Engines throttling up. Three engines now at one hundred four percent.' He had thought fleetingly of his own launch fifteen years before, of his job relaying data while Dave Muldorff 'flew' the monstrous Saturn V, until he was returned to the present as the loudspeaker carried Commander Dick Scobee's voice saying, 'Roger, go at throttle up,' and Baedecker had glanced toward the parking lots to see how congested the roads would be and a second later his client had said, 'Wow, those SRBs really create a cloud when they separate, don't they?' Baedecker had looked up then, seen the expanding, mushrooming contrail that had nothing to do with SRB separation, and instantly had recognized the sickening orange-red glow that lit the interior of the cloud as hypergolic fuels ignited on contact as they escaped from the shuttle's destroyed reaction control system and orbital maneuvering engines. A few seconds later the solid rocket boosters became visible as they careened mindlessly from the still-expanding cumulus of the explosion. Feeling sick to his stomach, Baedecker had turned to Tucker Wilson, a fellow Apollo-era pilot who was still on active duty with NASA, and had said without any real hope, 'RTLS?' Tucker had shaken his head; this was no return to launch site abort. This was what each of them had silently waited for during their own minutes of launch. By the time Baedecker had looked up again, the first large segments of the destroyed orbiter had begun their long, sad fall to the waiting crypt of the sea.

In the months since Challenger, Baedecker had found it hard to believe that the country had ever flown so frequently and competently into space. The long hiatus of earthbound doubt in which nothing flew had become the normal state of things to Baedecker, mixing in his own mind with a dreary sense of heaviness, of entropy and gravity triumphant, which had weighed upon him since his own world and family had been blasted apart some months earlier.