A fist-sized mass of clotted blood plopped out, splattering the stainless steel table.

“Big subdural hematoma,” said one of Roman’s associates.

“From the trauma?”

“I don’t think so,” said Roman. “You saw the aorta—death would have been nearly instantaneous on impact. I’m not sure her heart was pumping long enough to produce this much intracranial bleeding.” Gently he slid his gloved fingers into the cranial cavity, probing the surface of gray matter. A gelatinous mass slithered out and splashed onto the table.

Roman jerked back, startled.

“What the hell is that?” his assistant said.

Roman didn’t answer. He just stared at the clump of tissue. It was covered with a blue-green membrane. Through the glistening veil, the mass appeared irregular, a knot of formless flesh. He was about to slit the membrane open, then he stopped himself and shot a glance toward Jack.

“It’s a tumor of some kind,” he said. “Or cyst. That would explain the headache she reported.”

“No it wouldn’t,” Jack spoke up. “Her headache came on suddenly—within hours. A tumor takes months to grow.”

“How do you know she hasn’t been hiding her symptoms these past months?” countered Roman. “Keeping it a secret so she wouldn’t get scrubbed from the launch?”

Jack had to concede that was a possibility. Astronauts were so eager for flight assignments they might well conceal any symptoms that would pull them from a mission.

Roman looked at his associate standing across the table from him. The other man nodded, slid the mass into a specimen container, and carried it out of the room.

“Aren’t you going to section it?” said Jack.

“It needs to be fixed and stained first. If I start slicing now, could deform the cellular architecture.”

“You don’t know if it is a tumor.”

“What else would it be?” Jack had no answer. He had never seen anything like it.

Roman continued his examination of Jill Hewitt’s cranial cavity.

Clearly the mass, whatever it was, had increased pressure on her brain, deforming its structures. How long had it been there? Months, years? How was it possible that Jill had been able to function normally, much less pilot a complicated vehicle like the shuttle? All this raced through Jack’s head as he watched Roman remove the brain and slide it into a steel basin.

“She was close to herniating through the tentorium,” said Roman.

No wonder Jill had gone blind. No wonder she hadn’t lowered the landing gear. She had already been unconscious, her brain about to be squeezed like toothpaste out the base of her skull.

Jill’s corpse—what remained of it—was sealed into a new body bag and wheeled out of the room, along with the biohazard containers holding her organs.

A second body was brought in. It was Andy Mercer.

With fresh gloves pulled over his space suit gloves, and a clean scalpel, Roman set to work on the Y incision. He was moving more quickly, as though Jill had just been the warm-up and he was only now hitting his stride.

Mercer had complained of abdominal pain and vomiting, Jack remembered as he watched Roman’s scalpel slice through skin and subcutaneous fat.

Mercer hadn’t complained of a headache, as Jill had, but he’d had a fever and had coughed up a little blood.

Would his lungs show the effects of Marburg virus?

Again, Roman’s diagonal cuts met below the xiphoid, and he sliced a shallow line down the abdomen to the pubis. Again he cut through the ribs, freeing up the triangular shield that covered the heart. He lifted the sternum.

Gasping, he stumbled backward, dropping his scalpel. It clanged onto the table. His assistants stood frozen in disbelief.

In Mercer’s chest cavity was a cluster of blue-green cysts, identical to the cyst in Jill Hewitt’s brain. They were massed around the heart, like tiny translucent eggs.

Roman stood paralyzed, his gaze fixed on the gaping torso.

Then his gaze shifted to the glistening peritoneal membrane. It distended, full of blood and bulging out through the abdominal incision.

Roman stepped toward the body, staring at the outpouching of the peritoneal membrane. When he’d made his incision through the abdominal wall, his scalpel had nicked the surface of that membrane. A trickle of blood-tinged fluid leaked out. At first it was barely a few drops. Then, even as they watched, it began to trickle into a stream. The slit suddenly burst open into a gaping rent as blood gushed out, carrying with it a slippery flood of blue-green cysts.

Roman gave a cry of horror as the cysts plopped onto the floor in splatters of blood and mucus.

One of them skittered across the concrete and bumped against Jack’s rubber boot. He bent down, to touch it with his gloved hand.

Abruptly he was yanked backward as Roman’s associates pulled him away from the table.

“Get him out of here!” Roman ordered. “Get him out of the room!” The two men pushed Jack toward the door. He resisted, shoving away the gloved hand now grasping his shoulder. The man stumbled backward, tipped over a tray of surgical instruments, sprawled to the floor, slippery with cysts and blood.

The second man wrenched Jack’s air hose from its connection and held up the kinked end. “I advise you to walk out with us, Dr. McCallum,” he said. “While you’ve still got breathable air.”

“My suit! Jesus, I’ve got a breach!” It was the man who’d stumbled into the instrument tray. He was now staring in horror at a two-inch-long tear in his space suit sleeve—a sleeve that was coated with Mercer’s body fluids.

“It’s wet. I can feel it. My inner sleeve is wet—”

“Go!” barked Roman. “Decon now!” The man unplugged his suit and went running in panic out of the room. Jack followed him to the air lock door, and they both stepped through, into the decon shower. Water shot out of the overhead jets, pounding down like hard rain on their shoulders.

Then the shower of disinfectant began, a torrent of green liquid that splattered noisily against their plastic helmets.

When it finally stopped, they stepped through the next door and pulled off their suits. The man immediately peeled off his already wet scrub suit and thrust his arm under a faucet of running water, to rinse away any body fluids that had leaked through the sleeve.

“You have any breaks in your skin?” asked Jack. “Cuts, hangnails?”

“My daughter’s cat scratched me last night.”

Jack looked down at the man’s arm and saw the claw marks, three scabbed lines raking up the inner arm. The same arm as the torn space suit. He looked at the man’s eyes and saw fear.

“What happens now?” said Jack.

“Quarantine. I go to lockup. Shit…”

“I already know it’s not Marburg,” said Jack.

The man released a deep breath. “No. It’s not.”

“Then what is it? Tell me what we’re dealing with,” said Jack.

The man clutched the sink with both hands and stared down at the water gurgling into the drain. He said softly, “We don’t know.”

Sullivan Obie was riding his Harley on Mars.

At midnight, with the full moon shining down and the pockmarked desert stretched out before him, he could imagine it was the Martian wind whipping his hair and red Martian dust churning beneath his tires. This was an old fantasy from boyhood, from the days when those precocious Obie brothers shot off homemade rockets and built cardboard moon landers and donned space suits of crinkled foil. The days when he and Gordie knew, just knew, their futures lay in the heavens.

And this is where those big dreams end up, he thought. Drunk on tequila, popping wheelies in the desert. No way was he ever getting to Mars, or to the moon either. Chances were he wouldn’t get off the goddamn launchpad, but would be instantly atomized.

A quick, spectacular death. What the hell, it beat dying at seventy-five with cancer.