The Endeavour had launched on schedule, and had parked its empty tank right where we wanted it, half a click from the Station and rock-steady in orbit. My partner and I had been waiting, breathing the Station air through our umbilicals while the orbiter undocked and silently slid aft, taking up its station far enough away that the minute traces of gas it constantly vented would do no harm. I docked and hooked onto the tank, per procedure, and began unbolting the flight access door. The plench squirmed like a thing alive in my hands as its internal gyros took up the torque. I opened the door and clicked my headlight on, again according to procedure, to make sure everything in the intertank was shipshape.

I had to look three times to make sure I had seen what I thought I had!

"Jack, there's a dead man in here!"

My partner floated over to the open access door and peered inside. "Where?"

"There." I held my spacesuit spotlight steady as he raised the visor of his helmet and peered inside.

"What the hell. . .?"

The dead man's right foot was wedged between the lower ring frame and the top of the hydrogen tank dome. The rest of him bobbed up and down in the glare like a broken doll as Jack's momentum was transferred to the tank. Even moving like that, he was hard to see among the tangle of equipment and cargo that had been stacked in the intertank space. The tan blanket he had been wearing flapped around him like badly tangled angel's wings, revealing the gory white coveralls beneath. His skin was bottlefly-blue, blotchy and swollen from the blood that had literally boiled in his veins. He had not tried to hold his breath, but he hadn't been able to clear his sinuses or his gut. I was glad I couldn't smell him. He seemed to peer at us from ruptured eyeballs, just waiting, not hurrying, not caring. After all, he was dead. He didn't mind us staring at him at all.

I used extra care stowing the plench in its container and checked again to make sure the flight door I had just replaced was fastened to the jig on my babyseat. My thoughts formed themselves into words before I realized I was talking. "How do you suppose he got in there?"

"Damn!" Jack replied. "Hell, Dutch, I don't know." What are we going to do?

"We are going to set the stationkeeper, get the code key and then get the hell out of here, that's what we're going to do. Let Sarge handle this. That's what he's paid for."

Sarge is our boss. As bosses go, he's not bad, except when we screw up a tank retrieval, and this one looked like it was already badly screwed up. We don't have a procedure for handling dead people, at least not arriving ones.

"We can't just leave him here," Jack said. "We've got to get him out."

"No we don't, Jack. What I've got to do is get the code key and what you've got to do is finish hooking up the 'keeper. We can panic later. Right now, we've got to make sure this damn tank doesn't get loose. The guy can wait. We don't have that much air."

"Yeah, I guess you're right," Jack agreed, not moving. "Damn, Dutch. This is creepy."

He wasn't just whistling Dixie. It was me that had to go into the tank, not him.

I unhitched the babyseat, got a good grip on the sill and pulled myself inside the intertank, trying not to look at the dead man. Moving around in the new, high pressure skinny suits is harder than it looks, despite what the designers say, but it saves decompression time. I unlatched the range safety box, opened the access door on the IRD, the integrated receiver-decoder, and peered inside. "Oh, oh," I said.

"What's the matter?"

"No code key."

"What do you mean? There's got to be a code key. They couldn't have launched without it."

"They couldn't have left one of their men inside, either." I grunted as I swung myself back out of the door. "See for yourself. No code key!"

Jack stuck his helmet in just far enough to see the open access door. "Maybe the dead guy took it."

"Well, I'm not going to look for it now," I said. "Jack, we're running out of time. Get that damn 'keeper on the crossbeam and let's go back in. We can decide what to do when we're not burning suit air."

Jack gave himself a push and backpedaled down the side of the tank, bumping along the scorched foam, not saying anything. I watched him lock the placekeeper, the little clump of thrusters that would keep the tank where we wanted it, onto the crossbeam. He took time to check that it was secure and waved. I waved back and gave the stick on my babyseat a little nudge. The babyseat swung around and began falling horizontally back toward the Station, 338 kilometers above Brazil, leaving the dead man to ride the tank. As far as I was concerned, he'd earned the right to be his own captain. He hadn't given up his ship!

The United States had been fascinated with space travel ever since the early fifties, when Warner Von Braun and a bunch of his buddies from Peenemunde had published a series of articles in Collier's Magazine about how we were going to "conquer space soon." But fascination was not the same thing as appreciation or appropriation. No one really believed that a space station was possible until four years later, when the Soviet Union gave us all a hell of a scare with Sputnik. Then it was balls to the wall to beat the Russians to the moon. When Neil Armstrong took that first "small step for man" (he had meant to say "a man," but it hadn't sounded that way to the rest of us), every American knew all about orbits and weightlessness and why what goes up doesn't necessarily come back down again, and we'd thought the lessons cheap, since we had beat the Russians.

But after we got to the moon, we rested on our laurels. We had won the space race. Just to make it look like science, we took one of our old boosters and made a half-hearted space station, but then we abandoned it and dropped it on Australia. The Russians were finally trying to catch up with us, with a space shuttle that looked just like ours except that they hadn't been able to build reusable engines and still threw them away with each flight. But when Challenger blew up in 1986, Americans began asking themselves if it was all really worth it, the lives and the dollars and the money that was being spent in space instead of feeding hungry people or housing homeless people or patching up the hole in the ozone layer. NASA wanted a space station, the Nation wanted peace, land and bread. So Congress cut out the space station entirely. Then it cut NASA's operating budget, then cut it again. . . and again. . .

Meanwhile the Russians bided their time as they slowly surpassed our records in time in space and payload weight and knowledge about what working in space did to people and other living things. They quietly sent robots to the moon and built a real space station and staffed it with the same crew for almost a year. They used what worked and improved what didn't, building up their understanding of what the difference was.

And when they decided they could get to Mars, in spite of their problems at home, they went! With the logistic capacity for only three men but the need for the skills of five, they used five petite women, combined mass 249 kilos!

Most Americans didn't care. Mars was cold and lonely and far away. There were jokes about "upper Siberia" and "Reds on the Red Planet." Space was for young people; the US population was getting old. Space cost money; most Americans were on a fixed income. We had lost our thirst for adventure.

So when the President nominated an old Army buddy, a retired major general, to succeed the retiring NASA Administrator, the confirmation passed the Senate without a dissenting vote. The few senators who bothered to attend the hearings at all agreed privately that the Army didn't care about space; they had no astronauts and not even one jet pilot. An "old soldier" would probably let NASA fade away to obscurity, just keeping the Shuttle running and launching a few unmanned payloads now and then for show.

Boy, were they wrong!

The Administrator's very first official act was to tell Congress point blank that the United States was going to develop space; that we were going back to the moon and stay there. He told a full committee that he was tired of pissing away taxpayers' money for feasibility studies and preliminary concepts. He wanted to start cutting metal. If they didn't get off their asses and approve his amended budget, he said, he was going to spend what they had already appropriated his way anyway and to hell with them. And the President backed him up all the way.

We needed boosters that could be throttled and turned off, if necessary. That meant hybrid boosters, solid fuel and liquid oxidizer. But we didn't know how to build big hybrid boosters. So NASA offered to pay three billion dollars for the first pair that did the job, with options for sixty more pairs at cost plus, sole source, no bullshit and cash on the barrelhead. They got them in seventeen months, with ten percent more lifting power than the original SRBs, and no field joints to leak.

NASA wanted a lighter external tank, two metric tons lighter. The manufacturer shaved off three and a half tons and added two more tons of cryogenic capacity.

We needed a moon ship, but all our moon ships were in museums. But we already had manufacturers making life support systems and rocket engines in various sizes. A space ship that could lift itself to LEO with a 25 metric ton payload had more than enough power to set it down on the moon; LEO is halfway to anywhere in the galaxy. Take one STS orbiter, leave off the wings and insulating tiles, keep the life support system; change out the engines. . .

The general wanted a space station, not a dinky little travel trailer, but a big double wide, with bay windows and a raised sun deck. He pointed out that we were already sending space station hulls into orbit, it was time that we stopped throwing them away and started recycling. All it would take was a little goose to make that orbit stable, and with the lighter tanks and extra lifting capacity of the new boosters and ET, all it would require would be a minor modification of the OMS pods. He talked about the American Flag still faithfully flying on the Bay of Tranquility and eternal footprints of brave Americans on the rolling prairies of the lonely moon.

The reaction was a short but vigorous discussion on Capitol Hill about impeachment and misappropriation of funds and prosecution for violating federal procurement regulations and the necessity of saving the Spotted Owl.

Then came the election. The President stayed. The Administrator stayed. Twenty senators and thirty five representatives didn't!

Somehow, we had recovered our pride. If only it wasn't too late. . .

The Station is a bundle of gigantic hot dogs. Six space shuttle external tanks wrapped around a seventh, with airlocks sticking out at odd angles here and there because that's where the inspection manholes had been. The original US space station, the one Congress axed, had been called "Freedom" because somebody thought that it sounded nice. But nobody wanted to give the collection of old shuttle propellant tanks and other miscellaneous junk a proper name, so we just called it the Station, with a capital S. For the past three months it had been my home, along with 150 other people, more or less, who were assembling the moon expedition. I live in "Kennedy's Tank," ET 109.

Endeavour hung in the sky about a kilometer away, it's solar panels glistening in the setting sun. I waved out of habit, but I doubt if anybody saw. They had gotten the Minerva nuclear engine up here; now they were probably all on the middeck, eating supper or playing cards or doing whatever shuttle crews do while they're waiting to unload. They could have been unloading now, but the Minerva is a massive sonofabitch in spite of its small size and we didn't want to spare the tank retrieval crew while we were maneuvering it into position. So we worked on taking care the tank first and getting it out of the way so it wouldn't bump into anything or drift so far away that we'd have trouble picking it up again.

I pulled up to the EVA garage and waited while two other crewmen folded and stowed their babyseats. The babyseats were originally called "manned maneuvering units," with the acronym "MMU" being mandatory governmentese for common use. But then people started calling them "em-em-yues" and that didn't sound right either, so now we call them babyseats and always make sure we buckle up before we go anyplace. We could tie them up outside, but the trace of atmosphere and orbiter maneuvering exhaust at LEO does funny things to paint and metal surfaces after awhile, and there's all that room in the ET intertanks that can't be pressurized and even a little door in the side, so we keep things in there that we consider valuable.

In space, anything that supports life is valuable.

I stowed my babyseat in the clamps and made sure the gas bottles and battery were charging properly. The Station and the suits both use standard air at sea level pressure, but using separate nitrogen and oxygen bottles in the suits allows us to increase the oxygen partial pressure if we're working hard and need the extra fatigue resistance. I hadn't needed it, thank God. You sleep like a dead man afterwards. Speaking of dead men. . .

I punched the pumpdown button on the intertank air lock and waited while it cycled down, then squeezed inside and waited while it cycled back up to pressure again. Even though the intertank one-man locks are small, you don't bleed valuable air away unless there's an emergency, like empty suit tanks. I decided to report to Sarge first; stowing the suit could wait.

I found him in the comm room, where he usually hangs out when one of the crew is outside and he's not. "Sarge, there a. . ."

"Yeah, I know. A dead guy in the tank. You guys think nobody ever listens to any channel but their own?"

"I thought it best not to use the guard channel. You think anybody else heard?"

"No, no thanks to you and Jack. I relieved Joyce for dinner. I was the only one here. You didn't touch him?"

"Hell no, Sarge. Like I said, it's your job. I'll go out and get him if you want, but as far as I'm concerned, it's a favor; it's not in my job description."

"Well, you may have to, Dutch. Don't give me any of that union crap on this. Retrieving cargo is your job description; if he's in the intertank, he's cargo. Period. I don't want anybody knowing about this who doesn't have to. I haven't even told Houston yet."

"Why does Houston have to know? This guy came from Kennedy."

"Houston has to know everything, Dutch. You know that. We use the codes to make sure Houston is the first to hear, not INS or United Press."

"OK, so what are you going to tell Houston?"

"You're going to tell Houston. You found him."

I didn't like the sound of that. Houston, officially the Lyndon Baines Johnson Space Center, seems to think that since everyone on Earth can see where we live, and even what we're doing if he has a good telescope, we're all supposed to be on public display, with answers to every question and no personal privacy. If you're reporting a problem, they can grill you to death. They usually use an experienced astronaut as mission communicator, but anybody in the mission support rooms at Kennedy and Marshall, as well as Houston, can butt in if he wants. They get nervous if there's a problem. Somebody was going to have a heart attack about this.

"What'll I tell them, Sarge?"

"Tell them what you saw and what you did, and answer their questions. Then shut the hell up. But get something to eat first. You tired?"

"Not really tired, Sarge. Just a little wound up, maybe. It was bad enough being greeted by a corpse, but when I couldn't find the code key, well. . ."

"Yeah, I heard. You're sure? The last thing we need right now is a live RSS out there."

"Of course I'm sure. You think I'd miss something like that? Give me a break!"

"Sorry, Dutch. OK, go eat supper and get Jack. They may want to talk to him, too. Oh, and tell him not to say anything to anyone else. I want to keep this quiet until we talk to Houston."

I left the comm room and made my way back aft. When we decided to use the ETs as a space station, The manhole locations in the lox and hydrogen tanks were relocated so that an air lock could be bolted between them. Sometimes you have to wait for it to cycle before you get to the big living area in the hydrogen tank because someone's coming in from outside, but it's worth the trouble to be able to get to the cafeteria without going EVA. I still had my suit on, but EVA is EVA. I fell through the lock, made sure it was sealed again, and drifted past the lounge to the cafeteria. Their special was chicken and rice. We eat a lot of rice because it supposedly has most of the vitamins we need and it doesn't bulk much in storage. The water to fix it is free from the fuel cells. When the Minerva starts operating there's supposed to be a water shortage, but I don't believe it. The Minerva can use recycled waste water for reaction mass, and there's always a lot of waste water from cooking and bathing.

I really didn't have much of an appetite. The question about my being sure about the code key bothered me. Sarge knows me better than that. Of course, he might be jumpy about the dead guy; having me tell Houston about it was reasonable. But I've never known him to be jumpy about anything before. Something was really bothering him.

Sarge's real name is Bartholomew, but nobody calls him that to his face. His black father won two silver stars in the Marines in World War II and his mother was a Japanese war bride. He's got a half Vietnamese/half French wife and two daughters so beautiful it hurts.

He's also got four brothers and three sisters, all older than him, an MBA from Florida Tech and a Ph.D. in space facilities engineering from the Air Force Institute.

When he got out of the service as a chief master sergeant, he went to work for the launch support contractor, then switched to NASA and ended up as the crew chief for the unloading and retrieval crew, which Jack and I and a few other guys belong to. Somehow he managed to get the Air Force to order him to active duty up here for a few days and as a result he's the only enlisted veteran of any service authorized to wear astronaut's wings. He's proud of that. He still calls the service officers "sir" and treats them like royalty, but he's an OK guy as long as you do your job. I didn't like him thinking that I could possibly have left a live RSS on that tank.

NASA doesn't advertise this, although it's not exactly secret, but each space shuttle carries six high explosive bombs, collectively referred to as the range safety system, or RSS. There's one on each booster solid case, one on each of the booster lox tanks, and one each for the lox and hydrogen tanks of the ET. As bombs go, they aren't very big, but they're more than enough to blow the shuttle right out of the sky, just like Challenger. The Air Force won't let NASA launch a beer can without an RSS on it, although why a DOD agency should have veto power over a NASA launch has always been a mystery to me.

Ostensibly, the purpose of the RSS is to destroy any space vehicle that varies from its planned ascent trajectory and heads toward land. During every launch, a blue suit officer monitors the flight and is supposed to press a button which blows up the spacecraft, cargo, crew and all, if it goes astray. According to the Air Force, it's better for an errant spacecraft to land on Miami or someplace in lots of little pieces than one big one. They're probably right about that; each shuttle has as much energy as a small atomic bomb. But it seems to me that if they're worried about a spacecraft heading toward the US mainland, they could just have one of their tactical fighters following it to shoot it down if it starts heading west. Besides being a whopping big visual target, the shuttle has the radar cross section of a shopping mall and an exhaust temperature that would give a heat seeker missile an orgasm. With a target like that, no fighter pilot worth half his salt could possibly miss!

The digital code that arms and fires the RSS is programmed into the transmitter on the ground and the receivers on the ET and the boosters just before launch. The code is classified SECRET, but the booster codes are automatically declassified when the boosters impact so the DOD doesn't have to worry about classified hardware bobbing around unattended in international waters. On the other hand, the ET RSS is still armed, so anybody could blow up a shuttle, even in orbit, if he knew the right code and had a transmitter in the right place and was really trying. . .

Somebody was really trying!

We knew who they were, too; CASE, the Coalition Against Space Exploitation. They even warned us ahead of time. If we didn't stop polluting the universe and destroying the ozone, they told us, they'd stop us. They had an old cargo ship that flew the Libyan flag and habitually docked in Havana. We couldn't touch them without an international incident and maybe starting a war. They'd wait until we launched, and then they would fire up their powerful transmitter and use a computer to try all possible codes in hopes that they'd find the right one while the shuttle was still above the radio horizon.

Technically, of course, they were breaking international law, but our complaints to the UN Security Council fell on deaf ears. And it was our own fault. After all, we admitted, there really wasn't much chance of their finding the right code. The probability of actually doing any damage was substantially less than one in a million. They were really no more than a nuisance . . . really.

Even if they had somehow gotten the code after the flight, such as fishing a booster out of the ocean, it's not likely that they could detonate an RSS in orbit. For one thing, the receiver is probably not that sensitive, and for another, the Navy doesn't let anyone near those boosters until they're taken under tow by a US contractor. But an ET hanging there in space is damned impressive, and one with an armed bomb, two armed bombs, in fact, is definitely scary. So one of the first things we do to a new tank is remove the code key. Of course, we could unplug the batteries or set the inhibits or rotate the safe and arm device back to safe again, but the tank code is still classified. So we get the code key and give it back to the Air Force, which makes them happy and gets them off our back, and then we can take our time with the rest of the hardware. With the code key out, we know that CASE can't blow us to hell and gone.

But still they keep trying!

When Jack and I got back from lunch, Joyce Banner, our comm tech, was back in the comm room. Apparently they were expecting us. We were over Laos, not quite close enough for a direct link to the comm station at Kadena, so Joyce was nursing a tight microwave beam through TDRS to Houston and now and then sneaking wide-eyed looks at the three of us. We have a clear satellite downlink for PR purposes, but all the rest of our traffic is encrypted. Still, we don't broadcast to communist countries if we can avoid it; no code is uncrackable. Lieutenant Colonel George Grover was in the mission communicator seat. He was centered on the TV monitor, eating a cheese sandwich, drinking beer, and looking bored.

"Sir," Sarge began without preamble, "I'd appreciate it if you'd put on the headset for a moment."

The figure on the monitor picked up something from off camera and clipped it to the temple of his eyeglasses. He fiddled with it for a moment. "OK," he said. "We're private. What's up?"

"Endeavour brought up a dead guy in the intertank. He's still there. Dutch found him."

George put down his sandwich very carefully. "Say again," he said, very slowly and distinctly.

Sarge looked nervous. "When Dutch removed the intertank door, he found a body in the intertank. Tell him, Dutch."

George didn't say anything. I knew he was recording, so I wanted to get the words out just right. I stuck my face in front of the camera. "I went EVA while Endeavour was parking," I said, starting at the beginning. "The release was right on the button; zero delta on all six axes. I started over while she backed off and inspected the tank according to procedure. Everything was nominal. I docked the babyseat at the intertank door and removed it, according to procedure, and replaced it with the garage door. I didn't really look inside until I got the garage door secured. Even then I didn't see him at first. He was just about at minus Y on the 1082 ring frame. I think his right foot is wedged between the frame and the hydrogen tank dome. He's got some kind of tan blanket or poncho on that's the same color as the dome insulation. I wouldn't have seen him if the blanket hadn't moved. I think it must have been stretched or something. It was floating around the body. That's how I spotted it. It scared hell. . . ah, I was momentarily startled when I first discovered it"

"Did anyone else confirm this, ah, observation?" I didn't know who was off camera listening, but George wasn't giving anything away. He looked serious, though. That's a bad sign.

"Yeah. Jack Metsinger had the stationkeeper detail. I called him over and he definitely saw him. We talked about it for a few minutes. Sarge was listening. He knows what we said."

"Is that correct, Mister Simmons?"

"Yessir! I monitor the crew channel, so I knew about it as soon as Dutch told Jack. Dutch reported to me as soon as he came back in, but he didn't tell me anything I didn't already know. I told him to make sure Jack didn't say anything to anyone about it until we had talked to you." He looked at us as we vigorously shook our heads, a dumb thing to do in micro gee right after dinner. "They haven't mentioned it to anyone. You're the only one who knows about it besides Dutch, Jack and me. And Joyce, of course. I thought she should know about it before we called you."

"Well, I'll pass it along," George said with enforced casualness. "Anything else?"

"There was no code key in the IRD," Sarge said.

"Sorry, I didn't catch that." That's astronaut talk for "You're shitting me, Buster!"

"There was no code key in the IRD." I figured it would help if I repeated it.

"That's, ah, interesting." George was really sweating now. Apparently he had a boy scout troop or some space campers behind the glass. I could imagine what would happen if they got the story before NASA Headquarters did. No, on second thought, I probably couldn't imagine.

"I'd like to talk to you about this later," George said. "Will you be around?"

"Yessir!" Would we be around, indeed! We were going to be squeezed dry, rinsed and washed out all over again before they were going to let us get any rest. As soon as we signed off, George was going to call the mission director who would call the Deputy for Manned Space Flight, who would probably call the Administrator, who would call. . . Oh, hell, Houston was going to go absolutely bananas! And not just about the dead guy, either. That missing code key was classified hardware. The DOD would throw a fit about that. And George was still technically active Air Force. . .

"OK," George said as he reached for the cutoff switch. "I'll catch you later. Have a nice day."

Hah!

Sarge let us go back to our quarters but told us he would probably call us again before lights out. Actually, they really don't turn out all the lights; just the hall lights for eight hours and even then they keep the red ready lights on. This is supposed to give us some semblance of day and night so we don't get our biorhythms all fouled up. Officially, the Station keeps Zulu time (coordinated universal time to us civilians) as a concession to the astronomers and a compromise with the rest of the world, but ET 109 where I live, as well as most of the American administrative offices, keeps Houston time. The other outer tanks are each offset by four hours, so everyone can get a decent night's sleep and still run a 24-hour a day schedule for the Station as a whole. The core tank is mostly laboratories; they stay on Zulu time continuously, with big digital clocks counting out bright red seconds everywhere the scientists can possibly put them.

I was relaxing, watching the latest TASS report on the Mars mission on TV in the lounge when Sarge beeped me. For some reason, some people think it's unpatriotic to be interested in what the Russians are doing. It's entirely legal, of course, but any US broadcast station that carries TASS's English programs, even heavily edited, can expect to lose a substantial portion of their advertising income, so they don't do it. All of us up here watch TASS live from Moscow or from one of the USSR comm satellites and root for the Russians, now two years on Mars and counting. Those five little ladies have all the guts there are in their lonely world!

I made my way forward to the comm room. The place was lit up like Christmas, with a different face on each monitor. Apparently we were going to get the full treatment. There were two Air Force officers, a major and a colonel, as well as the Administrator, the DMSF, George, and Ollie Shriver, the commander of the Endeavour, still riding a klick behind us. There was another guy in civilian clothes that I didn't know. On our side was the Station commander; Mike Jackson; Sarge; Doc Subramanian, our resident surgeon, and Joyce; as well as Jack and me. Apparently Mike didn't want to let any other radio operator in on our secret yet; Joyce was supposed to be off duty.

"All right," the Administrator began,"let's hear it from the beginning. Mister Offenbach, I understand you found the body. They call you 'Dutch,' don't they?"

"Yes, sir. My friends do, anyway."

"OK, Dutch. What happened?"

"Well, I pretty much told Colonel Grover everything. I saw the body after I attached the garage door. I figured we shouldn't mess with it without checking with Sarge, ah, Mister Simmons, and anyway we were getting close to yellow on air, so we came back and I told Mister Simmons about it. But he already knew. I don't think I have much to add." Funny how the dead guy had become "the body" all of a sudden.

"Mister Metsinger?"

"I had the stationkeeper detail and was covering Dutch until he got the door on. I was about to go back to the crossbeam to activate the 'keeper when Dutch said there was a dead guy in the intertank. I looked in and saw him, just like Dutch told Geo. . . ah, Colonel Grover. I wanted to get him out, but Dutch pointed out that he still had to get the code key out of the IRD and I still had to check out the 'keeper, so we left him there, like Dutch said. I verified the attachment of the 'keeper to the crossbeam and started the diagnostic program. Dutch got to the garage ahead of me because I was still running the diagnostic. I finished the checkout, armed the 'keeper, and came in about ten minutes later. Dutch caught me in the hydrogen tank tunnel and told me Sarge didn't want us to talk to anybody but him, so I got a sandwich and then went up to the comm room. I was there when Sarge called Colonel Grover."

"You didn't do anything else?"

"Well, sir, I, stopped to take a. . . ah, use the WCS."

The Administrator grinned momentarily. The WCS, or waste containment system, is NASA-ese for "toilet."

"What about the code key?"

It was my turn again. "There wasn't any, sir. The IRD cover was on, but there wasn't any code key in it. I checked very carefully. The code key just wasn't installed." I didn't want them asking me if I was sure again. Of course I was sure!"

"Major?" Apparently the Administrator and the major were in different rooms. Both of them were still looking into the cameras above the monitors.

"Sir, I installed the key in the IRD according to procedure number. . ."

"We know the procedure, major. Just tell it the way it happened."

"Yessir." The major looked worried. "I installed the key in the IRD and locked the access door. I remained inside the intertank while the technician installed the cover. I verified that the cover was installed and watched while the technician torqued the bolts and the supervisor noted the torque wrench readings. I then stepped out of the door and observed the closeout crew remove the last of the intertank access pads. I left the platform to make way for the flight door closeout crew to bring up the flight door and went back down to the truck. I rode back to the firing room with the closeout crew."

"So one of the closeout crew could have removed the code key and left the platform after you did."

"No sir. I verified that the inhibits were in place at T minus 50 minutes and monitored the RSS arm and fire command tests. Both tests were nominal. I also monitored the safe and arm tests and removal of the inhibits at T minus 10 seconds. The arm and fire command tests would have failed if the code key was not in place."

"So the dead man had to have removed the code key. Could he have done that after you conducted the arm and fire tests?"

"Yes, sir. The only tests after that involve the distributor and the safe and arm device. We could have launched without the code key in place."

The colonel started to say something but the Administrator interrupted him. "But he would have had to have done so after T minus 50 minutes."

"Uh, yes, sir."

"That doesn't seem very likely, does it, major? The intertank is purged with nitrogen during cryo load. He would have died long before T minus 50 if he'd breathed only nitrogen."

The major looked like he was about to say something, then changed his mind. "Uh, no, sir. It doesn't seem very likely. But the code key was in place at T minus 50."

"Colonel, you were about to say something."

The colonel was a little more composed. Either he had more experience under fire or else he wasn't in the hot seat. Probably both. "I was just going to point out, sir, that the tapes verify the major's statement. The test arm and fire commands were transmitted, received and correctly decoded. The code key was definitely in place at T minus 50, as was the intertank flight door. The dead man must have removed it and replaced the cover after that time. He would have had to have self contained breathing apparatus, of course. It could have been done. I would very much like to know if any such apparatus is found in the intertank."

"I'll check personally, sir," Sarge volunteered. "If it's there, we'll find it."

"I suggest you find the code key also," the colonel added. "It still has to be somewhere in the intertank. That's classified hardware, Mister Simmons!"

"You're on this conference to answer questions, Colonel Richardson," the Administrator snapped back. "Make suggestions to your own people. We have a very competent unloading crew. Snide remarks won't make them do their job any better!"

". . . And I personally don't like it!" he added.

"Sorry, sir." The colonel looked genuinely sorry. "I'd just like to close the paper on the key as soon as I can. We'll all be busy with this other, ah, matter"

"Which brings us to the pivotal question," the Administrator interrupted. "Why was the code key removed? We all know about CASE. If the dead man knew or suspected something which made him so concerned about compromise that he risked his life in the first place, he ought to have known or found out that disabling the ET RSS wouldn't have saved the Endeavour. The boosters had the same code, and both of their keys have been recovered. If CASE had somehow acquired the code, they would have been able to detonate either the ET or the boosters or both. Removing only the ET code key doesn't seem to me to make any sense. Any comments? Mister Simmons?"

"I'm sorry, sir, but I can't agree with you. There is always the possibility that CASE could wait and try to detonate the ET RSS after separation. They might have waited until after booster separation, or they might have waited until we recovered the ET and tried to destroy the Station. I admit the probability that the signal would be received and successfully decoded at orbital altitude is small, but who knows how fanatics think?"

"I see your point. But what they wanted to do, or at least claimed they wanted to do, was to keep us from orbiting the Minerva. If they destroyed the ET in orbit, there's a fair chance that they'd take out the Minerva. It would be an absolute certainty between booster separation and loss of signal at the radio horizon. If that happened, there is no way whatever to prevent dispersal of the plutonium oxide core into the atmosphere. Besides being an unprecedented act of international terrorism, which would completely destroy their credibility, that would achieve precisely the result CASE appears to want to avoid. No, I can't buy that, Mister Simmons No fanatic with the technical expertise these people have is that stupid. Besides, as you pointed out, they would be taking a big chance that the noise level would be too high for the receiver to lock onto their signal, or that the explosion would be too far away from the Station to have any effect, for that matter. No, the way I see it, this was the work of one man who somehow managed to remain in the intertank to remove one code key, which achieved absolutely no purpose. Do you still disagree?"

Sarge hesitated just a moment. "No, sir. I see your point about the Minerva. Assuming for the sake of argument that the code was compromised, CASE would have had ample opportunity before booster separation. That would have at least dropped the Minerva into the ocean. Detonating the boosters in view of the launch site would also have been much more spectacular. Removing only the ET key wouldn't have made any difference at all."

"So." The Administrator seemed to have satisfied himself on one point at least. "Now we come to the dead man. Greg, are any of your people missing?"

The civilian seemed to wilt a little. "I, ah, I don't exactly know, sir."

"Would you care to amplify that remark?" The Administrator's stare was icy.

"Sir, all of the intertank closeout crew signed out at the launch complex. All crew time cards were punched at the end of the shift and each crew member exchanged launch complex access passes at the VAB. The computer records for the exit gate show that each of the crew passed through the gate. . ."

"You mean that each man's badge passed through the gate!"

"Uh, well, sir, two of the crew were women. . ."

"I stand corrected. What I meant to say, of course, was that the computer recorded that each crewmember's badge was inserted into the card reader at the gate. You do admit the possibility that one member of the crew, male or female, could have forged another crewmember's signature, exchanged his or her pass, punched his or her time card in addition to his or her own and then inserted the missing crewmember's badge, in addition to his or her own, into the card reader at the exit gate after he, himself or she, herself, exited. That is possible, is it not?"

"Yes, sir, it's possible. Not likely, but possible."

"You do admit, then, the possibility. Now, then, Mister, I ask you again. Are any of your people missing?"

"Sir, two members of the closeout crew, Bill. . ."

"No names, Greg. I don't want to prejudice the investigation. Just answer the question, yes or no!"

"I'm sorry, sir. I don't know."

"Well, then, just what do you know, Mister?"

The civilian seemed to be trying to speak a language he wasn't very good at. "Sir, five members of the closeout crew were scheduled for vacation. As you know, we work them pretty hard up to the launch. It's not unusual for them to leave for vacation after their last shift. I have verified that all but two of the crew, including three who are on vacation, are either at home or somewhere else where we can get in touch with them. I have cancelled the vacations of the three and they will be available for questioning whenever you wish. The remaining two, ah, individuals are supposedly enroute to a hunting lodge in Ontario. Since they are driving a private automobile, I have not been able to verify that they are, in fact, headed toward Canada. I have personally spoken to both, ah, spouses and have been assured that they will be told to report back to me personally as soon as they are located, and to return here as soon as humanly possible."

The Administrator was silent for a moment. "Dave, I want the FBI to look for the descriptions and licenses of any vehicle those two could possibly be driving. Check the rental car agencies around Kennedy as well, just in case they rented one. Have them stopped and detained. Arrest them if we have to; I don't care what the charge is. I also want every hotel they could possibly be staying at, and every campsite for that matter, to be on the lookout for anybody with their names or matching their descriptions. And I want a learjet ready to pick them up wherever they might be and get them back here on the double. Here, Dave, not Kennedy. I also want their families kept under surveillance. If any of them decides to visit a sick relative or suddenly has the urge to take an unscheduled trip, I want to know about it; where they're going, who they see, and what they're doing. Can you think of anything else?"

"I don't think so," the DMSF replied. "The Bureau isn't going to like us telling them how to do their job, though."

"I don't care what the Bureau likes, Dave. I want it in an interagency memo, black and white. I'll clear it with the President tomorrow. But I want this to get moving now, and I don't want the Bureau to have any doubt whatever concerning exactly what we want. Otherwise they'll use their own judgement about what is and is not feasible with their limited manpower. I don't want excuses, Dave. I want those two found!

"Yes, sir. It'll be done."

"Good. Now that that's settled, Ollie, do you have anything to add?"

The shuttle commander was surrounded by faces peeking from behind him. Apparently everybody was trying to get a good view of the single monitor. "I still have the Minerva, sir. If we slip more than two days, the Resnik won't be able to launch on schedule."

"I'm not going to slip your schedule, Ollie. Mister Simmons, are you going to have any difficulty unloading the body?"

Sarge had been watching the exchange with somewhat embarrassed interest. "No, sir. Not if Commander Subramanian helps us. Frankly, I don't know how to move a corpse, what to grab hold of, that sort of thing. But if he can help us, I think we can maintain schedule."

"Doctor?"

I felt sorry for him. Doc Subramanian is probably one of the best all around Navy flight surgeons in the business. Like all of us up here, he's certified for EVA, but he doesn't like it. He doesn't like to admit it, but he's an agoraphobe. He loves to fly, but space scares him.

"Certainly. It shouldn't be too difficult. We can put the cadaver in a cargo bag and bring it back to. . . ah, I don't think the crew will want it in the dispensary."

"You won't put him in the dispensary, Doctor. We'll want that body down here for autopsy. Ollie, can you put him in the cargo bay?"

"Sure. We'll seal the bag and bring him back vacuum packed. No sweat."

"Well, that's settled. Mike, do you have anything to add?"

"No, sir. We'll get the Minerva unloaded on time. If we find the SCBA the colonel mentioned before the Endeavour leaves, do you want that?"

"Only if it doesn't slip the schedule. Your people can perform any tests we need on it, can't you?"

"Sure. No problem."

"All right. Have we overlooked anything? George?"

"Not that I know of, sir."

"If anyone else can think of something, speak up."

Nobody spoke.

"All right. I needn't warn you to keep this to yourselves. We aren't going to want to go public with this at all if we can help it, but definitely not until we positively identify the dead man and determine how and why he got left in the tank. This had to involve a number of people, and some of them might not know just what we found. I'd like to keep it that way. Somebody might let slip something he shouldn't know, and I don't want him to be able to claim later that he read it in the newspapers. Greg, how much have you told your people?"

"Not much, sir. I told the people I called that I just wanted to congratulate them on launching the Minerva. The families of the missing men know I'm looking for them, of course. They don't speak very. . . ah, they don't know why, but they know it's important. I had to make that clear."

"Well, that can't be helped, I suppose. Mike, can you keep this a secret at your end?"

The Station commander thought for a moment. "Somebody may question why we're taking cargo out of the intertank and putting it back in the orbiter. I suppose I can either make sure no one sees or make up some kind of story. Then there's the lab. Somebody's going to notice if we have a non-flight SCBA up here. I'll have to tell them what they're looking at and why, but that won't involve more than two or three people. Yeah, I can keep it quiet."

"Good. Well, does anyone have anything else?"

"I have a request, sir." Sarge seemed a little more nervous than before.

"Yes, Mister Simmons. What is it?"

"Sir, I'd like to know what killed the man, whether it was lack of air or something else."

"Any particular reason?"

"No, sir. It's just, well, I started to work as a launch crewmember. They're kind of like family. I'd like to know how this man died."

"I suppose that's not unreasonable. All right, I'll have a report of the autopsy sent up as soon as we get it. And anything else we find. Well, if no one has anything else, I'll let you all get back to work. I envy you guys up there; we're not going to get much sleep the next few days."

I was proud of Joyce. We'd changed TDRS coverage to a ground station and back to another TDRS during the conversation and hadn't even noticed. That takes talent. I made a mental note to tell her so next chance I got.

We all filed out of the comm room, glad that we hadn't got the grilling that we had expected. I drifted back to the lounge, but the TASS anchor lady was talking about some kind of problems the Libyans were having with the Vietnamese, or vice versa, so I lost interest. I got a sleeping pill from Doc and went to bed. I didn't want to dream about that dead guy.

The next day Jack and Doc and I were detailed to unload the tank. The second and third shifts had already gotten the nose cap off and had attached the big propellant suckers to the tumble valve fitting on the lox tank and the recirculation line on the hydrogen tank. The reaction motors on the suckers keep the tank stationary so we can unload the intertank cargo without overriding the feeble thrusters and having the whole tank wandering all over the sky. They had to wait for us to unload before they started rotating the tank to let the lox and hydrogen that was still in the tanks slosh to the ends so they could pump out the liquid instead of gas.

The tumble valve used to be a little jet nozzle that used residual oxygen gas to rotate the tank to make sure it broke up when it hit the atmosphere and landed in the Indian Ocean without skipping off into space again and maybe hitting India on the second try. But they found out later that the tank reentered just fine without the tumble valve. Even if it did skip a little, the potential energy it gained in the skip cost so much kinetic energy that it dropped like a stone afterward, right where they wanted it in the first place. Then when they didn't want the tank to reenter at all, they eliminated the little nozzle on the outside and the big, heavy pipe that fed it on the inside. But the boss and the valve are still there, with a quick disconnect that mates with the lox sucker. We get a couple metric tons of propellant each trip that way. We use it for the fuel cells, the boost reaction motors, and fuel for the Resnik and the McAuliffe, the two modified orbiters that are going to the moon.

The guys manning the suckers helped us unload, with me inside the intertank, blocking the view through the door into the dark interior. I passed out the stuff inside to the guys outside, who took it back to the Station.

The orbiter is strictly limited to 25 metric tons of payload, because it has to be able to land at one of the contingency sites in an emergency and the wings and landing gear can't take more than that. The Resnik and McAuliffe don't count, of course, because they can't land anyway, at least not on Earth. But with the new tanks and boosters, we can actually put 37 tons of cargo into orbit, no sweat, so twelve thousand kilograms can be put in the intertank. About two thousand of that is cryogenic nitrogen, but still, ten metric tons is a lot of stuff, mostly furnishings to make the inside of the tank livable. This time, we found that a hundred kilograms or so was literally dead weight.

What we didn't find was the code key!

We got Doc into a suit and called him "Jim," Jim being one of the two techs who were going to examine the SCBA, if and when we found it. With his sun visor down, no one except us and Jim knew he was Doc. I wondered what would happen if somebody got sick or hurt while he was outside, but no one did and it was his and Mike's worry, anyway. Doc did just fine; everybody's a little clumsy when he's handling heavy cargo. I could tell he was scared, but he never said anything about it. He did a real good job getting the dead guy into the cargo bag. I had stopped thinking of the guy as a body and started thinking of him as a person again, a person who had sacrificed his life, presumably to remove the missing RSS code key.

Why?

Sarge kept the rest of the crew busy so that when we finally did get the dead guy out, everyone else was headed back to the Station. Ollie came over on some pretext or other, so there would be a reason for someone to go back to the Endeavour from the tank. If anybody noticed an extra cargo bag going back with him I didn't hear about it, and neither did Sarge. So far, it seemed, nobody knew about the dead guy except those with a need to know.

The last item out of the intertank was something I hadn't seen before, although I should have known it was there. Sarge found it. The colonel had been right. The SCBA we were looking for was an ordinary airpack, the kind that's placed conveniently inside big fiberglass cabinets just about everywhere you can think of on the launch pad to provide emergency breathing air if there's a toxic leak or spill. The mask had been modified to let in some of the outside air, which meant that the tanks were probably filled with oxygen. That figured. Oxygen would have extended the time it could be used by a factor of five, definitely enough time. It was fastened at the intersection of one of the frame stabilizer straps and the lower main ring frame with several meters of plain, ordinary duct tape. Whoever had done the job had known what he was doing; the ring frame had supported it adequately in flight, and the frame stabilizer had kept it from flopping around. If the dead guy had been inside a pressure suit, that much oxygen might have been enough to sustain him all the way up to orbit, assuming he could have stood the vibration. He could easily have stayed in the intertank long enough to remove the code key. Sarge wouldn't talk about it or even let me touch it. He just stuffed it into a cargo bag and took it back to the Station and down to the lab by himself. It seemed to bother him even more than the dead guy. I decided it was best if I didn't ask why. I was still searching for the code key when he called me back to help the shuttle unloading crew.

We got the Minerva out of the Endeavour and sweat blood before we got it docked on the core tank. After we got it secured we all breathed a sigh of relief. Even at this altitude, there's still a trace of air, and the Station is fairly draggy, big as it is. We had been boosting it back into orbit every couple of months or so with the orbital transfer vehicles that we brought up early on to move things to geosynchronous orbit and back. But we had to kluge the connections between the vehicles and the Station and everyone knew that if we ran out of extra propellant and there was an extended launch interruption (not likely any more, but possible, nonetheless) there was a possibility that we could lose the Station, just like we had lost Skylab.

This time, though, there would be people aboard! The emergency escape module is an Apollo reentry vehicle clone and only holds three.

Besides, every pound of propellant we used to boost the Station was that much less we could use for transorbital injection, and that was so precisely scheduled now that not having enough propellant would be a major disaster. Now that we had the Minerva, we could boost the Station any time we wanted, using water as the reaction mass. Fortunately, we always have plenty of water.

We finally had a fully operational Station!

The next few days went by fairly quickly, in spite of the constant interruptions from Houston for information that we didn't have and couldn't really be expected to get. They wanted to know anything about everything concerning the dead guy, insisting that we repeat everything to everybody, and asserting positively that we ought to be able to explain everything they wanted to know even if there wasn't any possibility of our finding it out.

The new tank was pumped down until we couldn't get any more liquid out of it, and then we burned five kilograms of hydrogen in the lox tank and dumped the rest. It seems a shame to throw it away like that, but that much hydrogen gas isn't worth compressing, so we just vent it to space, except for the little bit that we vent into the lox tank and burn, which produces hot oxygen and water vapor. The igniter for the burner is already installed in the lox pressurization line, but the last section of crossfeed line is disconnected to eliminate any possibility of premature leaks. We just have to connect it up, monitor the pressure on the line and read the time from a precalculated chart. When the time's up, the lox tank is full of hot oxygen and water vapor. Then we remove the aft access cover on the hydrogen tank and put in most of the cargo that was carried up in the intertank. A lot of the brackets and decks and things are already inside both tanks, anything that can be put in there during manufacture that isn't going to get ruined by cryogenic temperatures. The stuff we put in is cargo that can stand vacuum but not the cold. What can't take vacuum is brought up in big plastic bags with dry nitrogen in them. We have to wait to install those until we can work in the tank without pressure suits.

We can usually pump the liquid out of the lox tank until the pressure inside is a little above a quarter atmosphere, all gas. Part of the intertank cargo is a toroidal tank containing eighteen hundred kilograms of liquid nitrogen, with a line already hooked up to a valve in the lox tank helium inject line. After we burn the hydrogen, we add the nitrogen. It vaporizes and mixes with the hot oxygen, cooling it to standard temperature and pressurizing both tanks to sea level. When the pressure stabilizes, we have one atmosphere of brand new air in both tanks. Then we put an air lock on the hydrogen tank aft dome and start bringing in the furniture.

With all the work outfitting the new tank, I was almost able to forget about the dead guy when we weren't discussing him with Houston. Since the whole thing was still a secret, even Jack and I didn't talk about it, outside the comm room, and of course, neither did Sarge. But at night I'd somehow see that guy, whoever he was, working alone in the dark, removing the IRD cover by feel, taking out the code key and then blindly replacing the cover. Then he'd sit back down on the ring frame waiting for his airpack to run out, there in the cold and the dark, with the deadly purge gas hissing out around him and the tons of cold, cold lox above him, just sitting there in the dark, waiting patiently to die, now that he had done what he had stayed there to do.

I had just finished shaving one morning when my beeper informed me that Mike wanted me in his office. Because he's the Station commander, he rates a office with real carpet all over and a viewport, just off the lox tunnel in the barrel section. It's got a desk, a voice-activated computer and a huge, 40-inch monitor that serves as the computer display and TV screen. No chairs, of course. Nobody needs a chair in space. The vertical wall makes it one of the few offices in the lox tank that's suitable for conferences; that's why he's got it. Even so, it was crowded this morning. Sarge and Jack were there and so was Doc. Apparently they had been waiting for me. Mike was grim.

"Before I begin," he began anyway, "I want you to know that I have been strongly advised, and I emphasize the word 'strongly,' to speak to each of you individually and privately. I'm supposed to conduct a personal investigation, and that's not supposed to be done with each of the witnesses hearing what the other has to say. But I don't do things that way, not with people I trust, and I'm letting you guys know this up front so you know that I trust you and don't intend to let that trust be poisoned by treating you like bunch of criminals. Is that clear?"

In spite of being weightless, we all nodded our heads. It was clear, all right!

"All right, then. As you have probably already guessed, this is about the corpse the Endeavour brought up. I want to know if any of you removed anything; anything at all, from that body!"

We all looked at each other, but no one said anything.

"Dutch? You found him. Did you perhaps move him to get to the IRD?"

"No sir. He was back far enough that I didn't have to. I didn't touch him and neither did Jack."

"Is that right, Jack?"

"Yes. I wanted to get him out, but Dutch didn't. We didn't touch him at all."

"Sarge?"

"I held the cargo bag while Doc pushed him in. I may have touched him, but I didn't remove anything. There might have been some lint or something on the blanket he was wearing, but my suit was clean. It couldn't have been much."

"Doc?"

"I found traces of fecal matter on the sleeve of my suit. I didn't think it was important, Mike. I just wiped it off."

"That's OK, Doc. That's not what I'm talking about. OK, so none of you removed anything. Just for the record, did any of you put anything in the dead man's pocket. His right side pants pocket, to be exact."

We all looked at each other again. No joy.

"All right then. That's that." He seemed to relax a little. "Now that I've officially finished my investigation, you guys are probably wondering what this is all about. To be frank, so am I. It seems that there's been an unexpected development. We're fairly sure that the guy removed the code key, right?"

We all carefully nodded in unison.

"Right. Well, it seems that the guy had the code key in his pocket. No surprises there, since it wasn't found in the intertank, except the key in his pocket has the wrong code. . ."

Sarge jumped like a scalded dog! I had to grab him to keep him from banging his head on the bulkhead."

"Yes, Sarge. You see my point. Somehow the codes got switched and this guy removed the key. The range safety officer swears that he matched the codes before he inserted the keys in the boosters and the tank. The boosters check out, and so did the arm and fire tests on the tank. The Air Force is having cat fits! Not only has their code been compromised, somebody got hold of an operational key before the flight!"

"Holy Mother of God!"

"You got it, Jack. If CASE had gotten that missing key, they would have blown the boosters. Endeavour would be at the bottom of the Atlantic right now, and the Minerva with it. Without the Minerva, we couldn't have been sure of boosting the Station without hoarding propellant, and without the propellant, Resnik and McAuliffe would have been grounded, probably forever! You all remember what happened after Challenger. With that kind of embarrassment again, NASA might just have gone out of business! We might never have gotten to the moon, ever!"

I felt the hair on the back of my neck prickle as tiny cold slimy things ran up and down my spine. "But Mike, if that guy had a put in a different code, one that CASE knew about. . ." I couldn't finish the thought.

Mike just stared at me and I knew I was right!

"I think we all ought to very sincerely thank God he didn't do that, Dutch! They knew! The bastards transmitted the same arm code and fire codes fifty three times! It matches the dead man's key exactly!"

"I don't believe it!"

"You'd better goddamned well believe it, Doc, because it's damned well true! The shit has definitely hit the fan and we're all in the middle of it. The Air Force is screaming at NASA for compromising the real key; NASA is blaming the Bureau for not checking out the launch support people, launch support is blaming the Navy for not doing something about CASE, and the Navy is bitching at the Air Force for ever requiring an RSS in the first place! Everybody blames everybody else and nobody trusts anybody! Hell, I'm not even supposed to be talking to you because you're Navy and I'm ex-Air Force! So is Sarge! It's a mess, Doc; a god-double-damned pluperfect mess! You remember those two launch support guys who were reportedly going to Canada? Well, one of them was the guy in the tank. And guess what, Doc? The other guy, the one who was supposedly with him on this alleged trip? He was found face down in the Banana River with a bullet hole in his head! Right at the base of the skull, Doc! Close range! Powder burns and everything! And do you know what else, Doc? Both of these guys just happen to have had Vietnamese wives! Not just American Vietnamese, Doc, Vietnamese Vietnamese. Citizens of a communist government! Guess who's suspect now, Doc? Everybody who has a Vietnamese. . ."

Mike stopped like he'd been switched off. Everybody was looking at Sarge.

"I'm sorry, Sarge. I didn't mean. . ."

"That's all right, sir. I understand. This wouldn't be the first time my wife and I were under suspicion. I would like to have a word with you about it, though."

"Of course. You heard the man, guys. That's it. Keep this under your hats; the newspapers still haven't got this. We don't want them to get it from us!"

We filed out.

Everybody wanted to be EVA to greet the Resnik when she arrived, but we didn't have nearly enough suits, so we finally drew straws, actually broken bits of fiber optic cable. I was one of the ones that lost, along with Sarge, so we sat in the comm room and watched the whole program on the monitors. The launch was planned for Saturday at 1400 Kennedy time to get maximum PR value. The US and Europe got to hear all the technical stuff and watch the countdown, witness the launch, and then hear all about it again afterward from the commentators, with everyone home from work and nobody missing church. The Europeans could watch the whole thing by staying up late if they cared. The Japanese, Chinese and Koreans got to watch it early Monday morning, with their own people doing the recapping and native language commentary afterward. We also beamed the program to Mars, just to show the Russians we were still in the game. I knew they were watching. Once you get off Earth, national differences seem pretty small. They were probably as proud of us as we were of them, sitting in their lonely cabin so far away. I think all of us who work in space grew closer the moment the Resnik lifted off.

God, she was beautiful!

The Resnik and McAuliffe were not only the pride of American technology, they were professional works of art. NASA had donated three hundred kilograms of cargo capacity to paint the modified ET in its original color; basic virgin white with the American Flag, mission patch and NASA emblem. Neither spacecraft had wings, of course, but each was equipped with a modified vertical fin that could be twisted and tilted to act as a solar panel, a heat radiator, or a heat absorber. It's sparkling solar cells glittered with reflected solar thermonuclear fire like a billion flawless blue-white diamonds.

The orbiter itself had a micron-thick coating of pure gold to prevent atomic oxidation while in LEO and cut down unwanted radiative heat transfer on the moon. The underlying aluminum skin had been lovingly polished to absolute perfection, making the whole ship shimmer in the afternoon sun, a masterpiece of the jeweler's art. It was a memorial, to be erected on a pillar of towering flame by the human race in memory of those of our species whose spirits had pioneered this journey.

It seemed to me like a fitting lapel pin for Almighty God!

No one was surprised that the normally cheering crowd of spectators was absolutely silent, making the exhaust rumble that much louder as the ship majestically lifted off and disappeared from earthly view, climbing at last to her home in heaven.

We saw her in the monitor's telescope at 19:46:34 Zulu - somebody marked the exact time - just after midnight below in the south Indian Ocean. One moment there was the just the blackness of space, then suddenly Orion's belt had a new star. During the next half hour she maneuvered gently into her parking orbit, a kilometer closer to Africa than we were, following along rock-steady as the unloading crew jetted over like hungry bees. There wasn't much to unload; most of what had been the cargo bay had been converted to the quarters the first landing crew would live in on the moon. But none of our guys had seen her completely assembled before, and, well, you just had to be there to understand how we all felt.

When the crew came over, we had a big party in the cafeteria with champaign and everything. Julie Bernstein, one of the mission specialists, brought four bottles up in her personal pack. We're strictly forbidden to have alcohol on board the Station, but Mike said what the hell and opened each of them with a big flourish, with one of the cooks standing by with a towel to keep it from spewing all over, and gave us each a teensy bit so there would be enough to go around. He gave Julie a big hug for bringing it up, which created an interesting exercise in the orbital mechanics of weightless hugging, since Mike masses about twice as much as Julie and both of them had been in motion to begin with.

The only note of discord was CASE. We had picked them up just after we acquired the tracking station at Bermuda. They were still down there with their illegal transmitter, smack on 416.5 megahertz, trying out one RSS code after another, regular as clockwork, deedledeedledeedle, deedledeedledeedle. . .

The only reason I heard it at all was because I had to pass close to the comm room to get the corkscrew Mike had asked me to get from his office. (Now how did he know he was going to need that up here?) I wondered who would be listening, so I peeked in.

It was Sarge, looking thoughtful and far away. I knew something was wrong.

"Why not come and join the party, Sarge," I asked, not knowing what else to say. "Everybody's having a great time."

"So am I, Dutch. So am I"

"Listening to CASE? You'd rather listen to somebody trying to blow up the Resnik than celebrate the launch?"

"They're not trying to blow up the Resnik, Dutch. They just think they are."

"I don't follow you."

"You aren't unloading the Resnik, are you?"

"No."

"Who is? Jack?"

"No, Jack's at the party."

"Who, then? Specifically, who got the code key?"

"Give me some credit, Sarge; you're the crew chief. You aren't going to tell me nobody got the code key, that's. . ."

"Nobody got the code key. It ain't there, Dutch. Neither is the IRD, or the batteries. Or the goddamn RSS box! Or those fucking shaped charges! The Resnik doesn't have an RSS. Nobody is ever going to make us put a bomb on a manned spacecraft again, Dutch, never ever! And we owe it all to one man, Dutch, A very brave man; a real American. His name is Cyrus McGetchin, and he's the bravest man there ever was!"

He leaned back on nothing, his velcro socks still stuck to the floor, hands behind his head. "Let me tell you a story, Dutch. I just learned the whole thing this afternoon, even though I was a part of it, sort of. The first part, anyway. The last part was in his will. It's a story about honor, Dutch, about doing what you believe in, no matter what. . ."

They'd talked to Sarge just after he'd gone to work with the launch support crew. They figured he was a prime candidate for betrayal. They were supposedly horrified to think how his mother had nearly been wiped out by the first atom bomb, how perhaps even he had been forever cursed with defective, radiation-mutilated genes. They pointed out how his father's race had been humiliated and exploited for hundreds of years, to be sent out like cannon fodder to feed the military-industrial machine of the white man's wars. They spun elaborate fantasies about how his mother-in-law had been disgraced, shamefully used and cast aside as a mere toy to satisfy the lust of some irresponsible whitey, how his wife had been forced to endure the shame and humiliation of the biracial child. They appealed to his sense of destiny, to the dignity of the black man whose heritage had been stolen by the same unfeeling and uncaring powers that were even now destroying his homeland and the environment of his world. He would be protected, they said. No one would know. All he'd have to do was a very small thing, a simple act they couldn't describe to someone who had not yet fully committed himself to the glory of their noble cause. There were others, they said, who would help him do it, or he would help them.

He told them to go screw themselves!

He also told his boss about being approached by CASE, about their claim that they had infiltrated the launch support crew, but the official word was don't rock the boat. So then he talked to the FBI, which got everybody on the launch crew investigated except him. He got fired.

But he didn't stop there.

As soon as he went to work for NASA, Sarge had a long talk with their security. Yes, they knew about CASE, but there was very little they could do about it. Their sources were anonymous; because of the Privacy Act, they couldn't take action against an individual based upon information provided by an informant who did not agree to be identified. And the Air Force has assured the President himself that the RSS code was safe, that no matter how long CASE tried, they could never, ever, bring down a space shuttle by detonating the RSS.

So Sarge had recorded CASE's transmissions. Every time the Station was overhead, he had tuned to their frequency, taping each transmission, documenting each arm and fire code. And he had sent the tapes to the Air Force with a request to check to see if CASE had ever transmitted any operational codes, if they might possibly have ever been able to destroy a spacecraft in flight.

The Air Force responded by destroying the tapes, recalling him to active duty, right there at the Station, and giving him a direct and lawful order to shut up. They had warned him about his duty to obey orders dealing with national security even after he was discharged, and assured him that this was most definitely a matter of national security.

Sarge had continued to tape the transmissions, only this time he'd kept the tapes, waiting for the right moment to make them known.

And CASE had found two men whose wives were related to people still in Vietnam, old people, helpless people, frail people, who could be killed or tortured if CASE didn't get its way. CASE had vowed never to allow the alleged polluters and exploiters and environmental ravagers to put a nuclear reactor into earth orbit.

So they had finally managed to pressure one man into replacing an operational key with one of their own, one guaranteed to destroy the Endeavour and the Minerva, and probably our future in space as well. They had given him the alternate key and then had betrayed him, leaving him in the intertank to die as the deadly purge gas hissed around him and the launch processing sequencer cycled down to zero.

Or so they thought.

But Cyrus McGetchin's last will and testament told the real story. He had known that if he didn't agree to their demands, sooner or later someone, some day, would. It was just a matter of time, or of money, or of intimidation, or of sex, or of whatever else CASE had to offer that was the price of a vulnerable man. So Cyrus McGetchin had chosen to make the ultimate sacrifice, pretending to go along with the only man CASE had really subverted. He had brought along a brown blanket and covered himself so he wouldn't be seen by the closeout crew, but the blanket also concealed an oxygen-filled air pack. Working alone in the dark, he had removed the IRD cover by feel, taking out the code key and then blindly replacing the cover on the empty receiver to let whoever would find his body know that what he'd done he had intended to do, that he'd stayed aboard to protect his dream. Then he had sat back down on the ring frame and waited for his airpack to run out, just as I had dreamed about it, there in the cold and the lonely dark, with the deadly purge gas hissing out around him and the tons of cold, cold lox above him; just sitting there, all alone, waiting patiently to die, now that he had done what he had stayed there to do, making sure that those of us who cared would ultimately know why.

So Jack and I had found him, and the FBI had looked back into its files and said, yes, there were people they were suspicious about, but the Privacy Act. . .

And NASA had reviewed the tapes that one of their own employees had made using Station equipment. The Air Force smugly accepted the challenge to compare the codes CASE had transmitted with those which had been installed in operational spacecraft, to see if any of them matched.

They found two!

Of course, they had been transmitted at the wrong time to do any damage. The range safety systems they could have detonated were either awaiting launch or had already flown. But if the launch schedule been different, or CASE's schedule, for that matter, the whole world would have known, and it would have done no good whatever for the Air Force to admit how wrong they'd been.

We found the real code key, now that we knew where to look. It was there where Cyrus McGetchin had dropped it, there in his lonely tomb. It was wedged just above the junction between the intertank skin and the base of the hydrogen tank dome, hidden from view by the toroidal nitrogen tank. It wasn't very big, something like a video game cartridge, actually. But a man had died to put it there.

On a carefully guarded date next spring, the Resnik is going to the moon. She will be joined there by the McAuliffe. Both shuttles will leave their tankage and one of their engines in orbit, and most of the rest of their structure on the surface of the moon. If all goes well, only the McAuliffe will return, operated by the Resnik's crew, who will be relieved here at the Station to be debriefed and replaced by another crew outward bound. We're going to stay on the moon this time. Maybe someday it'll be a brand new state, up there in the sky.

All but one of the next moon ships will be launched from Kennedy unmanned, since the McAuliffe's cabin will be reused to take them onward to the moon. We'll assemble six ships that way, eight ships in all, to form the start of our first moon base. Those eight ships will carry just about everything we'll need on the moon to make sure we won't ever have to leave there again.

Part of the Scobee's cargo will be a small but very ornate lithium-aluminum alloy urn, made from the aft inspection manhole cover of ET 137. In that urn will be the last mortal remains of the man who is officially listed as the Scobee's commander and only crewmember, Cyrus McGetchin, the man who died to make this trip possible.

It seems only fair that he be allowed to finish it.

John Lindorfer