The phone rings with Suzie, the vice commander’s wife, on the other end. They’ve been talking on and off all afternoon. Bitsy takes the portable back to the couch.

“Did you see that montage Fox News did?” Suzie is asking, still amazed at the depth of the reactions through dozens of interviews.

“No. Tell me.”

“I didn’t know they had that many correspondents. They’re flipping all around the country. For instance, there was this little beauty shop somewhere in Iowa, crammed with women who’re holding kind of a vigil with the TV and hanging on to every word he writes. I swear some of those gals were sounding like rock groupies. It was strange.”

“I’m not surprised,” Bitsy replies. “Some of what he’s said… you just want to hold the poor guy and tell him it’s okay, you know?”

“Mother him, in other words?”

“Right. Don’t you?”

“Okay, I’ll admit it. But some of the women they’ve been talking to are thinking less of giving comfort than of getting him under one. But I don’t know, I think it’s whathe’s saying that’s sexy. The guy is intelligent, and remember, there’s nothing as sexy as a well-hung mind.”

“Who said that?”

“I did. Seriously, I’ll have to Google it.”

“Well, sexy or not, the reactions of everyone out there are just amazing,” Bitsy adds, still reading the evolving words. “What he’s saying now is really thought provoking. I’m sitting here wondering about a lot of the subjects he’s raised, not just how I would feel up there in his place.”

“The most touching thing to me are all those people who’re crowding airports and bus stations right now to race across the country and see parents or kids they haven’t talked to in years, and every one they’ve interviewed says the same thing: I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for reading what that poor guy wrote, and realizing how little time there is in this life.”

“Do they say which part, exactly, touched them the most?”

“Just the whole thing, and the anguish when he wrote about his son, I think.”

“He’s broken some sort of mass psychological dam, that’s for sure,” Bitsy says.

“You know, he wrote earlier about a dangerous intersection near his home in Tucson. For six years, he said, he couldn’t get anyone in city government to pay attention to the need for a traffic light there, and three people died. Now, suddenly, because he wrote it up there and half the world read it, the Tucson City Council is debating the issue as we speak.”

“I hadn’t heard that. But yesterday he wrote about how much he loved Banff and Lake Louise in Canada, and almost instantly they sold out for the summer.”

“You reading him right now?”

“About how he’s become a well-known artist, with four kids and a beautiful, Brazilian wife?”

“Yes. His rewritten life. He wants four kids and he already hasfour kids.”

“And the house in Tucson? He’s put himself right back there, only this time it’s a vacation residence. And the father he was going to fire and recreate? Still works for mining interests in Arizona, only now he always tells Kip he loves him.”

“You know what impressed me? The guy thinks he’s not brave. You probably read that part where he said he was far too timid to do anything bold. But he isbrave. Look how much courage it took to delete everything he’d written for two days. He was really deleting his old life and moving on. How many of us could do that, even in writing?”

The sound of the front door opening catches her attention and Bitsy turns to find her husband pulling the door closed and waving. She waves back and ends the call, coming to him quickly, ignoring the prickle of the metallic buttons on his uniform as she enfolds him and holds on tight, aware he’s slightly puzzled, though hugging her back enthusiastically. The hug progresses to a deep kiss and a loosened tie and shirt, and his hands begin an appreciative tour of her body as she tilts her head toward the bedroom.

“How ’bout it, sailor? Wanna get lucky?”

“Does the sun rise in the east?” he answers, grinning as he stops her momentarily. “But… not that I’m complaining, because I’m sure not… but to what do I owe the pleasure?”

“Let’s just say there’s a poor guy flashing past overhead every ninety minutes who’s reminding me how very, very lucky we are.”

Arleigh Kerr replaces the receiver as Richard DiFazio comes back into the nearly deserted control room.

“Any news?” Arleigh asks, aware that the final urgent meeting between their director of maintenance and the chairman was scheduled for an hour before.

“It’s final. We can’t fly. I saw all the reasons up close and personal and he’s right. We’d probably lose our second ship. How about you?”

“The Japanese have scrubbed their launch, pulled the plug.”

“And Beijing?”

“Still scheduled for a liftoff tomorrow morning, three hours before the Russians, and four before the shuttle.”

“Two down, three to go.”

“He’s got a fighting chance. Three launches are good odds.”

“You’re sure the scrubbers will hold?”

Arleigh looks at him long and hard before answering.

“No. I’m not sure. But death by CO ₂isn’t instant. Not like suddenly cutting off his air. If someone can get him out of that airlock before he’s too far gone, he could make it. We’ve briefed all of them.”

“And if you were to bet?” Richard asks.

“I wouldn’t. Not on this.”

There are times, Griggs Hopewell thinks, when he can almost recapture that old feeling of NASA invulnerability, those heady days when there was nothing they couldn’t do.

It is night again at the Cape, the night before the launch, the frenetic preparations beginning to pay off, despite the delays. John Kent has gone to sleep for a few hours, but even he’s feeling better about the prospects, and the crew is anxious to go, as most of them always are.

Griggs stands in the heavy night air, swatting at an occasional mosquito as he looks at the shuttle lit up so spectacularly a mile away. The morning he knows will be a challenge. He’s aware that Miss Dorothy from D.C. has not given up, and thwarting her will take a masterful effort, the main thrust of which is just about to begin.

On schedule his cell phone rings and he answers with a quick flipping motion of his right hand.

“Yes?”

“Okay, we’ve got what we came for.”

“Anything overt?”

“Not yet. If she’s got a specific plan, it’s buried in what we found, but there are some very interesting names in the database on her laptop.”

“I’ll meet you in ten minutes as planned.”

He closes the phone, disgusted that he has to play cat and mouse the evening before a launch, just to be able to launch. But if Dorothy Sheehan makes the mistake he expects, she’ll be facing criminal charges—the one element of leverage that may get Shear into another line of work.

Kip sniffs the air again, fearful of confirming what his senses perceive.

And yes, it is there. Faint, but there, and where there is some smelly evidence of the process of decomposition, there will be more.

He’s stopped typing, aware that his fanciful life story rewrite has wobbled too far afield. It’s not even a good fantasy, and it feels so narcissistic. No, he decides, he should be writing about something else, maybe how he wishes the world was, rather than how rich or famous he’d like to be.

Well, not famous. That’s never turned him on, though now he supposes he’ll be a tiny footnote in space history: “First contest-winning space tourist dies in orbit.”

With the odor, he can’t get Bill out of his mind. Of course he’s going to run out of breathable air anyway, but why hurry the moment?