"Okay," Sandy said. "I got that."

"Once the market price is set, you can put your money in," Fiorella said. "Say that it looks like we're going to get together on Friday. Okay, the price to buy in on that Friday could be quite large. With a basic, say, hundred thousand dollars on the scale, you might have to kick in another five or ten thousand dollars, or even more, to buy back in, if the event looks likely. If we're all kissy in the corridors. The amount would depend on how many people already have that date . . . The market price for the gamble."

"I don't entirely understand that," Sandy said.

"Look. Say there's a hundred thousand in the pot, and only three people have that date," Fiorella said. "If you can buy back in for, say five thousand, the pot is then a hundred and five thousand. Split four ways, that would be"-her eyes rolled up as she worked it out-"twenty-six thousand, two hundred and fifty each, a profit of twenty-one thousand, two hundred and fifty dollars on the five-thousand-dollar buy-in. But only if we get together that day."

"Tell me again why the three original buyers let him buy in?" Clover asked.

"They don't have any choice-the buy-in is by consensus of all the bettors," Fiorella said. "And the people who don't think it's going to happen on one particular day, would always be a majority, and they can force the buy-in price down to an acceptable level. Because they want other people to buy in."

"Because the money stays in the pot if it doesn't happen, and they don't believe it will," Sandy said.

Fiorella: "Yes!"

Clover: "If Sandy doesn't nail you on that Friday-"

"Please, John," Fiorella said.

"If you and Sandy don't have coitus on Friday-"

"Coitus? That's even worse," Fiorella said. "Anyway, to get to the point, the money stays in the pot and the action moves to the next day."

Clover scratched his chin. "Hypothetically, if you and Sandy were to stretch this out, running hot and cold along the way, raising hopes, then disappointing them, the money could get . . . large."

"I wouldn't say large. I would say huge," Fiorella said. "Actually, as the retained pot gets larger and larger, the amount will tend to snowball. It could go to, who knows? A million? More? If Sandy and I had a really loud argument on the morning of the day it happened . . ."

"The buy-in on that date would be really low," Clover said.

"And if we picked a fight date that nobody had bought, and then jumped in bed later in the day, someone who bought in would keep it all," Sandy said, his eyes narrowing.

"You and Sandy couldn't bet on this, because then everybody would know that you could fix it," Clover said to Fiorella. "But if a third person were to know the actual date, you and the third person could move things around so . . ."

"We could make a fuckin' fortune," Fiorella said. "Excuse the pun."

Sandy said to Fiorella, "You have a criminal mind. I admire that in a woman."

"So do I," Clover said. He rubbed his hands together. "Who do I talk to about getting in the pool? The handyman?"

- A few days later: Becca said, "If this doesn't work, I'll kill you."

Mark Vaughn, a computer tech safely ensconced on Earth, said, "It would have stopped the last one, or anything like that. We won't have the same fault, I promise you that. Other faults-well, it's your design, sweetie."

"Call me sweetie again and I'll kill you."

"Anyway, Becca, ma'am, sir-you're good. That last batch of code looked great if you didn't look too hard, but basically, it was marginal, in my opinion, and you probably ought to burn down that code farm and switch all the contracts to us. This batch . . . this batch is the cleanest, most robust stuff in the world. I mean that literally. In the world."

"If this batch blows us up again . . ."

"I know, you'll kill me."

"That's correct."

"Let me know what happens," Vaughn said.

"Don't worry about that: it'll be all over your screen, one way or the other."

- A few days after that: The other marines all looked at Sergeant Margaret Pastor, who said, "I know. I'm the smallest."

"It's not much of a leak," said one of the guys.

"It's not 'how much.' It's what it is," Pastor said.

What it was, was human waste, a brown trickle that could be seen spattering the floor. What was happening was a leak in a pressurized sewer pipe, and the fastest way to get to the leak was to send somebody down a cable tunnel, not meant for human access, with a laser cutter. That person would cut a hole in the wall of the cable tunnel, and then reach up and seal the leak in the sewer pipe with an epoxy injector.

"A shit job," said one of the guys, and the rest of them, with the exception of Pastor, fell about laughing.

"I didn't join the Marine Corps to clean up somebody's poop," Pastor said.

"No, but you volunteered to be cross-trained in maintenance, and none of the rest of us can fit into that pipe."

"Give me the fuckin' cutter. And get a garbage bag. I'll wrap myself in the bag."

The job took an hour: fifteen minutes to carefully cut through the cable pipe, another fifteen to plug the leak, during which time Pastor got liberally spattered with the effluent, another fifteen minutes to vacuum the crap out of the cable tunnel.

When she finished, she scooted herself backwards, until her feet were sticking out of the tunnel, and then the guys grabbed her by the ankles and pulled her out.

She was still on the floor, unwrapping the plastic bag that hadn't done much to protect her from the waste, when Fang-Castro turned the corner and asked, "What's that smell?"

When the explanations were finished, Fang-Castro told Pastor, "We've got a seat going down on the shuttle tomorrow. You want it, it's yours."

Leave was getting scarcer, especially for the military people. Pastor said, "Ma'am, I'd really love to see my mom one last time, before we go."

"I'll fix it with Captain Barnes. And thank you for this."

- A few days more: Vintner was not quite asleep, his feet up on his desk, when he heard the heels snapping down the subbasement's concrete floor, coming fast.

Women's heels had different sounds. Most of the higher-ranked women in the White House wore chunky heels because they wanted to look dressy, but knew they'd inevitably spend a lot of time on their feet, and their days were long. Women of lesser rank tried to emulate the dressiness of those higher up, wearing the chunky heels some of the time, but many, on the days when they didn't expect to do anything important, took a step down and wore flats, or disguised flats. Those of still lesser rank, who generally were making deliveries-mail, policy statements, budget documents, and so on-usually wore running shoes.

The chunky heels went clunk-clunk-clunk; the flats went clack-clack-clack; the running shoes went flap-flap-flap.

The shoes coming down the hall toward Vintner's office were going peck-peck-peck on the concrete, which meant that they were high-heeled dress shoes, and very, very few women in the White House wore them, and those who did would not be coming to Vintner's subbasement office . . . with one exception that he could think of.

The President.

A really, really angry president.

Santeros didn't get angry when dealing with disaster, or plotting a disaster for somebody else-in those cases, anger was inefficient. But when she was pissed, usually about some stupidity, she tended to get physical.

Vintner kicked his feet off his desk, grabbed a bottle of water, poured some in his hands, rubbed the water across his face and up through his thinning hair, then wiped his face on his jacket sleeve. One second later, Santeros burst into his office.

She started by shouting, "Twibbit!"

Vintner popped to his feet. "Mr. President! I mean, Madam-"

"Grabaddibbit!"

"Ma'am, I can't understand . . ."

Santeros's face was a fiery red, but she slowed, took a deep breath, and when her voice came back, it was icy cold and totally comprehensible, which was worse.

"Jacob: your man Johnson Morton. Unless it's Morton Johnson . . ."

"Uh, I'm sorry, ma'am, I don't recognize the name."

The volume increased: "Do you recognize the name 'Center for Psychological Policy Studies'?"

"Well, uh, sure, it's a think tank, we contract out some policy studies to them when there might be a psychological component to whatever . . . the military sometimes . . . ma'am . . . what happened?"

"This happened!"

She fired a stapled wad of paper at his head. He managed to grab it, and unwadded and flattened it on his desk. The title said "Psychosexual Aspects of the Flight of the Nixon," and beneath that, the author's name, Johnson Morton.

Vintner's mouth dropped open: "Psycho what? I never heard of this."

She was shouting: "Morton! Or Johnson! Thinks we ought to put hookers on the Nixon, to take care of the crew's sexual problems."

"What?" Vintner would have laughed, if he hadn't feared for his life. And job.

"Two each, male and female, bisexual for efficiency, to haul the ashes of those unable to pair up!"

"What?"

"Honest to God, Jacob, if you say 'What?' one more time, I'll strangle you!"

"Ma'am, I know nothing about this. I'll track it down, we'll-"

Shouting some more: "Look at the bottom of the last page. The small print. What do you see there?"

Vintner looked and saw a typical block of small print, with some handwritten numbers. He looked more closely. The study had been sponsored and paid for by the federal government, under the handwritten grant number.

"Oh, shit. Well, ma'am . . . we can still bury it-"

"No, we can't! No, we can't! You know how I found out about this? I found out on PBS! I had Gladys download the doc, and they're right. You know how much we paid for the study? One-point-two million. Morton! Or Johnson! According to the doc, INTERVIEWED some candidates for the job. Did he fuck them, Jacob, with OUR one-point-two million? If he did, how many did he fuck? Look at page seven: he says . . . Give me that goddamn thing." She ripped through the pages, and then, "I quote: 'obviously would require sexually desirable physical characteristics . . .' What's that, Jacob? A big fat cock? Is that what we're talking about? Grabaddibbit, Twibbit . . ."

It would be difficult, in the best of circumstances, to tell a president that she sounded like a gerbil, and these were not the best of circumstances, and Vintner stood and took it until the spit stopped flying through the air, and she slowed down again.

"I swear to you, on my life, that I didn't know about this," he said. "I never heard about it. I never had a hint or a suggestion of it, and if I had, I would have stopped it and fired Johnson. Or Morton."

She stared at him for a moment, then said, "I'm gonna rip somebody's heart out."

"I believe you. Do you want me to ask around-"

"No. I've got people who can do that better than you can. I just wanted to make sure you weren't involved."

"I was not."

"Good. I really didn't want to can your ass. But somebody will die."

"Maybe nothing will happen . . ."

She snorted: "Jacob, this will be in history books. When they write the history of the Santeros Administration, this will be the third item. It will go viral, worldwide. They're already cracking up in Beijing and Moscow. If I handle it just right, it will cost me only one percent of the vote in the next election. One-point-two million dollars, and there are underclassmen who work all day for eighteen dollars an hour. Jesus H. Christ." She took a deep breath, then said, "Thank you for letting me scream at you, and not getting up in my face. I need to calm down."

"A little yoga . . ."

"Yoga? Yoga? Gzzibit! Magrabbit! . . ." And she was gone.

Vintner turned on his office vid screen, which was tuned to CBSNN. He'd intended to click over to PBS, but that was unnecessary. The talking head-actually it was more of a talking-head-and-body, a woman so beautiful that she must have come from a different planet, possibly with the aliens-was saying in the most somber tones, "So we asked Johnson Morton what he meant by that, 'obviously would require sexually desirable physical characteristics,' and this is what he told us . . ."

Cut to Johnson Morton, a fleshy young man with black hair combed straight back from his forehead, and eyebrows like woolly bear caterpillars; Morton knitted his fingers together and said, "We did a comprehensive study of the most desirable physical . . ."

From up and down the subbasement hallway, where the President's temper tantrum had been overheard, people started laughing. Roaring with laughter. Back-slapping belly laughs.

Vintner closed his eyes for a brief prayer, that Santeros was in fact gone.

Then he started laughing himself, laughing until the tears came.

If Morton hadn't gotten fucked in the course of his studies, he thought, that was about to change.

- Early May.

Fiorella was in an EVA suit, floating next to a construction worker who was re-forming a wedge-shaped piece of the station's superstructure on the habitat side of the reactor; Sandy was in an egg, twenty meters away, working his cameras.

The worker, whose name was Everett, and who came from Tacoma, Washington, gave a ten-second explanation of what she was doing, and then Fiorella moved away from her, just a bit, so that Sandy could keep her working in the background, but also close on Fiorella's face.

"With two months to go until Nixon's launch, this former space station is an around-the-clock hive of activity. With the whole world following the Celestial Odyssey-the Chinese ship has just passed the orbit of Jupiter-space has stopped being routine for a large fraction of humanity, for the first time in a century. Anyone with a pair of binoculars or even a small telescope can watch as dozens of construction workers like Everett finish the American ship."

"I don't like that sentence," Sandy said on his direct link to Fiorella. "I think it should be, space has stopped being routine for the first time in a century."

They talked about that and Fiorella reworked it, and when it was done, they headed back inside.

The work outside was now so intense that getting egg time and suit time was becoming difficult; they wouldn't get it at all, if the President hadn't spoken directly to Fang-Castro about it. "This will either be a triumph or a disaster. If it's a disaster, there's nothing I can do about it. But if it's a triumph, I want the credit, goddamnit, and that means you put the news people out there anytime they want to go. I'll talk to them about keeping it to a necessary minimum, but if they think it's necessary, you put them out there."

The news links now had countdown clocks on their screens, and England's Daily Mail announced a new construction disaster at the top of every cycle, along with rumors of zero-gravity orgies, secret contacts with the aliens (with photographs of Santeros talking with a meter-tall large-eyed silvery alien in the Oval Office), and rumors that the whole trip was a fraud by the Americans and Chinese, just as all twenty moon landings had been.

For the general public, what Fletcher had characterized as "the most important scientific discovery in history"-Sandy's discovery of the starship-was increasingly lost in the noise: there wasn't any starship, not anymore, just some scientists announcing there'd been one. There were no little green men coming to visit, no "To Serve Man" landings on the White House lawn or in the plaza of the Forbidden City. The starship was an abstraction that fascinated folks for a few weeks and then got pushed out of consciousness by the humdrum minutiae of daily life.

But when you could look up in the sky and see a spaceship being built, that was real.