He wiggled his toes furiously, frowning at the radar display on his instrument panel. His radar had acquired four "unidentified" satellites so far on this sortie and they had all turned out to be decoys: nothing but metallized balloons. No markings, but everyone knew that if they were not made in the USA they came from Soviet Russia.

"C'mon, Frank, give it up," said the disembodied voice in his earphones. "You've got to start back now or else the mission controller will be required to ask Command for a standby rescue scramble."

"Stuff it," Colt snapped into his helmet mike. "Where they got decoys they're decoying something. What was the location of that other blip you had?" His tiny oval radar screen showed nothing now but random sparkles.

The communicator's voice in his earphones sighed. "Man, you're more trouble than the rest of this outfit put together."

"You're pickin' on me 'cause I'm black," Colt said, with a deliberate hint of Motown in his voice. "Where's that other blip?"

"It's out of your plane. You can't reach it."

"Gimme the coordinates."

He saw the data transmission light flickering madly on his computer panel, then the display screen showed a graph and a string of numbers. Colt tapped on the computer keyboard with a single gloved finger.

"You can't make that maneuver with the fuel reserve you've got!" the communicator said.

"Wanna put some money on that?" Colt laughed.

"Watch this."

Colt closed his gloved left hand around the tiny sidestick controller and worked the thruster button with his thumb. The spaceplane dipped obediently down toward the Earth, while a background mutter of voices in his earphones told him that the communicator and mission controller back at Van- denberg were arguing over whether they should transmit a recall order or not. If they did, and Colt failed to heed it, whatever happened afterward was on Colt's record, not theirs.

The plane's nose was visibly heating, turning a dull red. 294

Colt thought he could hear air whistling past the cockpit, even through the insulation of his helmet, but he knew that it was his imagination.

"You are hereby ordered to discontinue your orbital plane-change maneuver," the controller's voice said, heavily, officially, "and position your vehicle for re-entry and return to base."

"Roger," said Colt. "Discontinue and attain re-entry heading."

But the plane plunged deeper into the atmosphere as Colt grinned happily to himself. With pressures on the controller as delicate as a lover's caress, he rolled the spaceplane and made it turn, feeling the weight of accelera- tion as the silvery aerospace craft bit into the thin air of the high atmosphere. He pulled the stick back ever so slightly and the plane's nose reared upward. Colt felt himself pushed back into his seat. His eyes flicked across the instrument panel. The computer screen showed a glowing white dot pulsing along a gracefully curved line.

"Right on the money," Colt muttered to himself.

The spaceplane was trading kinetic energy for altitude now. Colt took his hand off the control stick, felt his arms hang weightlessly.

"That's a helluva re-entry attitude, Colt!" the mission controller's voice snapped.

"Just savin' fuel, Mary," he replied, almost jovially.

The radar screen showed a fat blip gliding from one edge toward its center. Colt touched another button and the screen displayed a telescopic optical view of the satellite, with range data and a targeting reticle superimposed.

"There she is," Colt said calmly into his microphone, "Real one this time. Big mother, too."

In his earphones he heard a muffled, grudging, "The sonofabitch can fly, I'll give him that much."

The satellite was dead black, but studded with glassy protuberances that made Colt think it might be an x-ray laser. He glanced down at his data recorder and saw that it was taping everything his sensors picked up. X-ray lasers were powered by small nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons in orbit were illegal, outlawed by the Space Treaty of 1967. The tapes ought to provide some ammunition for the diplomats wran- gling in Geneva, Colt thought. 295