Harley said, “Before we pin on the Congressional Space Medal, what are the next steps?”

“We have to be ready with the landing plan as soon as possible,” Kennedy said. “The moment we hear from the crew, we should start counting down to a burn at first opportunity.”

“And a data upload based on that,” Weldon said. He and Kennedy fired times, phrases, and names back and forth for several minutes, then both stood.

Harley tried to help with the sales pitch. “This isn’t as crazy as it sounds. Ten years ago, when we were looking at NEO missions, we were planning to simply fly a Destiny right down to a surface.”

“Down to the surface of a NEO the size of a football stadium,” Kennedy said. “Or maybe a kilometer across. Keanu is a hundred times larger, with real gravity of its own. I’m not saying it’s impossible. I am saying it ain’t the same deal.”

“Whatever, we’ll be ready in two hours,” Weldon announced. And he tossed down the last of his beer.

Emerging into the Texas afternoon was like entering a broiler. The clouds, threatening rain, managed to dull the glare, but they added to the oppressive thickness of the air. Even with Sasha Blaine pushing his wheels, Harley could feel his energy being drained. “It’s amazing,” Blaine said.

“The discomfort?”

“No!” she said. “It just all looks so normal! Insane things are happening half a million kilometers away, and all these people are just living their lives!”

It was true. There was a McDonald’s a hundred meters down the road, cars still lined up for lunchtime drive-through. Other vehicles, each one sealed and air-conditioned against the tropical Houston summer heat, glided past on NASA One. Harley knew that there were dozens of protesters at JSC’s back gate, but not out here.

“Jealous?” Harley said.

Blaine blushed again. “Kind of, yeah. This has been . . . fun. And it just shows me that I’m thirty-two and I have no life. No boyfriend, no hobbies, no pets. I just do calculations and teach and every now and then I slip the leash and come someplace like this.”

Harley was in front of his used Dodge Caravan, modified for easy access and equipped with hand controls. “The one benefit, and it may be the only benefit, of being differently mobile is that I don’t have to park across the lot.”

Formerly mobile Harley Drake, driver of a Mustang, would have added, “And since we don’t need to be back at the Home Team for a couple of hours . . .” And likely driven off for an afternoon of sport with Sasha Blaine.

But this was wheelchair Harley, spinal-cord-injury Harley, unable-to-function Harley.

It was also Home Team and Alien Protocol chief Harley Drake.

He used his key to open the side door, then waited for the special lift to extend. “I’ll see you back in the center in an hour.”

Then Blaine said, “Oh, you’ve got someplace better to be?” Harley was forced to conclude that she hoped he might have something more distracting in mind.

“Yeah,” he said. “Don’t worry. I’ll tell you all about it when I get back.”

I’d hate to die twice. It’s so boring.

RICHARD FEYNMAN’S LAST WORDS

Rachel awoke in her own bedroom, confused and not terribly rested. The light was wrong—bright through the shades. Right, it was afternoon . . . she had slept a long time.

But the sound of the house was wrong. The drone of the air conditioner was audible. That was the problem: Rachel could actually hear the machine.

Which meant something was missing.

Over the past two years, she had gotten used to having the house to herself. Her father made it a point to be home whenever she was . . . he had rearranged his work schedule to allow for telecommuting in the after-school hours, either plopping himself at the kitchen table while Rachel pretended to do schoolwork, or sitting on the sidelines at soccer with his Slate right up to the time Rachel finally told him she hated soccer and was quitting . . . and generally found other things to do between three and six P.M.

But whenever Zack was home, he had music playing . . . country, classical, horrible early nineties pop; it didn’t seem to matter, as long as sound filled the house.

As if her father couldn’t stand the silence. Back when she had had actual conversations with Zack, as opposed to arguments, Rachel had thought about asking him about the music . . . but, feeling she knew the answer, never did.

And now . . . would she ever?

Her father was . . . somewhere on Keanu, out of touch and, according to everything NASA had been saying, out of oxygen, food, and water . . . somehow in contact with the late Megan Stewart.

Maybe she should have taken the sedative Jillianne Dwight had offered. If it hadn’t been so freaking horribly hot outside, she would have sneaked out to the porch and lit up a joint.

As it was, the trip home had been uncomfortable. Amy simply would not shut up about all the weird stuff she’d seen, and how she couldn’t wait to tell everyone how she and Rachel had almost gotten arrested by the FBI. The fact that Rachel had had a conversation with a being who seemed to be her dead mother, reincarnated . . . well, that never seemed to strike Amy as all that interesting.

It was a relief to see her go.

Inside the house, Rachel had walked right past the telescope in the living room that Zack had used to first show her Keanu. In the last few months, of course, no telescope had been necessary.

Rachel had wondered what she would see if she used it now. She hadn’t been online for twelve hours.

Before she checked her page, she glanced at the news feed.

It was all Keanu: “Astronauts Out of Contact” . . . “Space Crews in Danger” . . . “NASA Hiding Zombie Planet” . . .

Some of it seemed to match what Rachel had seen and heard, and some of it was crazy.

The phrase zombie planet made her sick. Keanu-Megan wasn’t a zombie. She knew things that only Rachel’s real mother would know!

She turned to her page and saw that the counter had maxed out on seven thousand messages. Glancing through the first hundred, she saw about seventy versions of, So sorry to hear about your father! The rest said things like, What’d you expect?

There were, of course, the stupid smutty messages, too, boys and men from many nations offering to “comfort” her. Rachel had been online since the age of six; there was nothing new or notable in any of this. All it did was remind her of Ethan Landolt and the fact that he had not even tried to get in touch with her since the launch.

With brutal efficiency, she clicked through more of the messages. Same, same, same. Condolence, your fault, send me a naked pic.

But then her eye saw something that didn’t fit the pattern. This is the beginning of a new age, it said. How great for you to be the first to know that we live on after death. You’re like the women around Jesus at the Resurrection.

That really freaked her out, because she had been feeling something like that . . . and felt stupid for entertaining the idea for even a second. She was just a fourteen-year-old Texas girl whose father happened to be an astronaut. There were a hundred astronauts, so how did that make her special? Her mother had died, but there were hundreds of thousands of girls in the United States in the same situation, too.

She took her fingers off the Slate. At that moment, it looked and felt as alien as anything on Keanu. She wanted it out—

There was a gentle knock at the door. Jillianne. “Hungry?”