“The name,” said Scott, “is Guber. Peter Guber.”

Well, it was agreed that the two of them would fly out to Sri Lanka, and if I liked Gentry’s idea (and, equally important, Gentry) I’d develop an outline — perhaps a dozen pages — which would give characters, locations, plot, and all the basic elements from which any competent script writer could gener­ate a screenplay.

They arrived in Colombo on February 12, 1986 — just two weeks after the Challenger disaster. 1986 was going to be the Big Year for Space, but now the entire NASA program was in total disarray. In particular, Galileo would be delayed for years. It would be 1995 before there could be any further news from the moons of Jupiter. I could forget about Odyssey Three — just as Gentry could forget about doing anything with Galileo except getting it back from the Cape and putting it in mothballs.

Happily, the Guber-Lee-Clarke Summit went well, and for the next few weeks I filled floppy disks with concepts, characters, backgrounds, plots — anything which seemed even remotely useful to the story we’d decided to call Cradle. Gentry liked my four-thousand-word outline and flew out to Sri Lanka again so that we could fill in the details. From then onward, we were able to collaborate by making frequent phone calls and flying yards of printout across the Pacific.

The writing took the best part of a year, though of course we were both involved in other projects as well. When I discovered that Gentry had a considerably better background in English and French literature than I did (by now I was immune to such surprises) I heroically resisted all attempts to impose my own style on him. This upset some longtime ACC readers, who when Cradle appeared under our joint names were put out by passages where I should have done a little more sanitizing. The earthier bits of dialogue, I explained, were the result of Gentry’s years with the hairy-knuckled, hard-drinking engineers and mathematicians of JPL’s Astrodynamics Division, where the Pasadena cops often have to be called in to settle bare-fisted fights over Bessel Functions and nonlinear partial differential equations.