"The MP's were pissed," said Jenn. "They'd been ordered to stand down because the organizers had assured everyone that the 'demonstration' would be peaceful; and an MP cordon would have been 'too provocative.' Not that the politicians needed much assurance. California and Florida both had Green governors."

"Skazhitye," said Gordon. "But how do you know so much about it?"

The elderly couple glanced at each other. Jenn said, "Jim here was Launch Control and SBR Separation. I was Flight Path Planning and RSO."

"You--" Alex felt a lump rise in his throat. Buz's voice--a younger Buz's voice--had been the last words from Earth he had heard, fed through the speakers into the passenger cabin in the silence after the engines shut down. Goodluck, Enterprise. Our dreams are going with you. Alex took a step toward them and they rose from their chairs. A moment's awkward hesitation gave way to an embrace. Alex's cheeks were hot with tears.

"You knew, didn't you," he said, hugging the old woman. "You knew it would be the Last Shuttle up."

She said nothing, but he could feel her head nodding. "We knew we'd never see another," said Buz. "Not in our lifetimes. But we're still the lucky ones. Come."

He led them through the exhibits, past the trappers, the cowboys, the sod busters. Pioneers, Alex thought. Pioneers all.

Buz led them to a small case near the back of the museum. It was nothing but a scroll, done up on pseudovellum. One-inch-square photographs had been mounted beside a list of names. The lettering was an intricate Old English calligraphy.

Star Date 670127

Virgil J. [Gus] Grissom

Roger Chaffee

Edward H. White II

670424 Vladimir Komarob

710629 Vladislav VolKob

Geiorgi Dobrovolsky

Viktor Patsayeb

860128 Francis R. Scobee

Michael T. Smith

Jubith A. Resnik

Ronald C. McNair

Ellison S. Onizuka

Gregory B. Forbis

CHrista McAuliffe

Alex woke groggy on a museum bench.

Gordon sat in a plastic shell of a chair hunched over a scarred and warped desk. He was staring off into space with his mouth half-open. Writing a love poem? Sure. And to whom, Alex thought he could guess. Shoeless, he padded up silently behind Gordon and read over his shoulder:

The scoopship's cabin was a sounding box for vibrations far below the ears' grasp; as, high over the northern hemisphere, her hull began to sing a bass dirge. My bones could feel…

Gordon jerked suddenly and turned in his seat. "Alex, I did not hear you come." He covered the tablet with his forearm.

Alex grinned. "Does the hero get the girl?"

Gordon flushed a deeper crimson. "It is not that kind of story. Are no heroes. It is story about belonging; about one's place in the world. About being at home."

Alex's eyes flicked toward the hidden sky.

"No, Alyosha. Not home like that. Not accident of birth. Home is where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. Sometimes you find it in places you don't expect."

"That's fine, Gordon." Gordon did have a way of putting words together. Not just a subsonic hum, but a "dirge." The hum and the sweetness of flight--yet with a touch of ominous anticipation. When Alex wrote, the words fell like stones in line: solid, serviceable prose for memos and technical reports and the occasionally informative letter; but it never sang like Gordon's did.

"May I ask you a question, Alex?"

"Sure. I can't sleep; and we'll be leaving soon anyway."

"Ask away."

"About Sherrine." He looked up, locked eyes with Alex for a fraction, then looked away. "Alex. I burn. Sherrine… She is as Roethke wrote: I knew a woman, lovely in her bones, / When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them…' But I… she and I…" He shook head abruptly. "Nyet. I cannot assert myself. The time is not right." He turned and looked again at Alex. "What if she does not care for me?"

Alex almost laughed. "Is that what you wanted to ask me about? You want her, but does she want you? How would I know? Ask Bob. She doesn't confide her love life to me." Alex forced the words out between his teeth, surprised at how much they hurt. "Things are a lot looser down here in the Well, you know."

Gordon looked at him strangely. "I thought you…"

"You thought I what?"

Gordon shook his head. "Nichevo."

Alex shrugged and tried to recover his broken sleep. What was with Gordon, anyhow? Lost on frozen Earth, the authorities searching for him, and there he sat writing fiction in the middle of the night. A novel no one would read.

Sherrine drove the rig while Bob slept in the back. The hill country of southwest Missouri, trees shorn prematurely of their leaves, swept past on both sides of the nearly abandoned interstate. The setting sun nagged at the edges of her vision, not quite dead ahead and too low for the visor to help, painting the pastel clouds that hugged the horizon. She kept her speed down; from fear of the cops, but also because she had to watch each overpass as she came upon it.

Here the Ice was only a distant whisper beyond the horizon, borne on summer breezes that had become

crisp and cool. The fall came earlier, and the winter blizzards were more frequent.

And none of the overpasses had quite collapsed. But they were shedding. What had Fang called it? Spalling? Sometimes she had to steer the truck around chunks of concrete lying in the roadway under an overpass; and she sweated when she drove across a bridge. The dreadful blizzards of the smog-free 19th century Plains once more shrouded the heartland in winter, freezing and cracking the works of mankind.

Alex was crumpled against a pillow jammed between the passenger door and the seat back. He slumped loosely, dozing, bent like a contortionist, or a marionette. From time to time he would blink and raise his head and gaze around himself as if baffled before nodding off once more to the gentle rocking of the truck's suspension.

Gordon sat between them quietly reading a book. He had found it at the clubhouse in St. Louis and had pounced on it with unconcealed delight. A thick squat paperback with cracked and dog-eared covers. The Portable Kipling. The fans had made him a gift of it.

He closed it now, because it had grown too dark to read. Gordon gazed out the windshield into the gathering dusk, where sunset stained the western horizon. He whispered so as not to wake Alex. "I saw nothing like this in Freedom. Always we see sunsets from above."

Sherrine was glad of conversation. Driving in silence disembodied you. It was talk that made you real. "I've seen the old pictures, looking down on the Earth. They made my heart ache."

"Each place has its own beauties. We can learn to love the one, and still yearn for the other."

"What were you reading?"

"A story. A character sketch. 'Lispeth.' It tells of Indian hill country girl raised by English missionaries. She wears English dress and acts in English manner. When a young official of the Raj passes through, she falls in love. He swears he will return and marry her; but he never has such an intention and abandons her without a thought. Finally she realizes truth. So she gives up the mission and returns to her village and her gods and becomes peasant wife."

"A sad story."

"A tragedy." She could hear his smile in the dark. "I am half-Russian. We are not happy without a tragedy. Kipling saw the tragedy of India. Lispeth thought she was English, but the English never did."

"I haven't read much Kipling. His books are hard to find these days."

"Oh, but you must. I will lend you mine. Kipling. And Dickens. And London. And Twain. Wonderful writers. I have… No. I have only this one book now. Real book, of real paper. Still, you may borrow it."