “You Yankees.”

I watched until they faded into darkness. I had a vision of the girl looking back and peeling off that horror to reveal … What, exactly? The face of ancient Europa in all its twisted glory? With a shake of my head, I set off in the opposite direction.

At the ramp I noticed the hangar door open. Something stopped me from simply barreling inside. I was glad I hadn’t when I caught sight of Miriam and Doug floating in the center of the hangar, embracing, Miriam’s hair drifting loose as if to entwine the two of them together forever.

I watched a second or two longer than I should have, feeling numb, and sad, and perversely satisfied with the way things were turning out.

She had punched a hole in my armor. That armor that everyone has, made up of early hurts, and disappointments, and regrets, of too much time spent with the wrong people and too little searching for the right one, of the ordinary insults and abrasions that make up a life. She had pierced it but good, without intending to, with even knowing what she was doing. It would always be there, a rent matching her touch. I would feel it on my deathbed.

I left quickly, careful not to make a sound. As I went down the ramp a sudden image arose of Miriam facing that masked girl, Mimi’s sweet features confronted with that horror. I tried to push the picture from my mind, but it followed me into sleep.

· · · · ·

I greeted President Vecker where I’d started out, in the control room. I’d been training for a mission control position in the old agency when it collapsed amid its rubble of corruption and ineptness. I never actually held a control room job after the Bureau was established, instead acting as a jack-of-all-trades the way everybody did in the early days. But over the years I’d kept up with every change in procedure and equipment. It seemed to me that for this occasion a duty position was where I ought to be. I wanted everything to come off perfectly.

So it did. The shuttle slid in, kissing the restraints without a jolt. Three minutes later, pressure returned and the door swung open just as the welcoming committee, led by an honor guard of dress-uniformed Zoomies, cleared the locks. The tapes selected by the staffers-“Hail to the Chief” and other Sousa standards-blared forth.

The first one out was a cameraman, as I should have expected. Then came the President, squinting against the lights, which along with his customary half-smile gave him a more quizzical air then he might strictly have desired. The welcoming group, Lennie Irwin in the van, moved forward to meet him along the velcro padding leading to the shuttle (the President’s first true experience with microgravity would occur tomorrow).

I spotted Miriam at the side airlock and behind her, lo and behold, none other than the missing Lorne Mills, magically returned in time to take up her duty station. Although she’d neglected to call (as I’d left her strict instructions to do), I felt almost friendly at the sight of her. Lorne had a mighty surprise coming as soon as this jamboree was over.

By that time, Secretary Merck and Dino had emerged. The Ferris’s teenage daughter handed the President a bouquet of hothouse-grown flowers, the group moved toward the door, and I relaxed.

Just before they left my line of sight, the President spoke to Dino, who looked directly at me and pointed. When Vecker followed the gesture, I gave him the thumbs-up. And that’s how I got on TV in front of two billion people.

A moment later, Dino clambered through the door. He threw his arms wide. “It went great. First-class job, people.”

Burt and Shelley T. looked pleased. “Well, it ought to,” I told him. “We been at it since shuttles had wings.”

He stuck a cigarillo in his mouth and lit up. Last I’d heard he’d quit smoking, but it never seemed to stick. “I nearly blew it. Almost kicked off the last step. Can you imagine, one foot stuck and rest of me flailing around in midair? Oh yeah, Burt, that would have made your day.”

He pointed at me. “You, I coulda shot. I look around, where is the MC! Then I think: the control room, where else?”

“I noticed.”

In a quieter voice, he said, “The Service detail. That straight?”

“Inert. No big deal.”

“I figured when you didn’t call. The bird …” He gestured out the window. “Ready to fly?”

“Been ready. We wait any longer it’ll take off on its own.”

“I want you there for launch.”

“I’ll be right here.”

“No, Gid. Out there with the big dogs.”

I pointed to the board. “Right here, Dino.”

“Have it your way.” He shrugged. “You know, he likes that. ‘Hands on the wheel,’ he said. ‘That Cummins keeps his hands on the wheel.’ He wants to talk to you. Not during dinner, not to schmooze. He’s got some things he wants to run by you. After the speech.”

Somebody called him from outside. “That’s me. See you at dinner … Kids, keep it up. My destiny’s in your hands. I’m too old to go back to work.”

Outside, the crew was checking their wagon. I noticed they wore military coveralls, even though the shuttle was ostensibly a civilian flight. “Okay,” I told my people. “Close her down.”

As it happened, I didn’t see Dino at dinner. The next shuttle up carried, along with other essential personnel, a ninety-year-old senator who had wangled himself an invitation to Irwin’s penthouse, supposedly to look into the benefits of low gees for the aged, as if that topic hadn’t been researched into the ground. I discreetly offered my seat, eager both to avoid Jean Abu’s Cous-cous St. Jacques and Lamb Cooked Five Hundred Ways and to get a little extra sleep. I did catch a few hours before the staffers woke me, crying about the comm center not being open yet.

· · · · ·

I let them in and got an early breakfast, beating the mob by a matter of seconds. As I left, I was waylaid by a pack of reporters off the second shuttle. They were desperate for something to file, and they know how to dig. By the time they were finished, they’d succeeded in getting me to say something I regretted.

“Then there’s no guarantee this launch will come off?”

“Course not. Physics sets the rules in this game. Entropy and complexity always take a percentage. And that’s not considering the human factor-“

“But how can you launch something without being a hundred percent sure …?”

“Happens every day. The shuttle you came up on-“

“Oh, I’m sure the Bureau …”

“You’re saying the government is cutting corners on people’s safety …?”

“No-I’m not sayin’ that. Nothin’ of the sort. I’m sayin’ there’s such a thing as a rainy day, no more, no less.”

The one with the mustache put a concerned look on his face. “But I would think, Director, with a shot this important …”

“It was promises wrecked the old agency, son.”

“The old agency …?”

“Could you clarify …”

“NASA,” I told them. “If you’ll excuse me …”

I left them to work the initials out, as disgusted with myself as with them. Not that I credit the superstition-I happen to know that those initials were not the last thing spoken by Grissom aboard Apollo 1 or Resnik on Challenger either. But it’s never pleasant to be forced to say something against your will.

Around the corner, I found the exception to all rules awaiting me. Miriam got up, looking glorious. As I drew near, she put a fist to her hip and shook her head. “Gid-a polo shirt?”

I clapped both hands on my ribs. “Tradition, my dear. From the days of Deke and Kris. On launch mornin’, you wear knits.”

She smiled. “Come here, you.”

Another kiss, another deep whiff of the sweet smell of her. I thought of her at the dance, and in the hangar last night. I hoped for both their sakes that Doug knew what he had.

She touched my cheek. “Thanks for standing up for me.”

“My pleasure, lady. Somebody required a bring down, and I was happy to oblige. It’s a shame you ever got in Lorne’s sights, that’s all.”

“Ah, she’s nothing much. You know what ‘hembra’ is? Same thing as macho, in the female sense. She’s falto de hembra, that girl. I got her share.”

“I bet you showed Laxton.”

“Oh yeah. I explained the First Amendment and how it holds from here to the red limit …”

“You like that line, don’t you? Red limit.”

“That’s a good one, huh? I got it in Chile.” She pronounced it in the Latin style, Chee-lay. “At the observatory, at Las Campanas. I asked a cosmologist if there was really an edge to the universe.” Her fingers made a circle, outlining the edge. “And he said, ‘Well, there’s the red limit.’ Spooky, isn’t it? The universe kind of … goes all the way out and drops off into the red …”

“How do you know it doesn’t curve up?”

“Oooh, Gid-you are so contrary …”

A glint of light at her throat caught my eye. “Whoa-what’s this here?”

“Oh, that?” She lifted it up for my inspection. A Lunar tektite, a glass globule thrown out by a meteor impact. They’re common enough. You even find them on Earth. But occasionally you come across one shaped and colored like the most precious of stones, as this one was: a droplet of transparent light green, with small hairline cracks all through it creating an ever-changing web of light. Among them floated two pebbles, one light and one dark, like planets in a universe of aquamarine.

“You could get a better one mail order.”

“Ooh …!” She slapped my hand.

“Nah, I’m foolin’. That’s a good one. That one’s for keeps. I suppose Doug thought the rings up here were too expensive.”

“That’s right.”

“And we’re gonna have another complete disruption when you two get hitched.”

“Yes.”

I smiled to hide what went deep. “Well-they say quick is best.”

“It is.”

“What about him runnin’ all over the inner Solar System?”

“I’m going with him.”

“And if Hemispheric says no?”

“I’ll start my own net. We’re going to Luna first. There’s media up there, and they’d die to hire somebody who’s interviewed the Pres. Have you been there, Gid? You have! Well, tell me. Doug wants it to be a surprise. They’ve got birds up there.”

“Be a surprise anyway. It’s not like people think.” The birds are the least of it. They were introduced, along with the greenery, to create an overlay of nature to lessen the bunker effect. The original staff, a bunch of late-20th types who acted the part in spades, set up a “committee” to “study” the question of importing a biosphere. At last Pinkie Gaines, acting on her own, smuggled up a dozen songbirds. From then on it was a matter of seeing what would adapt, the result being not a cavernous jungle, as some describe it, but something new, something we don’t have the proper word for yet.

Then there’s the Cistercians-Trappists, to most people. A good fifth of the personnel on Luna, hard workers, disciplined and resourceful, pleased to be making a foundation on a frontier in the tradition of their order. “They tell time up there by the bells. Matins and Compline and … Nonesuch?”

“And the promenade? Did you see that?”

“Oh, they promenade every night. That’s just walkin’ the corridors and sayin’ hi. But the Pageant-that’s something else. Every Easter they shut off the lights, and the monastery choir sings, and everybody lights a candle, and they walk down the corridors to meet in the square.”

“Did you carry a candle?”

A voice prevented me from replying that I hadn’t actually seen the event. “Aha-I spy secrets.”

“Mornin’, Roy.” Laxton looked, if anything, more impossibly close-shaven and stiffly turned-out than ever. I looked back at Mimi. “One thing, ‘fore he gets here.”

“Yes?”

“How’d you know the President was comin’?”

She smiled. “Sources.”

“And you don’t give up sources.”

“An old guy who drank too much at a party. Wouldn’t be fair. Especially when he’s somebody’s boss. Hello, Agent Laxton!”

“I’m here to escort you to the Presidential interview, Ms. Espinosa.”

Miriam’s mouth made an ‘O.’ “Do I look … Am I … Oh …” With a flap of a hand, she headed for the lady’s room. “I will be one minute.”

We watched her go. “Nice gesture, Roy.”

“I asked for the job.”

“Good for you.” He gave me that steely smile. I went on: “Was Pasquale satisfied?”

“More or less.” A hint of a frown crossed his face. “One question: procedure in case something goes wrong with the … Flashlight …?”

“Easy. We pick it up, and we throw it out.”

His lips moved, echoing my final words. “I see.”

The staffers raced past, looking frantic. I smiled after them before turning back to Laxton. “So-want to hear my guess?”

His eyebrows rose politely.

“The Prez, the speech, the sabotage … no such thing as coincidence in politics, Roy. You want my opinion …”

“Later, Gid.”

“Hmph. You’re a man of few words, Roy.”

“Well, that’s the thing. I’m not allowed to explain where you’re wrong. I’ll tell you this, though: You’ll like it.” His face brightened. “Ms. Espinosa-“

“Miriam.”

Laxton gave me a look that on any other face I’d have taken as one of triumph. “Miriam. This way, please.”

Miriam looked at me over her shoulder. “We need to finish our interview.”

“Ah, I don’t wanna be in no interview, anyhow.”

“It’s not that easy, Mr. Director.” She smiled. “Wish me luck.”

“To the red limit.”

· · · · ·

The laser could have been anything. A weather satellite. A telescope. A planetary probe. It rested in the center of the hangar, in the place of honor. Everything else had been shunted aside, the shuttles tethered to the surface, the GTVs and unmanned units shifted into the corners.

The plan was for the laser to be slung out following the President’s speech, where Doug’s team would mate it to the reactor, which had never been brought aboard, and the fuel tanks. That accomplished, the launch would occur in full view of the restaurant, where a mass brunch would be catered. When asked what I thought of the idea, I merely grunted. The Germans had done something similar with the V-2, but I saw no point in mentioning that.

Doug, suited up and wearing a prebreathing mask, entered the hangar and headed for the laser. An agent moved to stop him but was waved off by Laxton. Doug went on without acknowledging either of them.

With a rumble of voices, the doors slid open. Off-duty staff, tourists, and politicians poured in and headed for the wall netting. Many of the tourists, barely capable of getting by in microgravity, were helped along by the more experienced. I got an uncomfortable feeling at the sight of them-I’d never seen the hangar this full, with even more coming. A glance at the agents suggested they felt much the same.

Doug finished his inspection and headed for the side lock, reaching it just as Miriam emerged. They had a word or two, Doug going through a pantomime involving the mask that set her to laughing. Always make the girls laugh, Gid, my granny told me. You do that, you don’t have to worry about nothin’ else.

Doug left. Catching sight of me, Miriam gave me a wave. I raised a hand, a little more reserved than I might have been otherwise.

“She’s waving to the legendary Gid Cummins!” Shelley T. cried.

“Where’d you hear that?”

“From her!”

“Yeah!” Burt said. “She said it to the Pres. ‘Our host, the legendary Gid Cummins.’”

“Well, I’ll just have to post a letter to her editor, I guess.”

“Ooh, here he comes.”

The crowd burst into applause as the President appeared. It took me some effort not to do the same. It’s funny-I couldn’t quite explain what it was I admired about him. You stop paying any mind to the political news, the absentee ballots become a chore, maybe you stop voting at all. Then somebody comes along to make it matter again.

He floated in as if he were a master of orbital living, touching each static line precisely as he passed. I understood there had been some rigorous practice out there early this morning.

At last he halted, with a bit of a jerk, it’s true, at what was not quite a podium as much as a stylized framework discreetly calling attention to itself. The applause resumed, as if he’d triumphed over some major obstacle.

He waited it out, his speech rolled in his hand in his trademark fashion. Two agents stood discreetly poised at either end of the laser behind him. I had to search for Laxton, up near the ceiling where he had an unobstructed view.

The President smiled in a way that took in everyone present. About to speak, he instead paused and, raising the sheets to chest level, let them go. They floated, as things tend to do in microgravity. He shook his head. “I’ve wanted to do that for years.”

Another round of applause rolled across the hangar. I could see we were in for a lot of that. “Shelley-start runnin’ the check on the boom.”

“Roger …”

The President retrieved his speech and bowed his head. Intent on his words, I didn’t at first apprehend what Shelley was saying. “Eh?”

“I said, we have activity on the laser.”

I stared at her, knowing exactly what she meant even as the thought that the laser’s arming codes could not possibly be corrupted left my mind. “The laser itself.”

“No …” The lights of the board flickered on her face as she called up various windows. “The engine.”

I nodded, recalling the small reserve maneuvering reservoir. “Burt, shut her down.”

“Roger.”

The President was speaking about his dad telling him the story of Apollo. A glance showed very few Europeans present. I switched to PA. “Excuse me …”

It came out louder than I’d expected. The President raised his head, not even startled as far as I could see. The tourists looked about them for the source of the voice. My staff’s eyes were glued to the window.

“Please clear the hangar.”

That quizzical look reappeared on the President’s face. My people started moving, a few remembering to drag along the nearest tourist. Laxton kicked off, aimed arrow-straight for the President. The laser clicked.

It was a nice, sharp snapping sound, easily audible throughout the hangar. You don’t think of satellites making noises, operating in vacuum as they do. I stared just as stupidly as anyone else.

Burt murmured, “I’ll be-” The last word was cut off by a woman’s scream.

The scene before me flew apart. The two agents at the laser grabbed the President and headed for the exit, aided by a shove from Laxton. The tourists boiled like bats from their spaces at the wall, colliding with each other, the ceiling, the floor, the laser itself. I saw the agents around the President battering a path through them.

“No response, Gid-“

“Crack the OS. See what’s runnin’.” I uncovered the mike. “All staff. Take hold of a … of two tourists and escort them out. I repeat-“

At that moment, I caught sight of Miriam. She was being borne down by three Secret Servicemen who slammed her against the wall hard enough to send her recorder tumbling. Then they retreated, leaving her curled up in a ball behind them.

Pasquale appeared in the doorway, pistol shaking in both hands. “What’s going on?”

“You leave me be, son. Burt, what gives?”

“No access … Some kind of firewall …”

“Do your best.” The main door and both side locks were jammed with people battering their way out, no more than two cases of outright panic that I could see, one being subdued by an agent, the other by Dino. As soon as the hangar cleared, I’d uncase the boom, snag the laser and toss it starward. I wondered how long the machine’s internal countdown would last. Maybe just long enough. “Staff-clear the doors. Stomp rump, you need to.”

I wasn’t the only one thinking about the laser. As I watched, Laxton shot toward it from the direction of the main exit. Something in his movements told me that the President, at least, was safe. Halting himself on an antenna, he freed the pallet straps and flicked them away. I was glad someone had thought of that. But then, not waiting for the boom, possibly ignorant that any such thing existed, he put his shoulder against the laser’s side. And even as he began pushing, I knew at last who Roy Laxton was.

He was the man who would not fail. He had fumbled badly, alienating the single individual who could have told him where true danger lay. But even now, in the shambles of his mission, he was not giving up. With all possibilities gone but one, he was fulfilling his duty the only way he had left: by doing what a fool had told him, picking the threat up and throwing it out into the cold dark.

The laser began to move. Even a mass that large will shift under the pressure of a steady force, and Laxton embodied that force. I sensed beside me the presence of someone who knew how not to crowd a control room. Doug, oxygen mask dangling, gazed coolly into the hangar. I caught sight of Miriam hanging from the netting by one hand, watching the laser.

It began swinging to one side. I saw clearly that it would collide with the wall before reaching the doors, and that Laxton, unskilled in microgravity, would not be able to stop it. I grabbed the mike to get his attention above the cries of the remaining crowd. Miriam pushed away from the wall.

She’d seen the same thing I had and was setting out to do something about it. Bag swinging at her side as if she were skipping, as if the laser were simply an impediment to get out of the way so that everything could proceed as before, she grabbed a thruster and started to push. I heard a sharp intake of breath beside me.

“I’m deploying the boom,” Shelley said.

“Do it.”

Her fingers fumbled on the keyboard as she overrode the check sequence. The noise of the crowd was dying down. I spotted Lorne pushing her way through the stragglers at the side lock, suited up and carrying two rescue kits.

The satellite edged forward, Laxton and Mimi on either side, invisible to each other. I don’t think Roy Laxton ever knew who had come to his aid. I wish he had.

The laser began to straighten out. That’s it, I thought. Get them out of there, get the door open; momentum would see to the rest. I flicked up the mike. “Roy, Mimi-enough …”

I got no answer. Somebody crowded into the control room. Lorne paused at a static line ten yards behind the laser’s gaping exhaust nozzle, the boom extending above her. I heard the exit door slam shut beneath me.

“Mimi-“

A storm of exhaust engulfed the hangar. I touched the emergency button at the same same moment as Doug’s gloved hand. The doors unfolded, and I caught a final glimpse of the laser as it burst out into its element, the hint of a human shape clinging to one side.

It was my job and duty to see that the station was saved. And I saw that it was; I could do no other. But I would have given up station, country, world, and my own sorry hope of redemption to have been struck blind at that moment.

The fumes began to clear. I shut the doors, flinching as a figure flashed past the window: Lorne, her helmet gone, her mouth gaping and trailing blood. Someone behind me gasped as she hit the ceiling and rebounded.

I turned to shout the sole words I ever spoke in person to President Carl Vecker: “Get out of my control room!”

I unclasped the mike. “EMT on site, now.”

· · · · ·

They fired Dino. They had to fire somebody. There was talk of firing me, but that was quashed by the President himself: “You don’t dump the one man who knew what he was doing.”

I never did learn what it was about. My guess is that it was a rogue operation by some EU faction more embittered or fanatical or depraved than average. They may have intended to humiliate the U.S., or bring the Flashlight program to an end, or simply to send a signal. It’s possible I’ll never know for sure. I was told steps would be taken, but in the end it’s one of those things you don’t learn the truth about until the truth has decayed into something harmless.

I took my own steps. When I asked the director of EU interests (charmingly called the “chef de gare”) if he had any idea what would have happened to Little Europe if our end had blown out, he refused to meet my eyes. I told him it would please me to see him depart aboard one of their tiny shuttles no later than that evening. I met the next chef when she arrived, and no longer is Little Europe an isolated patch of the Rock. They report to me, and I walk its corridors the same as I walk my own.

They found Roy Laxton. They found the laser, though by then it was an object of study at best. Flashlight had already begun, using operational military lasers, only hours after the President’s speech, the speech in which he enunciated the Vecker Doctrine: that henceforward, the United States would guarantee access to space by any nation for any peaceful purpose by any means necessary.

I didn’t hear the speech. I was busy explaining to the Espinosa family why they wouldn’t be getting their daughter back.

· · · · ·

The lock had changed as well, its blank white tiles replaced with a glare-free light blue. Not my doing; Lorne had seen to that. I’m sure she had her reasons.

I opened the doors and set the system on automatic. Doug hadn’t said a word since entering the lock. He stood rigid within his suit, groping at his helmet and staring sullenly at nothing. He knew what was coming, sure enough, but it hadn’t registered. Not yet.

The GTV paused while the boom deployed. Then Lorne did exactly what I was hoping she wouldn’t.

“Gid? Where are you?

I raised my handset. “It’s on auto, Lorne. Come on in.”

“You shit.”

Doug clutched his helmet in both hands, squeezing it as if it were a basketball. “I should have guessed. I mean, you let her stay, right? You did. Nobody else. Every time I ask somebody, ‘the bitch still there?’, it’s the same answer. Still there. Cummins let her get away with it. God damn you-“

I said nothing as I watched the pod slide in. What could I tell him? Is the truth always good enough? The truth was what I had seen in her face, in the quizzical look in her eyes, had felt in the pressure of her hand. The truth was that the girl had been mine. All I had to do was ask.

It would have worked. I know it would have. Despite everything, despite all the years between us. It would have worked. But it was not my move to make, and I let you step in, but you were not good enough, and she is dead, and why can’t you stay to hell and gone off my station and out of my life, you sorry-ass loser …

But that was not my move to make either. So I said nothing.

The GTV’s hatch opened, and Lorne emerged. Doug gestured at her. “I slept with that bitch twice. You believe that? Two fuckin’ times, and she owns me-“

Still suited up, she moved awkwardly. But when she turned to pull the large bag from the cockpit, she handled it with care.

Doug raised a fist as if to strike the window. “That had better not be what I think it is,” he said in an ominously calm voice. “It had better not, Gid. You had better get on that line and tell her … She stood here, right here, at this window, and she watched Mimi go, and now she has the fuckin’ nerve-“

“She went out with two rescue bubbles, Doug. That’s how-“

“I didn’t see that. I didn’t see that, Gid.”

“That’s how she got hurt.”

“Oh, she got hurt. Little Lorne got hurt. And Mimi? What about her?”

Lorne descended the GTV’s ladder, taking her time, rung after slow rung. She can’t jump around the way other people do. Doug grabbed the door handle and gave it a jerk. I had already taken the precaution of locking it.

“Doug … Before you-“

He hit me with the helmet. I wasn’t expecting it, and I lost the handset as I struck the wall. A quick grab at the rail saved me from bouncing around the lock. I watched dazedly as he plucked the handset from midair and tapped out the code with glove-clumsy hands. The door slid open. Lorne was removing her helmet, the bag floating in front of her.

Rage sent Doug kicking off high, to soar above her head and clatter against the side of the GTV. He swung around, positioning himself to push off. His eyes met Lorne’s, and he remained transfixed, staring down at her.

Lorne had been something of a medical celebrity after the incident. Burned, poisoned, battered, and flayed, she’d never have survived reentry. So she was treated up here, as well as could be accomplished-they’d never seen injuries that massive in a low-gravity environment before, not involving a living individual. They learned a lot from Lorne. Of course, it was no help to her. She had healed strangely, bones like crystal, scar tissue no thicker than paper. They had no idea what would happen if she was subjected to the stress of even a single gee. She was stuck here for life.

As for her face-well, let’s just say that there are no plastic surgeons in LEO just yet.

I kept my distance. I could feel all the pity in the world as long as I didn’t have to look at her. Ziegler ended that. “Check the film theater,” he told me late one night. “You got business there.”

I found a screen depicting a figure of incredible grotesquery speaking to a woman in 19th-century clothes. Lorne had spent the past weeks watching a certain type of film, over and over again-the cases were visible next to the projector: Freaks, The Elephant Man, Mask. When I shut it off, she cowered so that I wouldn’t see her face.

She didn’t try to hide it now. “Hello, Doug,” she said in the rasp that was all she had left.

Doug stared with the empty expression of a man who had erred badly and saw no way out. He patted the skin of the spacecraft, a gesture I understood without in the least being able to explain. At last he made his move. Gripping the handholds, he descended the GTV, one foot after the other, as if in a gravity field. Reaching the deck, he paused, mouth open to speak, but could find no words. Lorne raised a hand to the black body bag floating between them. A week ago she’d appeared in my office with an orbital plot revealing that Miriam’s long exile was at last drawing to a close. “I want you to be on the board for me,” was what she said.

She reached into a thigh pouch and handed something to Doug, small and of a pale transparent green. He stared at it, floating as if by magic above his open palm, then reached up to take hold of it. Lorne touched his gloved hand before she turned away.

As she passed by, she gave me a folded sheet. “Need help with the suit?” I called after her.

“Thanks, Gid. I’ll manage.”

She looked back when Doug called out. Her eyes remained beautiful. He said something in a voice so thick I couldn’t understand it. But Lorne did. “I know, Doug.”

She disappeared. As I moved to follow her, Doug said he’d be out in a while.

“I’ll be there,” I told him. I’d wait as long as was needed, and take him for a drink or two, and help him bring it to a close at last. We remain each other’s keepers, from here to the red limit.

As I left, my eyes were drawn again to the bag. It would end for me when I opened it, as I must, for identification. But then it occurred to me to unfold the slip. I, Lorne Mills, Supervisor of Night Operations, IOS, identify these human remains as those of …

Thanks, Mimi, I thought with no logic at all.

A sudden flare drew my eyes back to the hangar. The Moon was crossing the window, bright enough to make me squint. As I turned away, I could almost hear the bells ringing, and the birds, and voices echoing amidst a parade of light.

The End