They were turned loose into a party that was just starting to turn raucous.

Harry and Jenny stayed behind, by invitation of the King. Some of the court settled in a circle. Some had lutes or tubes that turned out to be musical instruments. Alex listened for a bit. Songs of past and future--

"Wanted fan for plain sedition, like the singing of this tune.

If NASA hadn't failed us we'd have cities on the moon.

If it weren't for fucking NASA we'd at least have walked on Mars.

If I never can make orbit, then I'll never reach the stars."

Never can make orbit… Harry and Jenny were singing to Alex's soul. Alex wasn't in the mood for that much gloom. He moved away, toward laughter.

Jenny's voice followed him. "How's this, Majesty?"

"Wanted fan for mining coal and wanted fan for building nukes;

Wanted fan by William Proxmire and a maddened horde of kooks.

Washington, D.C., still wants me 'cause I tried to build a dam.

If they're tearing down the cities I'll help any way I can."

"Yeah, Jenny, I know you would…"

Gordon gravitated to one of the fans who was writing furiously on a legal pad. He stood a little aside so as not to distract the woman; but Alex could see that she was aware of the Angel's hovering presence.

Alex wandered among mannequins dressed in the style of mountain man, Plains Indian, cowboy. They stood ghostly sentinel amid prairie dioramas and reconstructed Conestogas. Sunbonnets and calico and flintlocks. A moldboard plow. A la riata coiled to loop over a steer's horns. Chaps and Stetson hat. Buckskin shirt and leggings done up with beads and quillwork. A birchbark canoe bearing a coureurde bois. The opened diary of a woman who had crossed the Plains in an 1840's wagon train. Alex tried to read what was written there, but the light was too dim.

All the ages interfaced. No wonder fans were comfortable here.

Gordon, he saw, was deep in conversation with an aspiring writer named Georgina. The stilyagin was sitting lotus beside her on the floor and was pointing to something on her pad. They had gathered a small audience--all femmefans, Alex noted--and she was nodding with a very serious look on her face to whatever Gordon was saying.

Alex found a chair and sagged into it, a bit too tired to be sociable.

Somebody brought him a pewter flagon of fairly powerful punch. A younger fan brought an elderly couple over and introduced them as Buz and Jenn. "Have you made much use of the shuttle tank?" Jenn asked. "The one that went up with the last shuttle?"

Alex nodded. Noblesse oblige. "We couldn't live without it. And the other one. I've heard the story, of how the pilots and a friend in Mission Control brought the first tank to orbit. It was supposed to splash, but the pilots pulled the circuit breakers for the separation charge igniters."

Buz nodded. "The astronauts and cosmonauts had already decided to try to build a civilization. They had to have the tanks for living space."

"You were in on that?" Alex asked.

"A little," Jenn said. "They couldn't do that but once, though. Then came--"

"The Last Shuttle," Buz said.

"Yeah. I was in it," Alex said.

"We know," Jenn said. "How are Ian and Alicia?"

"You knew them?"

"Yes."

"Dad was killed in a blowout nine years ago," Alex said. "Mother died last year. Heart."

"Oh. I'm sorry," Jenn said. She turned to her husband. "They had twenty years together. Up there."

"And we're still here," Buz said. He turned to Alex. "It was Ian and Alicia or us," he said. "When the astronauts decided to take the last shuttle up. The space program was winding down, and we thought it would be important to get more people into the habitats. Peace and Freedom. Cooperation between U.S. and Russia. Symbols of peace and progress. They already had a shuttle tank in orbit, and we wanted to send another, but mostly we wanted to send up families. Jenn and I were candidates. So were Ian and Alicia, and you, only you didn't know it. You were about six, as I recall, and your mother was small, so the two of you weighed less than I do."

Georgina and Gordon had come to listen, and others gathered around. "What happened to the last shuttle?" Georgina asked. "You still have it, don't you?"

"Sure. It can't reenter. It was damaged."

"I heard--there was a riot at the launch," a fan said. He was younger than Gordon, a small round teenager with thick glasses. "I read about it--"

"It was Enterprise Two," Alex said. "Like Buz said. There had been regular supply runs, but-maybe Buz should tell this."

"I've told it before," Buz said. "Let's hear how you tell it."

"I was six," Alex said. "My father and mother were mission specialists. Engineers. They'd heard the space program was being closed down, and thought--they thought that if there were families in space, Americans as well as Russians, it would shame the government into supporting them. So they all volunteered to go. They thought there would be other ships. The NASA ground crew swore they'd stay on the job, refurbish the ship and send her back up with supplies. It wasn't supposed to be the last one."

"Some group had tried to get a court order to stop the launch," Jenn said. "Said there was a chance that a bad launch could fall on pleasure boats out in the ocean. Then they sent most of their membership down to man a fleet downrange of the pads."

Their audience had formed up in a circle. The younger fans were wide-eyed. A man in medievals, a troubadours outfit, with a lute slung across his shoulder, was jotting notes. Older fans, hanging farther back, showed a blacker mood. It wasn't just a yarn to them. They remembered.

"That was Earth First," Buz said.

Jenn snorted. "You mean Earth Only."

"Earth Last," another muttered. "Bastards."

"Nobody worried about their court order," Alex said. "But then the word leaked out that the launch was on, and a mob gathered around the perimeter. They tried to tear down the fences, but there was another group, the L-5 Society, supporters, trying to protect the ship. Not enough of them. There was fighting. Mom wouldn't let me watch. She had a death grip on me until she could get us aboard."

Alex noticed he was rubbing his arm, and stopped. "We squeezed into one couch. Everything was going wrong, Dad said half the control board was red, but they launched anyway. I remember the acceleration. Mother was holding onto me, the couch wasn't big enough, other kids were screaming, but Dad was grinning like a thief; I'll never forget his face. Or Mother's. "

"On the way up there was a clonk and a lurch. Didn't feel any worse than what was happening till I saw Dad's face. Scared. Snarling with fear."

"An eco-fascist Stinger," Jenn said. "It was a near miss. Ripped a shitload of tiles off her nose."

Alex nodded. "Punched nearly through. I've seen it. But we made it. Mission Control kept feeding corrections to the main computer. They're the real heroes, the NASA ground crew. I never knew their names."

"Why them?" asked one of the young fans.

"Because they stayed at their posts."

"But--"

"The mob broke through."

"Oh."

"The fighting in Mission Control was hand to hand," Buz said. Long, hard muscles were jumping in the old man's arms. He'd learned to fight… but afterward, Alex thought. "The mob had baseball bats. Two had handguns. Some of the ground crew held them at the door until they took bullets and went down." He turned to the woman beside him and took her gnarled hand in his and stroked it. "The mob swelled inside, swinging bats and smashing panels. The crew held on, nobody left, nobody left a console until Enterprise Two was up." He sighed and looked at the floor. "The police showed up then; but it was too late to save anything."