Florida Fact and Florida Fiction -- S.V. Dáte -- Final Orbit first chapter

Final Orbit

By S.V. Dáte

Copyright 1997
Avon Books
All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

Even by garage sale standards, the set tucked in the corner of the living room at 463 Gulfbreeze Terrace was a piece of junk. The whole picture curved inward, bands of red, green and blue glowing at the edges. A beige converter box with a coaxial-to-rabbit-ears splice sat on top: the cable company's attempt to drag its handful of stone-age customers into the twenty-first century. There wasn't even a remote control.

The Dean of American Astronauts didn't care. He rarely turned it on, and on those occasions he did, it showed him all he needed. On this particular night, the ancient machine painted a fuzzy image of two stocky figures, both clad in white, one with a dark stripe encircling each leg. Two hours earlier their movements had been awkward -- legs bumping and bouncing, arms pinwheeling fruitlessly. With practice, though, the pair had improved, moving slowly but deliberately along the walls of the cavernous cargo bay. Wrenches, screwdrivers and other, more specialized gadgets dangled from their waists, as Striped Pants unbolted a white metal box from the minivan-sized satellite nestled in the bay while Plain Pants held his legs to keep him from spinning in the opposite direction around the power tool. Occasionally a Donald-Duck voice broke the static to tell Mission Control that he had completed Step 7-Echo, or that a particular bolt had needed 12 inch-pounds of torque to loosen it, not the eight the engineers had expected.

Santiago Santich watched with as much interest as he could muster. He inverted the green bottle to drain the remaining drops and set the empty Heineken on the coaster atop the end table. He smiled wistfully; it had taken his wife 15 years to train him to use one. She had been gone four now, and still he kept the habit. He contemplated another beer, remembered there weren't any more, and settled back into the right-hand side of the love seat -- the co-pilot's side; the pilot's side was Emily's -- in front of the TV. It had taken her 10 years to make him abandon the easy chair in the corner and sit with her instead.

Striped Pants and Plain Pants succeeded in detaching the microwave-sized box and floated it to a locker mounted on the wall. They had already removed the replacement unit from the locker, and the failed module off the satellite fit the bracket exactly for the ride home.

Santich suppressed a sigh and watched with mild envy. A free-floating spacewalk was something, the only thing, that he hadn't done. Through two flights on Gemini, one on Apollo and three aboard space shuttle, he had never stepped outside in the weightlessness of orbit. True, his was a far loftier accomplishment: one of 12 humans in history, quite possibly for all time to come, to step on another world. But the moon had gravity, though a fraction of Earth's, and Santich wanted to taste the complete freedom that the others, too numerous now to name offhand, had described: the solitude, the fleeting vertigo as one imagined the plummet back into a spinning mass of green forest, white cloud, brown mountain and blue, blue water.

The thought pricked at Santich's insides, albeit only for a moment. Even a few years back, he would sigh whenever he contemplated that he would never again fly where the sky was star-flecked black. Now, the knowledge eased into his consciousness without undue fuss. The Dean of American Astronauts. That's what Time magazine had called him back in 1985, after his third trip on the shuttle. Norm Thagard, then Shannon Lucid had broken the final Skylab crew's record for most time in space by an American, but no one -- neither American nor Russian -- had been up and back as often as Santiago Santich.

And though he wouldn't have traded the moon for anything, he loved flying the shuttle more than the Gemini and Apollo capsules put together. True, the shuttle was almost completely automated, and could lift off and land without so much as a cockroach aboard. But Santich and the other Apollo-era astronauts had successfully lobbied the designers to omit the autoland program from the computers, leaving the deployment of the landing gear, the touchdown and the braking of the just-landed ship in human hands. By tradition, one that Santich began with STS-1, the pilot took the stick away from the computers just as the shuttle began its final turn around the field to line up on the landing strip, giving him full control for the last five minutes of a week or two-week flight.

But what five minutes they were! Before the shuttle, American astronauts splashed home, cannonballing into the water like drunken fraternity boys -- certainly no way for a trained Naval Aviator to end a mission. The shuttle was something else entirely: the steep, 50-degree bank around the runway, the freefall to the strip, the quick flareup, and finally the rumble of rubber rolling across concrete. That first landing aboard Columbia had been the best. No one knew how many of the thermal tiles on the ship's belly would be lost during ascent; if too many fell off, the super-hot plasma flowing around the descending shuttle would burn a hole right through. And even if Santich and Forrester did make it past re-entry, would the navigation system work? With no engines on the trip home, the shuttle's computers had to balance speed against altitude to deplete both by the time it arrived at the landing strip. There could be no waving off for a second chance. And what of the tires and brakes? The shuttle weighed as much as a small jetliner, but the demands of getting into orbit made redundant landing gear too heavy a luxury. Had two of the rear tires blown, or one of the front ones, it would have meant military funerals for both men.

As it was, the engineers had been right, and the landing had gone like the simulator said it would. Santich had celebrated by sharing a flask of Old Bushmill with Forrester before the ground crew could unbolt the orbiter's hatch. That, too, had become a tradition that, as far as Santich knew, had continued through all 75 landings to date. Santich's next two missions had been routine. He had hoped for one final trip -- lucky number seven. And as chief of the astronaut corps, he'd been in a position to take it.

Then Challenger blew up, destroying the American psyche like nothing since Kennedy. In the subsequent frenzy of media interest, two of Santich's memos to his bosses criticizing decisions that sacrificed safety margin to save a little money found their way into the newspapers. In the ensuing recriminations, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration underwent a public housecleaning to show the world that safety would now come first. It also relegated the Dean of American Astronauts to a harmless sinecure at Johnson Space Center. They couldn't prove he had blown the whistle, but they didn't have to. After all, he never should have written them in the first place. As if to mock his transgression, they made him Special Assistant to the Center Director for Safety. The title meant nothing: he was not part of Safety, Reliability and Quality Assurance, the agency department with enough institutional clout to ground the shuttle fleet if it so deemed. Santich reported to no one, and no one reported to him.

At first, he laughed at the snub. They couldn't possibly get away with it. The press that not long ago had deified him, the public that for three decades had stood in awe of his exploits, the President who just two years earlier had given him a medal, they wouldn't allow it. He would ride it out until the usurpers in shuttle management were purged, and then assume his rightful place at the top of the pyramid. Santich played his new role straight, attending every SRQA meeting, digging into the gritty technical issues that for two decades he'd largely ignored and in general trying to prove that they wouldn't break him so easily.

But months passed, then years. Five men aboard Discovery got America back in space, the shuttle program resumed a slow but steady pace, and Capt. Santiago "Santy" Santich, USN, Ret., was all but forgotten. His cohorts in the corps, those astronauts chosen at the tail end of Apollo, had retired. The younger ones still quietly admired him as a legend and a moonwalker, but they shared the nearly unanimous sentiment that he'd violated the brotherhood's code, recklessly risked the sacred mission, and, ultimately, deserved what he got. Besides, he was no longer Chief Astronaut, and no longer doled out the all-important flight assignments. Publicly or even privately taking his side meant jeopardizing their own chances of getting into orbit. Why risk that for someone who'd already flown six times? They knew on which side their bread was buttered, and took care to avoid his very name.

And though Santich had never thought much of the press, he had assumed that at least one of them would expose the injustice. After all, whistleblowers at nuclear power plants, oil companies and even the Department of Energy were deemed heroes, the stuff on which the awards that Santich thought were the journalist's reason for existence were given. But he soon learned that the print and television reporters who hungered after glory and fame quickly lost interest in space after the finger pointing for Challenger and the grand adventure of Discovery were finished. The only media left covering space were the same sniveling sycophants who had covered the program in the years before Challenger. Why interview Santich and lose access to those astronauts who actually flew?

Pride fermented into anger, anger into resentment and resentment, finally, into bitterness. Emily tolerated the first two, but not the third. What do you have to prove? she had asked. You've had more opportunity and good fortune than just about anyone who has ever lived. She suggested, then pleaded with him to leave Houston and return to Florida. If not for himself then for his grandchildren, who were growing up without him, just as his children had done. Four years earlier, she decided she'd waited enough, and went home without him.

Over the past months, he'd realized she had been right, and it was time to give up. They'd started talking again, but he didn't yet know whether she'd have him back. The occasional cards and letters they had exchanged told him she was no longer Mrs. Ninth Man on the Moon, but had grown into Emily Pembroke Santich, self-confident, self-sufficient, adult woman. This May 18, six more weeks, would be their 36th wedding anniversary. He would return to her then, or would try to, anyway. It was a good time to leave NASA. In June he would turn 59. That was early retirement for most jobs; it would be good enough for him. Unlike his pals who had left NASA soon after their flights for cushy consulting jobs in the aerospace industry, he would never be rich. But with the Navy and civil service pensions -- 29 years in one; 35 years in the other -- he would do okay. More than okay. The kids were out of school, the house was paid for, and he wouldn't be around for more than 10 or 15 years, anyway.

It would be nice, finally, to take the rotting canvas cover off that old but nearly new Boston Whaler, put her in the water, get out in the Gulf. Not the dirty, brown Gulf off Galveston, but the sparkling green Gulf off Naples, or even further south in the Ten Thousand Islands, or further still off the Keys. Just sit, all day long, with nothing to do but wait for the Big One to strike. Just him, and maybe a grandchild or two, to sit and fish. Something he hadn't had time for, or rather, hadn't made time for, in half a century.

The more he thought about leaving, the more he couldn't wait to walk into Bruce's office and tell him to take his assistant to the directorship and stick it up his tight ass. April 12: That would be the day to do it. The 17th anniversary of his first flight, when Bruce was still a snotty, stuck-up rookie just two years in the corps and still four years away from flying. The 10th anniversary had been a big deal, with ceremonies and picnics at Johnson, Kennedy, Marshall and Dryden. The 17th would be nothing like that, but it would be something. People would sit up and notice, if only to realize they didn't have Santy Santich to feel sorry for anymore.

He permitted himself a sigh and stretched back into the sofa, letting his eyes drop shut for a moment before snapping them open. NASA Select, the agency's in-house television channel, was again showing the inside of the Mission Control room, which it did whenever the crew was asleep or otherwise wanted privacy or, as was often the case, the radio link between the orbiter and the satellites degraded to the point where microwave transmission needed for TV downlink was impossible. The screen showed a dozen or so ground controllers at their monitors, chatting with each other, or milling about. In the second row down, along the right-hand side of the aisle just in front of the flight surgeon, sat the capcom, the capsule communicator. Back in the days of Mercury, the astronauts had decreed that only other astronauts were worthy enough to talk to the men in orbit. Successive astronauts had kept the tradition alive, so that to this day, the only voice heard on NASA Select speaking with orbiting astronauts was that of another astronaut.

And as Santich lay his head back against the love seat's cushion, capcom Mike Farina answered one of the Donald Duck voices that, yes, the customer wanted to study the satellite's health check for a few more minutes before giving the go-ahead to start Step 27-Lima.

While waiting, the other Donald Duck voice started humming "Rocket Man," to which Donald Duck Number One answered with "Space Oddity." Farina advised the spacewalkers not to give up their day jobs just yet.

Santich missed the hijinks. He wouldn't have recognized the songs anyway. They weren't of his generation. Instead his eyes stayed closed for ever longer periods before reopening. He had intended to watch all six hours of the spacewalk, as well as the second one the following night, even though they wouldn't end until 3 a.m. Houston time.

NASA Select returned to live video from Atlantis' cargo bay, where the two spacewalkers hovered against the starboard rail beside the satellite they were working on. Within seconds, the picture returned to the Mission Control room. And a few moments later, in the lower right-hand corner of Santich's set, where the image was both tinted blue and warped into a convex curve, the flight surgeon quickly reached forward to his monitor, and the broadcast picture was replaced with a test pattern.

Whether anyone noticed or linked the two together was impossible to say. Certainly no one at 463 Gulfbreeze Terrace did. The Dean of American Astronauts had fallen asleep.

Her normally black belly aglow, Atlantis hurtled through the night sky, 15 times faster than an airliner. To manage her great speed, the four cross-linked computers swerved the ship first left, then right, then left again. Each roll of her wings made Atlantis even less aerodynamically efficient than her stubby features dictated, making her lose both speed and altitude all the more rapidly.

Soon, she had fallen to 200,000 feet and slowed to only six times the speed of sound. Heavy clouds blanketing both the Midwest and the Eastern Seaboard kept anyone still awake from seeing the ionized trail she left behind, like a ship sailing through phosphorescent water. Apart from that shimmering wake, which had disappeared by the time she was over Georgia, Atlantis was completely dark. Only television spaceships carried port and starboard running lights.

By the time she was over Jacksonville, she was down to 150,000 feet -- low enough for her twin sonic booms to rouse light sleepers. By St. Augustine, even heavy sleepers were awakened by the rumbles, and those space shuttle aficionados among them wondered why the shuttle was coming home five days early.

As Atlantis slowed to Mach 1 and dropped below 50,000 feet over Titusville, she wasn't awakening space fans anymore. They had spent the past hour phoning one other: Have you heard? Atlantis is coming back tonight! A friend on the convoy team was called in an hour ago!

At 4:17 a.m., Atlantis commander Steve Banke took control of the shuttle from the computers and began a large, right-hand turn that would take him over the launch pads, out over the ocean and back over shore north of Cocoa Beach before lining him up on the three-mile slab of concrete tucked amid marsh and drainage canals. But with a thick overcast at 5,000 feet, all Banke could see was a uniform whitish glow beneath him.

"Roger, low at the 180," Banke answered, nudging the stick ever so slightly forward.

Atlantis' computers instantly translated the movement into minute, downward adjustments of the elevons -- the wing flaps. The ship's nose pitched down, and the airspeed indicator on the panels in front of Banke and his pilot, Robert Halvorson, began rising. Satisfied, Banke let the stick move back to its neutral position.

"Atlantis, here's your final weather. At 3,000: two-three-zero at four-zero knots; 2,000, two-three-five at three-zero; 1,000, two-four-zero at two-eight; 500, two-three-five at two-zero, peak two-seven; and surface winds at two-three-five, one-two, peak one-niner. How copy?"

Sweat beaded on Banke's forehead and lips, dribbling down onto the radio mouthpiece. With helmet in place, there was nothing he could do about it. Ordinarily, landings were the favorite part of any shuttle commander's flight -- actually the only part where he did any real flying. But after what had happened four hours earlier, the word "ordinary" no longer applied. In 87 combat missions, he'd seen buddies' planes disappear in balls of fire, had seen his share of ugly, torn-open guts on returning pilots. Nothing compared to that single, horrible moment. For that's how long it had taken. One instant he was breathing, talking; the next, he was gone, his life boiling away into nothingness. For a few seconds, he'd actually thought they could save him, if only they could get him inside fast enough. Then he got a better look, and knew it was already too late.

To cap it off, he did not need to be landing through a low cloud deck in 20 knots of crosswind. He was only seven miles away, but still couldn't see a thing.

"Shit," Banke muttered, 27 years of military radio protocol flying out the window. Arriving "low on energy" meant arriving in the swamp. The landing gear would snap off, the nose would bury itself in the muck, the residual hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide in the forward tanks would either leak out, killing everyone within two miles, or ignite, killing everyone within two miles. Then alligators would eat his and crewmates' corpses.

The shuttle during landing was an engineless glider with the flight characteristics of a winged brick. Banke had but finite quantities of speed and altitude. To gain one, he had to give up the other. Gingerly, he again pushed the stick away from him, pointing Atlantis' nose down and speeding her up. When the small circle on the CRT predicting where Atlantis would be in 30 seconds moved back into the target corridor, he eased back.

Banke let out a breath of relief, but took it in sharply as the approach lights finally punctured the gloom, drifting slowly to the left as the altimeter dropped rapidly through 500 feet.

Yes, he could see he was fucking diverging -- it wasn't his brain-dead idea to land here. He looked at the altimeter: 380 feet. If he rolled left, he'd drop too quickly and wouldn't even make the underrun. Two-hundred ninety feet. It was now or never.

"Motherfuck," he swore softly as he moved the stick to the left. "Houston, this is a fuck of a lot more than 20 knots."

Atlantis dropped her left wing, raised her right, and sank even more quickly. Two hundred feet; 160; 120; 80; Banke waited for 50 to roll up on the meter before pulling back on the stick. "Gear down!"

Halvorson flipped the remaining switch to blow open three sets of doors, letting the nose and main landing gear fall out of their recessed compartments as Atlantis' nose pitched upward, bringing the shuttle out of her dive and into a gentle flare. Banke watched the rough but usable underrun approach ever so slowly, as Atlantis again slipped off the centerline because of the crosswind. There was nothing more he could do; he had used all the altitude he dared to get back to the middle. If he rolled any further, he'd drop all 85 tons into the marsh and dig a furrow right to the lip of the runway.

No one said a word, not even the radio. Houston was finished calling. It was all in Banke's hands now.

The runway came to him ever more slowly, while Atlantis' lateral movement to the right continued apace. With 300 yards to go, he was nearly at the edge of the strip. With 200 yards left, Banke realized he had to roll the dice. Again his hands pushed the stick to the left, rolling Atlantis till her left gear were within feet of the marsh.

With a sudden lurch, the wheels slammed onto rough concrete; Atlantis tore through the mist, twin helices trailing off her wing tips, with her left wheels down and right wheels held high above the runway. Still, the crosswind pushed her, until her right wheels hovered not over concrete, but soft grass and mud lining the runway's edge.

"Drag chute," Banke said softly, giving Halvorson his cue to flip two final switches.

With a cannon shot, the chute's housing blew off of Atlantis' rear, pulling out a small drogue. It pulled out the main red, white and blue chute which filled instantly, giving the unrelenting crosswind a new target.

Immediately, the billowing nylon was pushed downwind, pivoting Atlantis' nose sharply upwind -- back toward the center of the runway -- before exploding into a flurry of cloth. Banke worked the rudder pedals to slow the turn and moved the stick back to its rest position to get the right-hand main gear down. With a sickening lurch, the sluggish ship began a wobble toward the left, as a new rumble joined the cacophony enveloping the flight deck.

"Hang on!" Banke called as he jerked the stick forward to bring the nose wheels down: the only way to regain steerage after what he knew must be a blown tire on the left-hand main gear.

The flight computers responded instantly, for a moment transferring much of Atlantis' 171,000 pounds onto her front two tires. The terrific load burned through plies of rubber, overheated the wheels, made steering even more skittish. Banke knew that if the nose wheels blew at that speed, they were finished. He slammed on the brakes; if they melted, they would die. If he didn't try, they would die anyway.

With half of the three-mile runway behind her, Atlantis still raced through the mist at more than 120 knots, her tires disintegrating, the shredded remnants of the drag chute shaking the frame hard enough to send flying through the cabin the pens and notebooks that, in their haste, had been left attached to the walls with Velcro. Banke clenched his teeth to keep from biting his tongue as he watched the centerline lights slip beneath the nose. Mist obscured the lights marking the end of the runway, which he knew must be less than a mile away.

Gradually, though, the spaceship's rumble deepened and softened as her speed dropped through 100 knots, then 80, then 50. At 15 knots, both nose wheels finally blew, and Atlantis screeched to a halt riding on the alloy rims. For a few moments, no one said a word. Banke gripped the stick with both hands, as if afraid she would start rolling toward the end of the runway if he let go.

Finally, Halvorson managed the words that were Banke's to say: "Houston, Atlantis. Wheels stopped."

"Roger, Atlantis. Wheels stopped." Honeycutt had been dragged from bed just two hours earlier to handle Atlantis' early return and fumbled through the made-for-TV welcoming line. "Congratulations on returning the Gamma Ray Observatory to fully operational condition, to let humankind continue its exploration of the high-energy universe. A job well done."

A job well done? Banke shook his head. The whole planet had seen it! He'd been at the aft windows when it happened, and the memory left him queasy.

Halvorson had already opened the flask of Old Bushmill, and Banke peeled off his gloves and lifted his helmet to accept it. "To a job well done," he mocked, and tipped the flask to his lips.

Twice, Santich had read through the morning briefing, and twice it made no sense. He tossed the pages on his desk, flipped off the reading glasses and turned to the now-tepid coffee. Why in God's name had he drank that third beer last night? Like most astronauts, Santich had a slight build -- 5-foot-8, 150 pounds -- and he'd never been able to handle more than two drinks without a hangover the next morning.

Others in his flight school class, then in his group at Pax River and later in Gemini and Apollo could all drink like fish, even though none had been that much heftier. The height and weight restrictions the military had for fighter and high-performance test pilots meant all their fliers were fairly small. But it had been a point of honor for the others to get pissed drunk each evening, stay that way well past midnight, and then get out on the flight line by dawn. He himself had never felt the need to conform, and so had never developed the others' alcohol tolerance.

Any new group he found himself in at first delighted in ridiculing his moderation. Santypuss, they called him. At first it bothered him, but he soon discovered he was always slightly better than the others. Whenever a new engine arrived for flight test, or the choice assignments were handed out, Santich would be at the top of the list, and the mockery would become a grudging respect.

In recent years, there had been no mockery at all, because he had nothing left to prove. He'd walk into the Outpost, where the latest class of astronauts would congregate each day, drinking Lone Stars or Dos Equis to fit in, and order his Heineken, drink it, and leave. Often he'd speak to nobody but the barkeep. Occasionally he would meet Hoop, and go so far as to have a second Heineken while chatting with his buddy.

In the past year, though, he'd largely stopped going to the Outpost at all, and instead drank at home -- a change that, when he thought about it, disturbed him. In fact, now that he thought about it, the previous evening had been the fourth, no, the fifth night this month he'd had a third beer. He shook his head, swallowed the rest of the bitter coffee to mask the foul taste in his mouth and began for a third time on the briefing.

It had been prepared by Mission Operations for the mission management team, and distributed only to senior managers within Mission Ops, Crew Branch, Orbiter Flight Project and of course program management at Huntsville and the Cape.

In typical NASA-ese, it described the events of the previous night in a series of bulleted paragraphs, starting with the discovery of a failed logic assembly on the Gamma Ray Observatory's sun sensor, to the failure of fuel cell number three, to the "anomalous readings" on fuel cell number one and the subsequent decision to de-orbit next rev, to the landing at Kennedy earlier that morning. And to think he'd slept through it all! Based on the mission elapsed times listed, all the fun must have started just a few minutes after he'd nodded off.

But what ever had possessed them to come back to Florida? He'd seen the weather outlooks the previous day, and the entire East Coast had been socked in, from Portland right down to Key West, while Southern California was completely clear. And how the hell could they have lost two fuel cells in the span of one hour? What were the chances of that?

Santich leaned back in his chair to stretch his arms just in time to see Ned Marsh look down at a sheet of paper and silently open his mouth. Santich jumped forward, shuffling aside papers till he found the remote control for the Sony in the corner.

"...At 4 days, 21 hours mission elapsed time, that's about 1 a.m. Central Daylight Time, EGIL -- that's the Electrical Generation and Illumination officer, for those of you new to our program and all its wonderful acronyms -- noticed a funny on fuel cell one. It was a brief transient, but our concern was that its primary oxygen valve was exhibiting the same behavior that had shut down fuel cell three."

Poor Marsh, Santich thought. The guy had been up all night and now, as chief of Mission Operations Directorate, had the responsibility of explaining to the world how NASA had screwed it up again. His thinning hair was disheveled, and the harsh TV lights highlighted the deep circles under his eyes. He looked like hell. To make it worse, he sat next to Marty Bruce, who also must have been awake all night, except he looked like he always did: a predator on full alert. A falcon perhaps, or a shark. Every time the camera pulled back for a wide-angle, there he was, his beady eyes scanning the press room.

Marsh took a sip of water from a glass and continued. "Rather than risk leaving the crew with just a single source of electricity if fuel cell number one were to fail, the MMT, sorry, the Mission Management Team, decided at 4 days, 21 hours and 30 minutes to go ahead and de-orbit on the next revolution. As many of you know, the flight software is constantly updated with a possible landing site for every moment of each orbit, in case of a major malfunction that requires an immediate de-orbit.

"We weren't quite so desperate as that. Instead, given our orbital parameters and our groundtrack, we were able to delay for 25 minutes, letting us return to the primary end-of-mission landing site, the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Now I know y'all will ask me, so, let me find it..."

Marsh searched through a sheaf of papers on the dias while Bruce continued scanning the half dozen Houston reporters who'd managed to wake up in time to make the press conference.

"...okay. The TIG, that's time of ignition; sorry; was at 4 days, 21 hours, 57 minutes and 1-point-zero-four seconds..." a slight titter went through the press room "...with a touchdown on KSC runway 33 at MET 4 days, 23 hours, 6 minutes and 34-point-five-six seconds, or 3:21 a.m. Central Daylight Time.

"Colonel Banke brought Orbiter Vehicle-104 down safely, and the flight crew is resting at the Operations and Checkout Building at Kennedy, and will be flown back to Ellington Field later this afternoon."

Marsh looked up from his papers, turned toward Bruce, and then the other way, toward Len Concord, the Public Affairs Officer moderating the conference. "That's all I had, so I guess we can open it up for questions," Marsh told Concord.

"Okay," Concord said, stopping to listen to his earpiece. "We'll follow the standard format: starting here and then going around to the other centers. Please wait for the mike and state your name and affiliation."

Santich leaned forward, spellbound. What bullshit! They could have landed at Edwards Air Force Base that very same orbit, if they'd wanted. No, they landed in Florida for some other reason....

The camera moved to a pretty brunette wearing too much makeup, particularly for such an early morning. "Hi, this is Sandy Appleton from KHST, and I just wondered what time the astronauts would be returning. My station wants to send a crew out."

Marsh managed a smile, the pale lips turning upward. "Well, Sandy, we'll be sure to get that to you. We're in no rush, just waiting for the crew to wake up. Then we'll put 'em on the STA -- uh, the Shuttle Training Aircraft; sorry again -- and bring 'em home."

Sandy smiled back, teeth glistening perfectly, and the camera followed the boom-mike to the next reporter.

"Tony Birch from the Houston Herald; I was wondering if one of you could walk me through the decision-making process you used for deciding to bring Atlantis home instead of maybe waiting an extra orbit or two to get smarter about fuel cell one. And also if you could describe what the problem was with NASA Select and if that had anything to do with 104's anomalies."

Problem with Select? Santich hadn't heard about this, and leaned even closer toward the set.

"Tony, I apologize; I'd meant to cover that in my opening because I knew y'all would be interested in that. I have to find my sheet here...." Marsh shuffled some more papers and settled on a single page. "Here. At MET 4 days, 20 hours, 23 minutes, NASA lost its ability to transmit NASA Select television because of an electrical surge at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. As most of you are probably aware, the East Coast has had unsettled weather for the past several days, and we most likely suffered from a nearby lightning strike.

"Whatever the exact cause, which we are currently investigating, we were unable to receive the feed from White Sands. And even if we had, we would have been unable to retransmit it out to SATCOM 7. The damaged equipment was replaced about two hours ago, and went back on line about an hour ago."

Lightning strike.... Couldn't Goddard afford surge protectors and arresters and whatever the hell other gadgets were out there? Santich fumbled with the remote control to turn on the built-in recorder to tape the rest of the conference.

"None of the equipment at White Sands was affected, and Mission Control's ability to communicate with 104 and its crew on UHF, S-Band and Ku-Band was never impacted. In fact, like I mentioned, the entire incident was completely transparent to everyone in the MOCR, or, Mission Operations Control Room, and we carried on as if nothing had happened. PAO even continued commentary after we were notified we weren't broadcasting. Isn't that right, Len?"

Concord's look became even more officious as he nodded slowly. He turned toward Birch, the TV lights glinting off round, wire-rimmed glasses.

"Yes, Ned, I continued commentary because I didn't know if Select would come back up before touchdown or not." Concord puffed out his pudgy cheeks before continuing. "As deputy news chief here, I'd like to emphasize that we take very seriously our obligation to provide the public and the press a timely and accurate report of all our activities in human space flight, and we will study exactly what happened to ensure it doesn't happen again."

Concord turned to Marsh with a back-to-you look he'd gotten from watching television news, and Santich snorted. He hated Concord, a one-time radio reporter who idolized the space program and, at age 43, finally got his dream job: a NASA flack, who got to talk with real astronauts each and every day. Every time the man opened his mouth, out popped the pronoun "we," as if what Concord did was somehow every bit as important as what the software engineers or flight controllers did.

If Marsh shared Santich's disdain, he hid it, and continued with Birch's question.

"And as to why we deorbited; well, we did what we thought best given the circumstances. I don't think anyone in the program would have recommended keeping Atlantis up given the chance of only one good fuel cell, and our flight rules are quite clear about the required level of redundancy on Criticality-1R items."

Crit-1R: Hardware with redundant backups, that, which if all are lost, would result in loss of vehicle and crew. How was it that two of three fuel cells had failed within an hour of each other? And how convenient that a storm should simultaneously knock the public access off the air.... Santich poured himself a second cup from the pot behind him, and heard the all-too-familiar voice of Space Slut.

"This is Jo Pointer with WNS. Do you worry that the early landing will overshadow in the press the successful repair of the GRO?"

Santich rolled his eyes. Another softball, blowjob question. He wondered when she would jump back over to NASA, like Concord had. At one time, back when shuttles began flying, she'd been a NASA flack at Kennedy, but had become a reporter to become eligible for the Journalist-in-Space program. When that idea had died along with Teacher-in-Space Christa McAuliffe aboard Challenger, her only reason for leaving NASA had disappeared, and she'd been angling to get back for the past five years.

Bruce fielded her question, arms folded across his chest. "Well, Jo, I guess how the press portrays STS-74 is up to you all." A native Midwesterner, Bruce hadn't quite mastered the Southernism, giving it the same clipped pronunciation he gave everything. "The whole shuttle team performed in a professional and exemplary manner, and I personally am proud of our achievement. Also, we repaired all that we set out to on the GRO, and I'm proud of the two EVA crew members: Sam Torrington and Alexis Orlov; the rest of the flight crew, and the hundreds of flight controllers on the ground who made it happen. It takes thousands of hours of preparation to make a space shuttle mission happen, and we here at NASA do it six and seven times a year."

The camera moved to Space Slut, who sat with a self-satisfied smirk, and moved back to a wide-angle shot of all three men on the dias.

"Okay, we'll move to the Kennedy Space Center for some questions from there. We have to wrap this up in 15 minutes, so limit yourselves to one question each, please," Concord announced.

Santich almost turned off the set; the reporters from Florida were even bigger ass-kissers than those from Houston. But as he hunted for the remote again, his ears perked at the slightly distorted, disembodied voice booming over the picture of Bruce, Marsh and Concord.

"This is Robert Lawrence from Cocoa Beach Today, and, I have a three-part question. We out here at Kennedy have been hearing all kinds of rumors about the last few hours, and I'd like you guys to set the record straight. First, I understand that the GRO was not boosted to the proper orbit prior to re-deploy and another repair mission will be needed. Second, the weather here last night seems, to the untrained eye anyway, to have violated flight rules, while the weather at Edwards was calm and clear. And third, we've heard that 104 may have suffered some tire damage, brake damage and possibly some structural damage to the landing gear, and that the drag chute was torn beyond repair."

"I'll try to answer them, Bob, if I can remember them all." Bruce wore the confused look he affected whenever he was particularly irritated with someone. "Let's see. About the GRO. I suppose you all missed the discussion and resolution among the project scientists because Select was down. But, yes, during last night's EVA -- that is, for you laymen, extra-vehicular activity, or spacewalk -- we found a control module for a sun sensor that looked like it had suffered oxidation. The crew relayed this to the GRO scientists, and they ran a health check and decided the module, which is the backup, was indeed failed. The primary unit was examined, and it appeared to have a lesser amount of corrosion. A health check was also done, and it was working properly.

"But to make a long story short, the project team decided that to make it easier for a second repair flight to change out the sensors, it was best to leave it at the lower orbit, which if you will remember from your pre-launch briefings is a perfectly acceptable orbit for science operations."

Bruce licked his lips, a wolf preparing for the kill. "So in answer to your implication, no the repair was not a failure. Second, I'll guess that few of you in the media are trained meteorologists. It's very easy to play Monday-morning quarterback, and we were faced with one, quite possibly two failed fuel cells. Would you rather that we have left Atlantis in orbit, and the third cell had failed, with the crew stranded? There used to be a saying: Any port in a storm, and early this morning, Florida in marginal weather was a better port than California 90 minutes later."

That's their story, and they're sticking to it. Santich bit his lip. What the hell really happened up there?

"And as to your third question, we haven't had time to study the orbiter in much detail yet. And as it's getting late, if you kids will excuse us, Ned and I have some work to do."

As Concord looked on, mouth agape, Bruce, followed a moment later by a perplexed Marsh, arose, pushed in his chair and walked away. Santich stared at the Sony in his office, awestruck. He normally loved it when someone thumbed his nose at the press, but his dislike of Bruce and his intense curiosity of the Florida newspaperman's questions left him conflicted.

The abrupt end to the conference equally confused both the cameraman and the producer, as the television picture first followed the two men as they strode out the back entrance to the briefing room, lingered for a moment on the closed door, then panned back to the still-shocked Concord.

The figure slumped forward over the steering wheel, arms carelessly on the dashboard. The sun shone brightly, so the top was down: a great morning for a drive. There wouldn't be any traffic. There rarely was. The beach road long ago had been made superfluous by the completion of State Road 3. No one would notice the golden wings on the breast pocket -- the mark of a spaceflight veteran -- or the dark stain that spread towards them down the ubiquitous blue flightsuit.

Quickly, nervously, for the third time, the door handles were wiped clean, inside and out. The transmission lever was pushed from "N" into "D," and the lever on the cruise control flicked to RESUME. With a lurch, the car started rolling forward, slowly at first, then faster.

The first time, the car had sped up solely under the weight of the foot on the accelerator pedal. It had barely damaged the plastic bumper. The second time, the cruise control had been set, and the convertible's hood had begun to crumple, but no fuel spilled out.

The third time, the convertible was still only doing about 30 mph at impact, but because the valve on the tanker was already open and leaking, it was fast enough. Aviation grade kerosene poured onto the hood, where the still-hot engine easily ignited it.

A quarter mile down the road, a light-blue Chevrolet with white government license plates pulled onto the asphalt and headed slowly northward. An overall-clad figure leaned head and shoulders out the passenger window, far enough to make sure vomit didn't dribble down the side of the door.

The car was well clear of the area by the time the smokey yellow flames creeped backward through the convertible's passenger compartment, found the small leak in the fuel line and detonated the nearly empty gas tank like a bomb.

Typing had never been a job requirement for fighter pilots and moon walkers. So only occasionally did the keyboard chatter, as Santich spent much of his time hunting the elusive letters with the index finger of each hand. Like a half dozen other astronauts in quasi-management roles who retained offices in Building 4, Santich had his own secretary, but he didn't want word of his departure out until he was ready. Telling Lynnette guaranteed that Millie, the Office's secretary, would know within 15 minutes; that the rest of the corps would know inside the hour, and the whole of JSC would know by the end of the day.

The letter Q had once again moved to a new spot on the keyboard when one of the handful of people he permitted to barge into his office unannounced did so, a photocopied page thrust out before him. Santich fished out his reading glasses and scanned the five paragraphs while Butch Grieve paced beneath photos of Santich in orbit, Santich on the moon, Santich in the Rose Garden with three different presidents. Cloth patches from six NASA space flights, two Navy fighter groups, "Top Gun" and Patuxent River hung in a row, each behind glass in a square frame. Above them was a single diploma: Bachelor of Science in aeronautical engineering, United States Naval Academy, Annapolis, Maryland.

Grieve dropped his stocky frame in the padded steel chair opposite the steel desk, both a standard, Government Services Administration, grade-11 grey, that, along with some filing cabinets and some bookshelves, furnished the small office.

"No. He was alone. I know; the release doesn't say shit. Can you believe that's how they told us? With a fucking news release?"

Santich nodded, read through the sheet a third time: U.S. Army Capt. Samuel James Torrington, veteran of two NASA space shuttle missions, including the just-completed STS-74, died from injuries sustained in an automobile accident, declared dead at the scene by Kennedy Space Center paramedics. Entered astronaut corps in class of '89, BS from University of Southern California, 1973, U.S. Army from 1973 to 1985, MS from University of Alabama, Huntsville, 1982, survived by two sons, Christopher Scott, age 8, and James Wilfred, age 5.

Grieve shrugged. "The official story is that he was going for a run on the beach before coming home. He quote lost control of the vehicle unquote and ran it into a fuel truck by the side of the road, the vehicle became quote engulfed in flames unquote, and he was burned beyond recognition by the time rescue crews arrived."

Santich raised an eyebrow at one of his few friends in the corps and looked at him over his spectacles. The fuel cells, the crazy landing, now this.... "And the unofficial story?"

"Who knows? With Sam, a bimbo, or booze, or some combination would be a pretty safe bet. That's what the rumor mill is already saying."

"Come on, Santy!" Grieve stood and began pacing, his arms folded over his chest. "Does any of this make sense? Everything's going along fine, NASA showing its can-do spirit, just like the old days, when in the span of three hours, they deep-six GRO, run home with their tails between their legs and in the process almost crash and burn! And now Torrington's dead!"

Grieve joined the program just after Apollo-Soyuz but before shuttle. He wasn't quite old enough to talk authoritatively about "The Old Days," but Santich excused the transgression.

"Jesus, Santy! What have you been doing in here all morning, playing with yourself? They did $10 million worth of damage to the nose gear and left main. They shredded all six tires and they blew up the chute." Grieve shook his head. "Halvorson went to jettison it at the end of rollout, and there was nothing left but the risers."

Santich raised his eyebrows wearily. The queasy feeling that had come to him that morning returned. Yes, there was something wrong; something a little too pat.... But, no more. It wasn't his fight. After the morning press conference, he'd barricaded himself in his office: He could make his resignation effective the end of June and burn his accumulated sick leave. Tomorrow, hell, today, could be his last day. Whatever had happened to Orbiter Vehicle-104 was interesting, a nice discussion topic to while away an afternoon, but not his problem anymore.

"Cabin leak, meteorite strike, who knows? I guess that's the most likely explanation. If they were bleeding air, that would explain coming back at dark-fucking-thirty in the middle of a gale."

Santich had already come to the same conclusion. "So why lie? Why not just say: we were hit by a micrometeoroid and had to come home immediately?"

"You know damn well why!" Grieve shot an irritated look, sat back down, flinging one blue-jeaned leg over the narrow armrest. "After Wembley-Scott, Headquarters doesn't even want to hear the word meteor, not after all the lying those Station pinheads did about how low earth orbit is self-cleansing and how the estimates were off by three or four orders of magnitude." Grieve allowed himself a snicker. "I'd love to see those guys go back up Capitol Hill and explain this!"

Santich nodded slowly. Mark Wembley and Hannah Scott had been two astronauts who were also mathematicians. Just before leaving the corps the previous year, they finished a paper concluding that a space station like the one NASA wanted to build would have a one-in-96 chance each year of suffering life-threatening damage from orbital debris or meteorite impact. So, over the course of the 20 years it was supposed to stay in orbit, there was a one-in-five chance of a crew getting killed. That argument brought the Station within 17 votes of cancellation the previous year in the U.S. House of Representatives.

"Okay. Say they were hit, and sprang a leak. That would explain why they'd come back on the next rev. But the whole damn thing was on TV: How could they keep a meteor strike secret? You know Banke of all people would have called down the instant it happened."

"Okay, in this particular case they got lucky. But that's not the sort of thing you plan on, is it?"

"Goddamn, Santy." Grieve shook his head, amazed. "What have you been doing these last two years, playing with yourself?"

Six months earlier he'd overheard the phrase as he walked into the Outpost. He'd made a mental note to look into it, but then had let it slide. He shrugged helplessly.

Grieve looked for a hint of recognition, saw none, continued. "Dammit, what's happened to you? You used to be on top of everything! Not a single waiver, problem report, procedure even got written without your knowing about it. Now, this happens, and you can't even see what's going on!"

Santich knew that if his friend could sense this, others could also, and that irritated him beyond the mere fact of its truth. "So what's 2601?" he snapped.

"Okay," Grieve leaned forward conspiratorially. "Now I don't know this first-hand, but then again, I don't think anyone outside of Bruce's little star chamber does. You remember two summers ago, when the turbine-blade fuck-up grounded us for three months? And that Senate committee almost killed Station because we couldn't be trusted to keep the shuttles flying long enough to build the damn thing?"

"Well, Bruce got to worrying that if Congress could pitch a fit over something that might have happened but didn't, then they'd really scream for blood if we did have a bad day. So he cooked up a plan to cover it up."

"Cover up a bad day?" Santich laughed, partly at the in-house euphemism for catastrophe. "How do you hide it when a shuttle blows up in front of 20,000 tourists at Kennedy?"

"Not that bad a day. No, I think he and everybody else accepts that if anyone else dies during ascent, that's the end of the show. What he had in mind was something like what happened this morning. A cabin leak, say, or a fire or something that forced a contingency landing."

"Look: you want me to explain this or not? This isn't my harebrained scheme, it's Bruce's. I'm just telling it to you." Grieve paused a moment, licked his chubby lips. "Alright. Here's what they did: they set up a circuit to take down NASA Select's Goddard transmitter, and kept the proper excuse ready to go at a moment's notice. Like last night, with all the storms around the area, a lightning strike was a natural.

"They wired the flight director's station in Mission Control with a switch that cuts off the feed and also trips a breaker in Goddard that allows the transmitter circuits to overload and blow. If the emergency is cleared up, Goddard techs go about their normal business, fix the transmitter and get back on the air. But if a longer delay is needed, like, I bet, last night, then someone on Bruce's staff makes sure that repairs take long enough."

Santich cocked his silver crew cut, squinting his bright blue eyes slightly. "No. There's no way.... He rigged all that just for a coverup? And people went along with him?"

Grieve shook his head. "I admit it sounds nuts. I thought so, too, when I first heard it. But trust me: Bruce is dead serious. And you know the atmosphere around here: We'd rather lie about something to the world and leave it broken than get a black eye and fix it. Every single person's livelihood here depends on the shuttle taking off and landing six or seven times a year. Hell, you don't have to take my word: Look at last night! What are the odds that Goddard would take a lightning strike at the same time a meteor hit 104?"

If Grieve was right, he realized with a chill, it had all happened right under his damned nose. What had he been doing the past two years? Impatiently he shook his head.

"Alright, say that the whole Goddard thing was rigged. The whole thing falls apart if anyone on board says the wrong thing on the radio. And look who you had on 104! I'll grant you: Most of these new ones are spineless yes-men, but Banke? At the first sign of a cabin leak, he'd have called down, fucking this, piece of shit that. How do you cover that up, or does the flight director sit with his finger over the panic button the whole mission?"

Grieve grinned. "Next time you're in the control room during a flight, go in the back and take a look at PAO's console. He has a NASA Select monitor that gets the Goddard feed rather than the JSC mix. Watch and you'll see."

Grieve nodded. "Five seconds. Everything but launch, landing and the PAO events; you know, interviews, in-flight news conferences and the other Headquarters bullshit. All that stuff goes out real time."

It was technically possible, Santich allowed. But how could Bruce expect to pull it off without someone blowing the whistle? NASA was a huge bureaucracy, filled with jealous ideologues and conflicting agendas. If anybody in planetary science, or astronomy or aeronautics or any of the other offices whose funding was getting slashed to feed the Station-Shuttle beast got wind of this, the game would be up.

Grieve shrugged, then stood to resume his pacing. "I haven't the foggiest. I would guess none. You know the kind of latitude they give Bruce: Get the job done, and we'll ask you no questions. How else do you think he could've turned this place into his personal fiefdom? Near as I can tell, this whole thing was supposed to stay within Johnson. Although I have no idea what happens when they roll 104 into the hangar at Kennedy, and instead of a failed fuel cell they find a hole in the crew cabin. You watch: Within two days, some Florida paper will say there was no fuel cell problem, but there was a cabin leak, according to anonymous space shuttle sources."

Santich leaned back, rubbed his temples and eyes with his knuckles. On the face of it, the whole thing was ridiculous. But.... He'd felt funny about it right from the start. It hadn't made sense. What if Torrington....

Grieve was looking at a group shot of the Apollo astronauts, one taken early enough to include Grissom, White and Chaffee. Again he shrugged.

"I don't know. It's just like Sam to go tearing off to blow off some steam. Maybe it was his fault they had to come home early, or that GRO is still broken. Maybe, as you guys used to say, he screwed the pooch."

Screwed the pooch. Santich tried to remember whether they had actually said it, or if it had become common lingo at NASA only after they turned Tom Wolfe's book into a movie. After that, all the new astronauts had loved slipping it into their everyday speech. Each one thought he was the first to revive an old standby -- sort of pay homage to the early explorers.

"Besides," Grieve continued, sitting down again. "Whether the wreck had anything to do with the early landing or not doesn't matter. The whole world thinks it does. That's the important thing. Here."

Grieve picked up the remote control and switched it to CNN, where a hastily spliced piece of film showed the video highlights of veteran astronaut Sam Torrington's life and times, from still shots of Sam the high school wide receiver in Billings, Montana, to ROTC at Southern Cal, to research in the Army in materials processing, to his first space flight three years earlier, and finally his first spacewalk -- last night. A true American hero, dead at age 43.

The anchorman went on to read how his just-revealed death follows NASA's most bizarre space shuttle mission to date, the first to end in virtual secrecy because of a communications problem, and with a still-unanswered question about how badly the vehicle may have been damaged. Reports said the amount could exceed $150 million. The clip ended with the snippet of Bruce insulting the assembled media, standing up and walking away.

"Can you believe that? Sam's a fucking hero now. Pure as driven snow." Grieve laughed. "Had he lived through the month, they would have indicted his ass, and then the TV would be full of his lousy grades in college, how he was nearly expelled for cheating, how he diddled the neighbor's dog."

It was common knowledge within Building 4 that the FBI was nearly finished with Operation Bedbug, a two-year probe into bid-rigging in the Space Station contracts at Johnson and that an astronaut would be indicted. That Torrington was the target was a given. Even he had known it, and had hired a criminal lawyer to get off as lightly as he could.

"You know," Santich mused aloud. "That guy was here, what, five years? And I don't think anybody in the place is the least bit sorry he's dead."

Grieve pushed the mute button on the remote. "Yeah, well, why should we be? He's either fucked, or tried to fuck, half our wives, and probably has fucked 90 percent of our girlfriends."

Grieve had had two extra-marital affairs that Santich knew of. The first had ended when the woman, a junior flight controller in the mechanical systems branch, began something with Torrington while she was still seeing Grieve. Santich wondered whether Torrington had moved in on the second mistress, too.

"What about Banke and the rest?" Santich said, wondering whether they'd stay at the Cape longer now because of Torrington's death.

"They're on their way back." Grieve bit his lower lip. "Funny thing about that. At first, they wanted to ship Torrington's body back on the STA with the crew, but Banke told 'em to stuff it. So they're flying out the second STA special, just to haul him back tonight. I don't know. Maybe he was so falling down drunk they're trying to hide him from the medical examiner down there. I mean, how would it look for the Great American Hero to have bought it with enough alcohol in his blood to embalm him?"

Probably no worse than if it got out that the commander and pilot chugged a flask of good Irish whisky after every landing, Santich thought. He glanced at his computer screen, looked up at Grieve, and sighed.

"Well, amigo, whatever's at the bottom of this mess, I'm sure you and the other brave lads and lasses here in Building 4 will sort it out, reward the good, punish the wrongdoers and uphold the American Way."

It was Grieve's turn to stare blankly. "What? That's it? The biggest fuck-up since Challenger, and you're not interested?"

The queasy feeling wrenched his gut. No! No more.... "Why? How much interest should I have in something that's so clearly not my problem?"

Grieve's dark brown eyes blinked twice. "Not your problem! Santy, you live for this! Come on! Why do you think I'm here? I've got it figured out. When all this gets out, they're gonna can Bruce and his minions, including Garvey. And when that happens, they'll need a new program director, and a new chief astronaut. And, yea, the meek shall inherit the Earth!"

"What are you talking about?" Santich sighed. "Bruce isn't going anywhere. Even if all this gets out, you forget one important thing: nobody cares. And if anybody takes the fall for it, it'll be Banke."

Grieve gasped again, stood to relieve his consternation. "Yes! Absolutely! If we do nothing, then Bruce rides this out and people like Banke get screwed! But, but, if we grab the bull by the horns, we can push things the right way. If Bruce lies about something, like this morning, we make sure the truth gets out."

"They do! Space is still the last page, the final frontier! People care about this. I think they'd get pretty steamed if they found out someone rigged the whole system to cover his ass."

Santich sighed a much practiced, well-worn sigh. "No. They don't care. Nobody in the rest of NASA, nobody in Congress, nobody in the quote unquote public has any interest whatsoever in who runs this country's manned spaceflight program. Look. With a flight every other month, seven slots per flight, we send 42 people into orbit every year: 42 out of a quarter billion. All this hierarchy here at Johnson is about one thing: who gets to ride the go-cart? Sure, we're a $7 billion a year jobs program, but no one outside our little club cares who rides it, so long as somebody does, seven times a year, ad infinitum, ad nauseam."

Grieve nodded. "Okay, fine. I admit it: That's the only reason I came here: to go into space. I guess most of us in the corps feel that way. But there are others who believe there's something to all of this. Like you, for instance, or like you used to be." Grieve paused, got no response, continued. "And there are people out there who think the whole thing is a waste of money, and others who think there's something to be learned from it all. But one thing they got in common, I think, is that they think it's their go-cart, not Bruce's. And if he can't take care of it, then maybe he shouldn't be in charge."

Santich sighed again, turned his computer monitor toward Grieve and motioned for him to read it. "As you can see, while I appreciate your interest and enthusiasm, I really can't help you."

He waited for his friend to finish reading the four and a half paragraphs he'd managed in as many hours. "I'm not part of this anymore. I haven't been for a while. You know it, so does everyone else. It's time I admitted it, too."

"You mean 104?" Santich waved his hand and snorted. "Hell, no. This has been coming a while. I've been thinking hard about things. I've only got so many years left. I'd be an idiot to keep banging my head against the wall here.

"No, I'll go back to Emily, if she'll have me, and spend some real time with the kids, and their kids." He leaned back, arms stretched overhead. "So I think maybe before I leave today, I'll zip this over to Bruce, and make Friday my last day. No, I take that back: I'll make today my last day."

Grieve shook his head. "No! You can't! Come on, Santiago, I know you've been unlucky for 80 days, or 90 days or whatever the hell it was. But you're on the verge of catching a big one."

Santich smiled. The Old Man and the Sea had been his father's favorite book, and that his only boy -- named after his grandfather -- shared the hero's name had made it that much more special. In recent years, Santich had begun to liken his inability to fly again with Santiago's 84 days without a fish.

"Santy: If I get Bruce's job, I can make you chief astronaut again. Which means you can fly!"

All the old emotions, packed away for years, returned, unbidden. The practiced, methodical climb into the left-hand chair; the tedious run through the checklists; the endless wait; and, finally, the low rumble, the sudden push on the chest and a mad, terrible, wonderful headlong rush into an ever-darkening sky. A chill flashed up and down his spine, bringing goose bumps.

"Come on, Santy! You've been waiting around a dozen years for this. You can hang on another six months."

Santich kept a poker face. "You've obviously thought this out. What would I have to do? I'm not agreeing, mind you. I just want to hear you out."

Grieve rubbed his hands together. "Piece of cake. Just be yourself. The press will still listen to you, especially after this morning. Anything you say, they'll eat up. And your title allows you access to all the reports, right?"

"In theory. Usually I have to hold my breath and turn blue before they give something to me."

"I bet if you announced that you're forming a committee to investigate STS-74, you'd open all kinds of doors. People will see the writing on the wall. They can either help you, or cast their lot with Bruce. Why go down with a sinking ship?"

"I'll help you. You're the senior astronaut here, I'm second. Between us, we've got more than 50 years at NASA. If that doesn't bring respect, I don't know what will. Each week we hold a press conference to announce our findings. I think if we can point those pinheads in the right direction, they'll start smelling a Pulitzer Prize and go off on their own. They'll make a much bigger deal out of 2601 if they uncover it themselves than if we hand it to them on a plate."

Santich thought about it, tried to guess how long something like that would take. "How would we start?"

"Big, that's how! We'll tell 'em the fleet ought to be grounded until we determine why it was that Atlantis had to do such a dangerous, costly landing. That alone will get great publicity, and if we follow up by saying there may have been a coverup, they'll be eating out of our hands!"

"He resigns, or becomes enough of an embarrassment that Headquarters has to fire him. Doesn't matter. The point is, if all this comes out, he can't possibly stay. No way."

Again Santich leaned back, his fingertips joined together in a steeple. Grieve let him think for a minute, then could no longer contain his impatience.

"Come on! I don't claim I have this all worked out, but I absolutely guarantee that in six months, Bruce will be finished -- if we move quickly and stay ahead of this." Grieve studied Santich, decided he needed more. "You know you've been aching for one more trip up. This is your last chance, and I think it's a pretty good one. Six months, Santy, that's all I ask."

Santich's body gently rocked back and forth in the vinyl-upholstered office chair, but his mind was 12 years and a thousand miles away. Unlike the slow nudge in the back of the old Saturn 5's, the shuttle boosters were a kick in the pants. A bone-rattling, two-minute rush to the top of the roller coaster. Then the solids burned out and fell away, leaving only the main engines, whisper-quiet and silky-smooth in comparison. And in another six minutes, when those, too, fell silent, nothing. Absolute quiet and total freedom; the most perfect peace he had ever known. How he'd dreamed of it over the last decade....

Santich flicked his eyes up to find his friend staring at him, grinning like he knew he'd get what he'd come for.

Grieve's grin hardened into a thin line. "No! The time to act on this is right now. Look at the TV!"

For the umpteenth time in a few hours, CNN was broadcasting its blurb about the landing. The muted image shifted from the anchor, now a pretty former model, to that morning's press conference. Once again, Bruce silently mouthed his final answer and, once again, silently stood up and walked out. The clip lingered on the closed door for a split second before returning to the ex-model.

"These people have an attention span about this long." Grieve held his thumb and index finger a quarter inch apart. "They're like hunting dogs: basically pretty dumb, but persistent for a while. It's 4 o'clock. We should fax out notice of our press conference in the next half hour, and set it for 5. If we do, we'll be the major story on the evening news. If we wait three or four days, we don't even rate two paragraphs in the local rag."

Grieve rolled his eyes. "Come on, Santy! I can't do this myself. You're the great hero, not me."

Grieve shrugged. "The usual for an aging astronaut with college-age kids. More money. I'm Grade 14. Bruce is SES: $110,000 minimum. If I stay for three years, that's 14 grand a year more when I get out. I guess I should have cashed in with Hulling-McGee or Spartan Aerospace like everybody else."

Grieve stood, walked to the group photo of the Apollo astronauts. "Yeah. I guess so. Maybe, though, if you were head of the office, and I was your boss, maybe I could manage one last flight, too." He turned to Santich with a grin. "What do you think?"

"Tomorrow. I'll decide tonight, and let you know first thing in the morning." Santich raised his eyebrows, but kept his arms folded.

Grieve shook his head. "Goddamn stubborn son of a bitch. Alright, tomorrow. But tomorrow morning. No later." He turned to leave, then stuck his head back through the doorway. "Tomorrow morning!"

Santich waved his friend away, waited for the door to click shut. He stood, stretched and walked over to the row of photos, stopping at the one taken in front of the Descartes Mountains. Santich, completely unrecognizable in the bulky white suit and reflective sun visor, stood on a steep ledge overlooking the plain where the lander had touched down. In the background, a gibbous Earth hung in the heavens.

During his three subsequent trips to space, Santich always found time to stare at the moon. He'd pull out the Zeiss binocs and focus in on the familiar pattern of craters, hoping to catch a glint off the car-sized mound of metal they'd left behind.

He moved on to the closeup of Columbia leaving Kennedy's Launch Complex 39 on her maiden voyage. Again, Santich's face was not visible through the multi-layered flight deck windows. Nor was it in the photo of Columbia about to land on the baked clay desert at Edwards. Only the photo of Santich and Forrester, still dressed in orange pressure suits, helmets under their arms, standing in front of Columbia's nosewheels, proved that he had been in the cockpit.

So how badly did he want it back? He thought about Grieve's proposal, tried hard to avoid wishful thinking: He gave the plan a fair to middling chance of success. He marveled again at the audacity of Bruce's coverup. He had known since STS-1 that the PAO console in Mission Control had a panic button that immediately cut off the NASA Select feed. Its purpose had been to protect the crew's privacy in the event of a catastrophic accident, like a sudden cabin leak or a smoky fire. It was agreed that no one should have to die on national TV, with final curses and screams broadcast for all to hear. But no one had dreamed of manipulating it like Bruce seemed to have.

So what the hell was Bruce covering up? Was it just a cabin leak? It seemed crazy to risk landing like they did just for that. According to the mission elapsed times they'd given, whatever it was had happened just after the spacewalk. But what if those times were lies, as well? What if whatever disaster happened actually took place during the spacewalk? Maybe Torrington's death did have something to with whatever happened in orbit. An air embolism maybe.... Yeah; that was it; a meteor hits Atlantis while Torrington and Orlov are outside. They rush to get back in to deorbit. They come home. Torrington suffers an embolism in the brain while driving down the road....

Sure; he had it all figured out. Why bother with an investigation? Besides, none of that was really the point. Grieve was right. If the press got wind of 2601, that was the end of Bruce. True, the realization was self-serving, mercenary almost. He hated the press. They were, with rare exceptions, stupid, sloppy, opportunists.

To rid himself of Bruce, and go there one last time, he would have to cozy up to them for God-only-knew how long. The thought tied a knot in his stomach as he turned to face the still-on, still-muted Sony. Within a minute, the blue-and-red NASA logo popped up behind the anchorwoman. This time, they included clips from the early part of the spacewalk, then spliced in footage from one of Atlantis' earlier landings, then finished with the snippet of Bruce leaving the press conference.

Santich sat back down and stared at the television, which had moved on to a stock market update. The dollar was down slightly against the yen but up against the Deutsche mark. Short-term interest rates had risen slightly. Santich found the remote and flicked off the set.

He turned the chair 90 degrees to face the computer screen and studied the still-embryonic resignation letter. His right index finger moved over the keyboard, hovered for a moment, then came down with a solid click. A line at the bottom queried whether he wished to exit the document without saving it. He typed the letter Y and gave himself a fresh screen. Letter by letter, he began typing a memo:

Compelled to do what? Suck up to you lazy half-wits? Destroy the careers of a half-dozen co-workers so I can get my rocks off one more time? Getting Bruce fired gave him no moral qualms. The man's ruthless authoritarian streak had been necessary: once, when the program was threatening to spin apart. Now, it was merely paranoid megalomania, a menace to the program. But there were others around him, like Marsh, who were honest, hardworking people who would fall along with Bruce if 2601 turned out to be true.

An inadvertent glance at his watch showed Santich he was late. He stood, picked his jacket off a hook on the wall, and hit the light switch on his way out.