The last time I flew in one of these goddamned things, thought Dar, it was on a Sea Stallion leaving the Dalat Reactor.

The pilot made sure that they were all strapped in and then twisted one stick and pulled up on another. The little chopper lifted, fluttered, and then tilted forward, climbing for altitude at the mouth of the canyon before buzzing back, hovering a minute over the wide shelf of stone and sagebrush, and then settling down carefully, the rotors no more than twenty feet from the vertical rock wall.

Dar walked away from the thing with shaky legs. He wondered if Cameron would let him rappel down the canyon wall back to the highway when it was time to go.

“So is it true what the sergeant says about you and the space shuttle?” said Patrolman Elroy with a slight twist of his Elvis lips.

“What?” said Dar, crouching and covering his ears as the chopper took off again.

“That you were the one that figured out what made it blow up? Challenger, I mean. I was twelve when that happened.”

Dar shook his head. “No, I was just an NTSB flunky on the investigatory committee.”

“A flunky who got his ass fired by NASA,” said Cameron, tugging on his Smokey hat and securing it.

Elroy looked puzzled. “Why’d they fire you?”

“For telling them what they didn’t want to hear,” said Dar. He could see the crater here on the ledge now. It was about thirty feet across and perhaps three feet deep at the deepest. Whatever had struck here had burned, flared against the inner rock wall, and started a small fire in the grass and sagebrush that grew along the ledge. A dozen or so CHP people and forensics men stood and crouched near or in the crater.