"It's a lot to adjust to," she said. "I'm a long way from home."
"AndNeal."
"That's all over," she said quickly. "It's been over for a long time."
"Okay. I'll see you tomorrow, I guess. Good night."
"Good night, Chet. And thanks."
He shrugged and made a crooked grin. But as he walked away down the corridor his mind filled with the old pictures of the dead cosmonaut, and the new memory of General Murdock's memo.
Kinsman strode past his own quarters, prowling the corridors, sleepless, angry with himself and not knowing why. Without conscious direction, he wound up back at the rec dome. It was empty now. The litter of the party cluttered the floor. The overhead lights were off, but the pool lights glimmered softly. Earth hung bright and motionless over- head.
Kinsman sat down at the piano and tinkered with it. He got all the way through the first two movements of the "Moonlight Sonata," decided against risking the third and botching it. He tried some Bach. It was miserable and so was he.
Then he felt her hand on his shoulder. He knew it was Diane without looking up. She sat on the bench beside him.
"I don't want to be alone," she said.
It was like the first time he had flown in orbit. The 315 breathtaking freedom of weightlessness. Free-fall. All the bounds of Earth slipped away. Nothing else in the universe except himself and this lovely warm woman. Kinsman even forgot the crowded, beckoning, troubled Earth and the star-eyes of God that watched him.
Thursday 2 December 1999:
1550 hrs UT
SPACE STATION ALPHA WAS a set of concentric rings connected by spokelike tunnels. At the central hub spacecraft docked. From a distance it looked rather like a set of bicycle wheels of different sizes nested within one another. Closer up, you could see that things were nowhere near that neat: antennas and equipment pods and odd-shaped structures poked out from the wheels every few meters. Like all human cities, Alpha was suffering from urban sprawl.
When it was first built. Alpha was intended to be a center for commercial industry, even tourism. But as the United States began developing its strategic defense satellites, armed with lasers capable of destroying ballistic missiles over ranges of several thousand kilometers, the military took over more and more of Alpha's facilities, and those of the other two major space stations, Beta and Gamma. Now Alpha was almost entirely manned by Aerospace Force personnel, a center for manufacturing the strategic defense satellites out of lunar raw materials, for deploying them in orbit around the Earth, and for command and control of the globe-spanning defensive network of laser-armed satellites.
Alpha had also become a base for the manned intercep- tor sorties against Soviet strategic defense satellites.
Frank Colt was supervising the overhaul of his space- plane. The sleek one-man interceptor rested inside a tubular metal hangar, pressurized to normal Earth atmosphere so 316 that technicians could work without cumbersome space suits hampering them. Men, women, and equipment drifted easily in the nearly zero gravity, hovering around the stubby-winged spaceplane. Only a few weeks ago it had been gleaming, polished silver. Now it looked used, the metal finish pitted and dulled by hours of solar particle bombardment and fiery dives into the atmosphere, where the air turned incandescent from the shock of its hypersonic maneuvering.
Like the technicians, Colt was in stained, well-worn coveralls. He was hovering above the stump of the rocket- plane's tail, where the main rocket nozzles poked their black snouts out from their streamlined fairings. Pointing with an outstretched accusing finger to one of the smaller maneuver- ing thrusters set into the fairing, Colt muttered, "That's the one." He looked up at the technicians hanging upside-down above him and yelled over the clamor of the machinery that echoed through the hangar, "That's the mother that froze up on me."
The tech was white, young, with red hair and freckles. New to Alpha. He steadied himself by planting one hand on the spaceplane's skin and peered at the tiny jet nozzle. "Looks okay to me," he said, then added, "sir."
Colt pushed his face to within a centimeter of the tech's. "Listen, Sergeant, I don't give a shit how it looks to you. It froze on me. Get it out of there and find out what's wrong with it."
"Take out the whole thruster assembly?"
"Perform a hysterectomy if you got to. Find out what's wrong with it and fix it."
"But my shift is over in ten—"
"Sergeant, your shift is over when I'm satisfied that this thruster works right. Understand that? And the way I'm gonna find out is to bring you with me on a test flight. Now, you can either bust your ass in here or get fried out there. Take your pick."
The kid's face turned as red as his hair. But before he could say anything, the loudspeaker blared, "Colonel Colt, top-priority communication from Earthside. Acknowledge immediately."
