"Think you'll be up to EVA tomorrow?"
"I hope so," Linda said. "I want to go outside with you."
I'd rather go inside with you, Kinsman said to himself as he worked.
An hour later they were hovering side by side at the 80 observation port, looking out at the curving bulk of Earth, the blue and white splendor of the cloud-mottled Pacific. Kinsman was trying to remember the mission flight plan, comparing the times when Jill would be sleeping against the long stretches when the station would be orbiting between ground stations, with no possibility of interruptions.
"Is that land?" Linda asked, pointing to a thick band of clouds wrapping the horizon.
Glancing at the computer display of their orbital track, down by the control desk. Kinsman replied, "The coast of Chile, South America."
"There's another tracking station down there, isn't there?"
"NASA station, not part of our network. We only use Air Force stations."
"Why is that?"
"This is strictly a military operation. We have to be able to operate entirely separately from the civilian space agency."
"Doesn't that cost more money?"
Kinsman thought of Murdock, and the reason why the Pentagon had agreed to let Celebrity magazine send a photo- journalist to the Air Force space station. "Maybe. But it lets the civilians do their thing without getting involved in military operations. And vice versa. Like the separation of church and state."
"So everything you do here," Linda said, "is strictly military."
He made himself grin at that. "Yep. But it's not very warlike. We don't have any weapons aboard. We couldn't hurt a flea."
"I thought you tested giant laser weapons up here. You know, for the Star Wars program."
"No," he replied, shaking his head. "No death rays. No killer satellites. We have reflectors mounted outside, to test laser beams fired at us from the ground. And someday we will test antimissile lasers and other SDI stuff, I guess. But for now, all we do is observe the Earth and check out hardware that's supposed to run in zero gravity. And people," he added. "We test people up here. Jill's specialty is biomed- icine. She's studying how well people perform in zero gee."
Linda repeated, "But this station will become a testing 81 center for Star Wars weapons."
"When and if the Pentagon and the Congress can agree on the matter," Kinsman admitted. "Then we'll get a lot more secrecy, a lot more of the hup-two-three crap."
She smiled. "You don't like that?"
"There's only one thing the Air Force has done lately that I'm in complete agreement with."
