'So you don't have anything to do with the space shuttle?' said Maggie. 'Not really. We had some subsystems aboard the shuttles and used to rent payload space aboard them every once in a while.' Baedecker was aware that he had used the past tense, as if he were speaking about someone who had died.

Maggie stopped to watch the rich sunlight bathe the sides of the New Delhi control tower and terminal buildings in gold. She tucked a wayward strand of hair behind one ear and folded her arms. 'It's hard to believe that it's been almost eighteen months since the Challenger explosion,' she said. 'That was a terrible thing.'

'Yes,' said Baedecker.

It was ironic that he had been at the Cape for that flight. He had been present for only one previous shuttle launch, one of the Columbia's first engineering flights almost five years earlier. He was there in January of 1986 for the Challenger disaster only because Cole Prescott, the vice president of Baedecker's firm, had asked him to escort a client who had bankrolled a subcomponent in the Spartan-Halley experiment package sitting in the Challenger's payload bay.

The launch of 51-L had seemed nominal enough and Baedecker and his client were standing in the VIP stands three miles from Pad 39-B, shielding their eyes against the late-morning sun, when things went bad. Baedecker could remember marveling at how cold it was; he had brought only a light cotton jacket, and the morning had been the coldest he could ever recall at the Cape. Through binoculars, he had caught a glint of ice on the gantries surrounding the shuttle.

Baedecker remembered that he had been thinking about getting an early start to beat the leaving crowds when the loudspeaker carried the voice of NASA's public affairs officer. 'Altitude four point three nautical miles, down-range distance three nautical miles.