“I never knew that! Why hasn’t NASA told us about this?”

As Don fished around in his mind for a reply, the host turned on his smile and fixed his gaze on camera one.

“Well, it always seems that we run out of time just when things are really interesting.” Glancing back along his guests on the couch, he said, “Dr. Arnold, that was fascinating. I hope you can come back and talk with us again, real soon.”

Before Don could answer, the host said farewell to the two other guests, mispronouncing both their names.

Don sat up in bed, his back propped by pillows, the sheet pulled up to his navel. It was hot in the upstairs bedroom now that they had to keep the air-conditioner off, but he stayed covered because of the twins. They were nine now, and starting to ask pointed questions.

Judy was putting them into their bunk beds for the night, but they had a habit of wandering around before they finally fell asleep. And Judy, good mother that she was, didn’t have the heart to lock the master bedroom door. Besides, on a sultry night like this, the only way to catch a breath of breeze was to keep all the doors and windows open.

Don played a game as he sat up watching television, the remote-control wand in his sweating hand. He found the situation comedies, police shows, doctor shows, even the science fiction shows, on TV so boring that he couldn’t bear to watch them for their own sake.

But they were tolerable—almost—if he watched to see how much space-inspired technology he could identify in each show. The remote monitors in the surgeon’s intensive-care unit. The sophisticated sensors used by the coroner’s hot-tempered pathologist. The pressure-sensitive switch on the terrorists’ bomb planted in the cargo bay of the threatened 747.

Judy finally came in and began undressing. The bedroom lights were out, but there was plenty of light coming from the TV screen.

“Better close the door, hon,” Don told her as she wriggled her skirt down past her hips. “The twins. . .”

“They’re both knocked out,” she said. “They spent all day in the Cramers’ pool.”

“Still. . .” He clicked off the TV sound and listened for the patter of nine-year-old feet.

His wife’s body still turned him on. Judy was short, a petite dark-haired beauty with flashing deep-brown eyes and a figure that Don thought of as voluptuous. She stripped off her panties and crawled into the bed beside Don.

Grinning at him, she said, “You worry too much.”

“Yeah, maybe I do.”

“I thought you were terrific on the show this afternoon. I got so mad when those other two clowns kept hogging the camera!”

“Maybe I should have let them hog it for the whole show,” he said.

“No you shouldn’t! I sat here for nearly an hour waiting for you to open your mouth.”

“Maybe I should’ve kept it closed.”

“You were terrific,” she said, snuggling closer to him.

“I was lying,” he answered. “Or, at least, stretching the truth until it damn near snapped.”

“You looked so handsome on television.”

“I just hope nobody at Headquarters saw the show.”

“It’s a local talk show,” Judy said. “Nobody watches it but housewives.”

“Yeah. . .”

He started to feel better, especially with Judy cuddling next to him, until almost the very end of the eleven o’clock news. Then they showed a film clip of him staring earnestly into the camera—I thought I was looking at the host, Don thought—and explaining how people who live in orbit will live forever.

Don saw his whole career passing in front of his eyes.

He made sure to get to his office bright and early the next morning, taking a bus that arrived on Independence Avenue before the morning traffic buildup. Don was at his desk, jacket neatly hung behind the door and shirt sleeves rolled up, going over the cost figures for yet another study of possible future options for the Office of Space Transportation Systems, when his phone buzzed.

“Uncle Sam wants you,” rasped Jack Hardesty’s voice in the phone receiver.

He saw the show! was Don’s first panicked thought.

“You there, Mr. Personality?” Hardesty demanded.

“Yeah, Jack, I’m here.”

“Meet me in Klugie’s office in five minutes.” The phone clicked dead.

Don broke into a sweat.

Otto von Kluge was as American as the Brooklyn Bridge, but many and various were the jokes around NASA Headquarters about his name, his heritage and his abilities. He was an indifferent engineer, a terrible public speaker, and a barely adequate administrator. But he was one of the few people in the office who had a knack for handling other people—from engineers to congressmen, from White House Whiz Kids to crusty old accountants from the Office of Budget and Management.

Despite the low setting of the building’s air-conditioning, von Kluge wore his suit jacket and even a little bow tie under his ample chin. Don always thought of him as a smiling, pudgy used-car salesman. But once in a great while he came across as a smiling, pudgy Junker land baron.

Hardesty—bone-thin, lantern-jawed, permanently harried—was already perched on the front half-inch of a chair at one side of von Kluge’s broad desk, puffing intensely on a cigaret. Don entered the carpeted office hesitantly, feeling a little like the prisoner on his way to the guillotine.

Von Kluge grinned at him and waved a hand in the general direction of the only other available chair.

“Come on in, Don. Sit down. Relax.”

Just like the dentist says, Don thought.

“The TV station is sending me a tape of your show,” von Kluge said, with no further preliminaries.

“Oh,” Don said, feeling his guts sink. “That.”

Laughing, von Kluge said, “Sounds to me like you’re bucking for a job in the PR department.”

“Uh, no, I’m not. . . I mean. . .”

“Sounds to me“—Hardesty ground his cigaret butt into von Kluge’s immaculate stainless steel ashtray—“like you’re bucking for a job selling brushes door-to-door!”

“Now don’t get your blood pressure up, Jack,” von Kluge said easily. “Most of the crimes of this world come out of overreacting to an innocent little mistake.”

An overwhelming sense of gratitude flooded through Don. “I really didn’t mean to do it,” he said. “It’s just—”

“I know, I know. Your first time on television. The thrill of show business. The excitement. Takes your breath away, doesn’t it?”