Back inside, Sandy tracked Fiorella as she floated down the length of the center shaft, through Engineering. Sandy was floating as well, but behind him, one of the engineers, who was off-shift, was standing on the "floor" with gripping pads on his shoes, holding Sandy upright and at the same time backing down the shaft, as Fiorella, given a shove by another volunteer, who had then slipped out of sight, floated toward them. Every minute or so, air resistance would start slowing Fiorella down, and they would start over.

"This all became very real for us with yesterday's one-hundred-percent burn, our first full-fledged engine tests," Fiorella said to the cameras. "The Nixon has four VASIMR engines, two coupled to each reactor/power subsystem. Each engine, full on, gobbles down over two and a half gigawatts of electricity. Combined, they suck up more juice than many major cities. What the Nixon gets for all that juice is thrust. For those of you with scientific minds, at launch, the VASIMRs will deliver over two hundred thousand newtons of thrust. That sounds like a lot, except each of the Chinese's ten nuclear thermal engines produces five times as much thrust as Nixon's entire complement.

"The Nixon is not a sprinter. At launch, it won't even manage half a percent of a gee. The Chinese ship took off twenty times faster, the rabbit to the American tortoise. It couldn't keep that up. After a handful of hours of that, the Odyssey had exhausted its reaction mass and was coasting on its trajectory to Saturn-as it still is.

"The Nixon is a marathoner. The nuclear-electric VASIMR system won't shut down after a few hours or even a few days. It can run nonstop for months, accelerating the ship to the halfway point near Jupiter's orbit and then continuously decelerating it until it arrives at Saturn. The VASIMRs will only add a handful of centimeters-per-second velocity to the Nixon every second. But there are a lot of seconds-more than eighty thousand in a day, two and a half million in a month. That adds up to a lot of velocity."

"I think we might be getting too technical," Sandy said.

"Hey: let me do this, you just run the cameras," Fiorella said. "I've written in optional cuts. Some people will get the comic-book version, some of them will get the science."

"If you say so."

"I say so. How does my lipstick look?"

"It's okay so far, but stay away from that left corner." Fiorella had a tendency to chew the lipstick off her lower left lip. "Keep going."

"I will have to say," Fiorella said to the camera, "that as important as the tests were, they were spectacularly boring to look at. The engineers who were in charge of making the reactor play nice with the cooling vanes were successful, but once the sails were out, they didn't look like much of anything but sheets of tinfoil, and the plasma exhaust from a VASIMR engine produces only the faintest of glows. You can barely see it even on the nightside.

"But make no mistake: this was a critical test and the Nixon passed it with flying colors. This was our first real space flight. We only raised our orbit by a hundred kilometers or so, but it was our first step, if only a baby step, toward the mysterious moons of Saturn."

Sandy looked away from his cameras: "Moons of Saturn?"

"Well, we think we're going to a moon."

"But most people don't know that, they think we're going to the rings."

"Sandy . . ."

Early June, six weeks before launch, and the new arrivals were becoming accustomed to their new world. More or less.

Barry Clark was a tall, thin, dark-haired biochemist, an associate professor at Ohio State. Chuck Freeman was a short, stocky, red-haired Marine Corps sergeant. Clark lived near the center of Habitat 2, and was walking down the hall to his room when he saw Freeman-who'd cross-trained as a maintenance tech-unloading a vending machine from a wheeled pallet.

There would be six vending machines in a small room in Habitat 2, so that those who lived there would not have to travel all the way to the Commons, in Habitat 1, to get a simple snack.

With the pallet in place just outside the vending room, Clark saw Freeman lift the heavy machine off the pallet and, taking backwards baby steps, maneuver it into place in the vending room.

"You work out, huh?" Clark asked, as he passed by. The vision of Freeman lifting the machine created a particular mental construct in Clark's mind. The machines weren't that heavy in space.

Freeman said, "Ah, it's four hundred kilos down on Earth. Up here, only forty. Forty kilos, I can handle."

"When will they be up and running?" he asked.

Freeman patted the machine. "Gotta plug them in and load them up. Four of snacks, two of drinks. If I'd had to carry this baby full of water, it would have been a different story. That'll add another twenty kilos. Anyway, should have them up in an hour or so."

"Terrific. Can't do it fast enough for me."

Clark went on to his room, where he spent some time reading papers from a seminar he'd continued to teach by vid while on the Nixon. An hour later, feeling peckish and a little thirsty, he stuck his head into the hallway and saw Sandy emerge from the vending room with a pack of crumbless crackers and a candy bar.

"Ah: it's in."

"About time," Sandy said. He was working in the fab shop at the end of the habitat, and continued on his way.

Clark went into the vending room to check out the offerings. He was a biochemist, not a physicist, and though he could have explained the difference between weight and mass had he been given a few seconds to think about it, the concept was not right at the top of his mind when he pushed the button on the drink vending machine.

A bottle of Diet Coke was mechanically pushed into the descent tube. It slowly slid down, in the one-tenth gravity, halfway. And stopped. It wasn't supposed to stop, not in a vending machine engineered for low-gee. Nonetheless, it stopped.

Clark said, "Goddamnit"-he really wanted the Diet Coke-and slapped the transparent plastic face of the vending machine. The bottle moved down perhaps a half centimeter. "Goddamnit . . ."

He slapped the machine a couple of times, then did what he'd done on other such occasions at Ohio State: he braced his feet, grabbed the top corner of the machine, and yanked it forward. But the machine weighed only one-tenth of what a similar machine weighed at Ohio State, and the whole thing lurched forward . . . with the same mass and momentum it'd have had on Earth. The mismatch between the real physics and Clark's expectations threw him completely off balance. He fell on his ass, directly beneath the machine.

Clark would've been fine, maybe bruised but not broken, if he'd been thinking. The vending machine was falling a lot more slowly than it would have on Earth. It'd hurt when it hit him, but if he'd taken it flat the forty-kilogram effective weight wouldn't have crushed him.

When you're looking at what experience has previously told you is a half ton of vending machine coming down on you, you don't think clearly. He tried to roll out of the way.

The machine was falling much more slowly than it would have on Earth, but it was still falling and Clark was still a little clumsy in tenth-gee.

He grabbed the side of the machine. It twisted. He twisted. He almost made it. Not good enough. Forty kilograms of vending machine crunched, edge-on, into his feet, from his ankles to his toes, breaking several bones in the arch of his foot and pinning his feet to the floor.

Clark screamed and fell backwards. Because the machine was no longer moving, he could have picked it up except that he was badly positioned to do that, his two feet pinned and pain surging through his feet.

He tried to pull a foot out, by gripping an ankle and pulling, but the pain was too great and when he let go, he found his hand smeared with blood.

He screamed, "Help! Help!"

Sandy had just unlocked the door to the fabrication shop when he heard the machine hit the floor and Clark scream. He dropped his snacks by the door and ran back up the hallway to the vending machine.

Where the delicacy of real-world mental constructs revealed itself again.

Clark had long hair, and brushed it back out of his face as he struggled with his pinned feet. When Sandy ran up, he looked down at a dark-haired man with blood on his face, his feet pinned . . .

. . . by a wall. Two important Guapo leaders had been meeting in a village just off Rio Tinto. American intel had picked up word of the meeting, and had sent in an SSG squad to hit the two enemy big shots. They'd approached the village at three o'clock on a moonless morning, had isolated the targets using laser mikes, and at first light, three shooters had gone into the house where the two leaders were sleeping with their wives. The rest of the squad had set up on two other houses where the leaders' bodyguards were asleep.

Somebody in the target house had gotten off a shot before they were wiped; the bodyguards came boiling out of the other two houses and were cut down by the waiting SSG members. Then somebody in one of the bodyguard houses had blown a satchel charge, suiciding, and a wall of splinters had punched through the dawn.

One of the splinters, longer than a hand and half as wide, had hit an SSG lieutenant named Roger Jackson in the throat. Jackson had been one of the designated shooters, and had been running out of the house he'd just helped wipe, when the charge went off. In addition to being hit in the throat, his legs were pinned by a falling wall.

Which was where Sandy found him, running around from the other side of the leaders' house. Jackson, a thin, dark-haired man, was pinned, blood on his face, looking up, trying to call out . . .

Jackson bled out in a little more than a minute, dying in the now-complete silence of the village. They had to leave him there, running ahead of the Guapo revenge squads, until they were picked up by gunships fifteen miles from the village.

The flashback lasted only a few seconds. Clark looked up at Sandy, crying, "Get it off me, get it off me," not understanding why Sandy was clutching at the wall. The flashback was absolutely real-Sandy was there, on the Tri-Border, all over again, in the heat and the dust, the smell of blood and raw bloody human meat and chicken shit-and then, just as quickly, the flashback flickered out, and he was back aboard the Nixon.

He asked, "It's going to hurt when I lift. Can you pull on your legs?"

Clark groaned, "I think so . . ."

Sandy lifted the machine; it didn't weigh much even loaded with bottles of liquid. When it was upright, he called for help, and sat next to Clark until help arrived, and after they'd explained what had happened, he wandered off to the fab shop while Clark was carried to the med station in Habitat 1.

The fab shop was empty-a number of people used the shop, but he, Martinez, and Elroy Gorey were the only regulars-and Sandy dragged a chair around to the printer he'd been using, and sat down and picked up a partly printed arch-top guitar body.

The flashback at the vending room had been utterly real, and now little flickers of that day at the Tri-Border began scratching at his mind, like a guttering flame, hot, then gone, then hot again.

A half hour later, he wandered over to Habitat 1, down to his room, dug a case of meds out of his personal kit, popped a blue pill. The pills worked well, but only by ironing out every little crack and fissure in his mind, leaving him feeling like a biscuit . . . a really bland, flour-and-water biscuit.

Can't have this, he thought, as he lay back on his bed. If the people running the Nixon understood his condition, they might unload him.

He needed the Nixon.

He really did.

Like watching a bunch of troops getting ready to ship out, Crow thought: somber passengers with their bags, milling around the terminal, with a few dozen anxious and sometimes weeping family members to see them off. At this point, he didn't really expect anyone to back out. There had been a few dropouts on earlier flights, but-unknown to the passengers-they'd all been evaluated for the possibility that they might refuse to go at the last moment, and this bunch had been found to be the least likely to do that.

If somebody did, there'd be several more round-trips by the Virgin-SpaceX shuttles before the Nixon departed, which could take up an alternate crew member. Right now, Crow's major concern was baggage. All the passengers had been required to present their baggage the day before departure, and all of it had been minutely scanned for anything that could represent a security hazard, including electronics that could be used to attack onboard systems.

Two exceptions had been made: one passenger had a rare but treatable form of cancer, and his extremely expensive medication simply hadn't been ready because of a bureaucratic entanglement with Ameri-Med. The insurance system refused to provide a three-year supply of pills because of cost considerations, and had no way to change its mind without rewriting its software, which might cost a couple of billion dollars. Crow had called the pharmaceutical company that made the medication, and after carefully explaining the situation to the CEO, in which he pointed out the intense interest in his decision by both the President and the IRS, a batch of pills was put on a hopjet from Philadelphia and had arrived that morning.

The other exception was for a violin; the psychiatrist who owned it refused to allow an electronic scan. "If it gets ruined," he told Crow, "I'm out nine million."

"Couldn't you take a cheaper violin?"

"No. It wouldn't have the tone. I need the tone."

Now one of Crow's security officers, a woman named Carol, hurried up to him as he watched the crowd, and said, "We have a tiny problem. Roger Ang doesn't want his violin x-rayed, either. He says x-raying it could damage the tone by changing the varnish at a molecular level. It's like a rare"-she looked at a slip of paper in her hand-"Enrico Politi. He says we can x-ray the case, and has no problem with an internal fiber-optic check on the violin itself, if he can watch it to make sure we don't harm the instrument."

Crow nodded. "All the musical instruments will be loaded at the same time in the cargo hold. Do the fiber-optic check, tell him that I've decided that an X-ray isn't necessary. When the instruments are put on the cargo mover, pull the violin, x-ray it, and if it's clear, put it back on the cargo mover. Just a little sleight of hand, Carol."

"What if the tone is affected?" she asked.

"It won't be-but there's no arguing with that brand of assholedom. If he knows it's been x-rayed, he'll hear a difference and sue somebody. If he doesn't know, he won't. Okay?"

"Okay." She hurried off.

The crew of ninety-one would be taking along eighty-one musical instruments of all varieties. They were a brilliant, disciplined bunch, and people who were both brilliant and disciplined often played musical instruments.

"There's a clear connection there-people who learn a musical instrument early in life are basically learning to discipline themselves, and that carries over to other intellectually demanding fields," said one of the shrinks who'd been hired to consult on possible shipboard problems. He'd recommended sending along both personal musical instruments and a supply of loaner instruments, so that those who didn't actually play an instrument could learn en route.

"If you can get a bunch of bands going, there's no better way to build teamwork and tie people together," he told Crow. "It's also a great way to kill time, for people without a lot to do."

The manifest now included four electronic pianos.

Crow checked his implants: July 21, 2067, a hundred and forty-three hours to departure.

JULY 27, 2067.

Fang-Castro checked her implanted clock: 7:45 A.M. Universal time, which was about to become Ship's time. She went back to looking at her brief speech, which would be broadcast throughout the ship and linked with an Oval Office broadcast by President Santeros.

She would broadcast from the control deck. Sandy was there with his cameras, which were already linked with broadcast control on the ground. At 7:50, the news anchor for PBS appeared on the screen; he spoke for a little less than a minute, setting up the President's talk.

At 7:51, Santeros appeared on-screen. She looked almost . . . sweet, Fang-Castro thought. The power of digital makeup. Fang-Castro herself had only the old-fashioned kind, painstakingly applied by Fiorella. They were walking a narrow path: Fang-Castro wanted to look good, but by no means better than the President.

Santeros was saying . . . "a possible great step into the future for all of mankind. We have no idea exactly what our visitors have left behind out there, but we fully expect to benefit from the technology that we've already been witness to, as their ship arrived and then departed . . ."

Blah, blah, blah . . .

Fang-Castro checked the clock again, and saw Sandy holding up a fist. That meant that she was less than a minute away. Sandy flashed five fingers, twice: ten seconds . . .

Five fingers, four, and Santeros said, "From the command deck of the Richard M. Nixon, Naomi Fang-Castro, captain of the Nixon. Captain Fang-Castro."

She was on.

"This is Fang-Castro of the USSS Richard M. Nixon. In just under two minutes, we will start the engines and begin the voyage that will see us arriving at Saturn at Christmas. Initially we will be firing a twenty-five percent thrust while we run our in-flight checks. Assuming everything is nominal, and we expect it to be, after one orbit we'll bring the engines up to fifty percent power. At the end of the second orbit, we'll take them to full power. The status display on the wall here in the ship, and on our blog down on Earth, will keep everybody current on our progress."

This, she said, had already been a long journey. Hundreds of workers had visited the Nixon, to get the ship ready for the longest manned voyage in human history.

Blah blah blah . . .

At the carefully timed end, she said, "Thank you for your support, Madam President. We could not have done this without you. Now it's time for me to say . . . three . . . two . . . one . . . and . . .

"Launch!"

In the ship, half the people in the Commons unconsciously braced themselves . . . for nothing.

The Chinese launch had been high drama. This was the exact opposite, a non-event. There was nothing. No vibration; no new sound, no feeling of acceleration or indication of motion. The status display showed no change in speed or altitude.

Somebody asked, "Is there a problem?"

Somebody else pointed at the broadcast feed on the main monitor. They were on the nightside, and the steady bright glow from the engines proved that they were firing.

Fiorella smiled into the camera: "Yes, the Nixon's doing just what it was supposed to do, which is to begin its spiral out of low Earth orbit. At twenty-five percent power, though, and fully laden, its acceleration in open space is undetectable to human senses-a thousandth of a gee. In the zero-gee environment of the axle modules, free-floating objects will have started drifting, but none of the crew has felt anything different at all. In the zero-point-one gee artificial gravity of the Commons, there isn't even a perceptible tilt to the floor."

The reality of the departure was even more peculiar than that. The engines that were trying to push the ship forward were actually causing it to slow down. Before the Nixon could go to Saturn, it had to claw its way out of Earth's gravitational well, and that took prodigious amounts of energy. The energy that was pouring out of the VASIMR engines as thrust all went into raising the ship's altitude ever so gradually. With the passage of each minute the Nixon climbed by about one kilometer under the push of four plasma exhaust streams.

Bit by bit, the exspace station's orbit was expanding, and that's what made things seem weird-a normal state of affairs in orbital mechanics. Larger orbits were slower orbits. In its original thousand-kilometer orbit, the space station zipped along at over seven kilometers per second. A geostationary communications satellite, orbiting at thirty-six thousand kilometers, only traveled at about three kilometers per second, while the moon, three hundred and eighty thousand kilometers away, traversed its path at a stately one kilometer per second. The Nixon obeyed the same laws of orbital physics. As the Nixon climbed kilometer by kilometer, it slowed down, and it would continue to do so until it was finally on an escape trajectory.

By lunchtime the earth that slid past the window was shrunken, the curvature of the horizon more pronounced. The Nixon was on its third expanding spiral orbit about the earth and the status monitor showed that it had lost about a third of a kilometer per second of velocity, but picked up more than five hundred kilometers of altitude. By dinnertime, the view of Earth, now three thousand, six hundred kilometers below, was dramatically different.

Sandy and Fiorella were doing two-minute squirts of commentary, every half hour. In their cameras, which ran continuously, the earth looked much smaller than it had at the start.

"Man, a freaking year with no surf. I think I want off," Sandy said.

"I don't know, Earth might not be a safe place for us," Fiorella said.

"What?"

"We might have made Fang-Castro look a little too good."

"Ah, bullshit," Sandy said.