It was because — in a stupid, unworthy way, now that she was utterly dependent on him — he was falling in love with Libet himself.

Rosenberg was jealous.

When he got back to the common area, he found Angel and Benacerraf screaming at each other.

Paula had algal growth smeared over her cheek. “Were you aware of this?”

“Aware of what?”

“What he’s been taking.” She stabbed a finger at Angel, who loomed in the air beyond her, his beard floating, his body hunched over in the shape of a huge, brown-jacketed claw.

“Are you talking about drugs?”

Paula seemed to be trembling, so extreme was her anger. “God damn it, am I supposed to watch over every damn thing on this fucking ship? Rosenberg, you’re the surgeon up here. You got a responsibility for this stuff.”

“Woah.” Rosenberg held his hands up. “Back off, Paula. As far as I’m concerned all I have is a field assignment. I’m no doctor, and I sure as hell will not accept sole responsibility for our medical supplies.” Now it was his turn to point at Angel, who laughed at him. “If that asshole wants to shoot himself up, that’s his responsibility. There’s no lock on the cupboard, and I’m not prepared to hold any key—”

“Fuck this,” Angel snapped now. “Look, Benacerraf, I’m not taking any orders from you over this.”

“Then you can take them from NASA.”

“NASA are ten million miles away,” Angel yelled. “We’re on our own out here. Don’t you get it?”

Benacerraf tried to face him, but they were both bobbing in the air as they gestured, their centers of mass adjusting as they threw their arms back and forth. It added an air of absurdity to the whole situation, and was maybe even extending the row.

“Steroids,” Rosenberg said.

They turned to look at him.

“Anabolic steroids. That’s what this is about, isn’t it? He’s taking steroids, against microgravity wasting of his bones.”

“Steroids,” Benacerraf said, “and fluoride to promote calcium growth. That’s what I’ve been able to trace anyhow.”

Angel shrugged. “Sue me,” he said. “It’s a hell of a sight easier than those dumb hours in the arm.”

“It doesn’t work,” Rosenberg said. “What is it you’re using, the nandrolone? Look, steroids work by increasing muscle strength, not by acting directly on the bones. The stronger the muscles, the more stress they impose on the skeleton; and your skeleton adjusts itself until it’s just strong enough to withstand muscle stress. But — here’s the catch, Bill — you still have to do your exercise to get the benefit. Don’t you get it? And as for the fluoride, that really is dumb. You’ll start getting calcification where you don’t want it. And—”

“Up your ass, double-dome,” Angel said savagely. “You’re no doctor. What do you know?”

Rosenberg shrugged. “Fine. Your choice. Don’t come to me when your tendons ossify.”

“Fuck you,” Angel said. He pulled himself into his quarters, and slammed the door closed behind him.

Now that the shouting had stopped, the routine noises of the hab module became more apparent: the whir of the high-speed fans, the hiss of the vents, sixty decibels of white noise.

For a moment Benacerraf hung there in the air, her legs drawn up towards her chest. Her breathing was rapid, her face flushed, her eyes, over puffed cheeks, red-rimmed and irritated. Rosenberg wondered vaguely about the state of her heart. “Rosenberg,” she said now, “I want you to take responsibility for this. I want you to find a way of locking those damn drugs away from Bill.”

He didn’t respond.

He had no intention of locking away anything. He sure wasn’t going to intervene in some argument between Benacerraf and Angel, for the benefit of a control freak like Benacerraf.

Anyhow, he figured, he had enough responsibility already.

He got away from Benacerraf. He made his way past the debris of the laundry, and in the galley he tried to find something easy to fix for lunch.

Hadamard was in Washington during the inauguration of Xavier Maclachlan, after his wafer-thin win in the 2008 election.

Maclachlan called it a “liberation of the capital.”

Armed militia bands came in from Idaho and Arizona and Oklahoma and Montana, to fire off black-powder salutes to the nationalist-populist who promised to repeal all gun control laws. In the crowd, Hadamard saw a couple of Ku Klux Klan costumes, a sight he thought had gone into an unholy past. Come to that, there was a rumor that a former Klan leader was being made ready to become a future White House chief of staff. And in his speech Maclachlan appealed to the people to end what he called the “Israeli occupation of Congress…”

And so on.

As soon as Maclachlan lifted his hand from the Bible, U.S. peacekeeping troops in the Balkans and Africa started to board their planes to leave. Foreign aid stopped. The U.N. was being thrown out of New York, and there was a rumor that Maclachlan was planning some military adventure to take back the canal from Panama.

Army engineers — set in place during the handover from the last Administration — started to build a wall, two thousand miles of it, along the Mexican border, to exclude illegal immigrants. While it was being built, troops brought home from peacekeeping abroad were operating a shoot-to-kill policy.

There was chaos in the financial markets. Maclachlan had withdrawn the U.S. from the North American Free Trade treaty, from the World Trade Organization, from GATT. Reviews of the country’s membership of the World Bank and the IMF had started — arms of an incipient world government, Maclachlan said, designed to let in the Russians. He had raised tariffs — ten percent against Japan, fifty percent against the Chinese — and world trade collapsed.

The Chinese, particularly, screamed. And so Maclachlan sent the Seventh Fleet to a new station just off the coast of Taiwan.

Meanwhile all the strategic arms treaties with Russia were torn up, as Maclachlan ordered his technicians to dig out the blueprints for Reagan’s old dream of SDI. In fact, Maclachlan wanted to go further. He was inviting ideas for what he called his “da Vinci brains trust.” The press was full of schemes for fantastic new weapons: smart remote sensors; dream mines that could shoot at passing traffic; smart armor that would use explosive tiles to deflect incoming projectiles; maybe even an electrical battlefield in which electricity-propelled shells would be zapped in by low-flying aircraft.

And back home, Maclachlan had cut off any remaining programs which benefited blacks and other minorities, and any funding that appeared to support abortion, which had been made illegal in any form.

Xavier Maclachlan was a busy man, and he was fulfilling his campaign promises.

Jake Hadamard was still in his job at NASA, trying to maintain support for the Titan mission, still coping with the fall-out from the Endeavour launch. Not that anybody seemed to care much about that any more. The scuttlebutt, in fact, was that Maclachlan was lining up Al Hartle as Hadamard’s replacement. Maclachlan couldn’t have sent a clearer signal as to what he thought of the X-15 incident.

Hadamard had thought he could work with Maclachlan. All his life, Hadamard had put himself, his career, first; he’d thought he could work with anybody.

Maybe he’d been wrong.

He thought Maclachlan was causing a lot of people a lot of misery, needlessly. He was stirring up hate that might rebound on him. And he was taking one hell of a risk by enraging China like this.

Hadamard felt afraid of the future. But his greatest fear was that Maclachlan might actually be right. What if his protectionism and military bristling actually gained back the advantage for the U.S., as they all entered the second decade of what the commentators were calling “China’s century”? What if his own, Hadamard’s, vestigial moral doubts were exposed as the confusion of a weakling? What then…?