In the ten years I’ve been living in tanks I doubt I’ve ever entered or left one without blinking at least once in awe. The hatch was at one end of a metal cylinder as long as a ten-story building is tall, with the diameter of a small house. The walls were stiffened with aluminum baffles which once kept a hundred tons of liquid hydrogen from sloshing under high stress. That ribwork now held my greenhouse ponds.

The former hydrogen tank had a volume of over fifty thousand cubic feet. It, and its brothers, were just about the largest things ever put into space. And this one was all mine—my own huge garden to putter around in during off-duty hours, growing new types of spaceadapted algae and yeasts.

I passed through the yard-wide hatch into the intertank area between the two main section of the External Tank. In the middle the intertank was only four feet across. The hatch closed.

Looking back into the garden tank through a tinted port, I pressed a button to let the sunshine in.

A bright point of light blossomed at the opposite end of the cylinder, mirror-focused sunlight speared through a fused quartz window to strike the cloud of rising bubbles.

I stayed long enough to watch the rainbows form.

The intertank hoop connects the big and little parts of the great External Tanks, or ETs, as we call them. The smaller cell had once contained 550 cubic meters of liquid oxygen. These days I stored gardening tools in it. Not a day had passed, in the last five years, in which I hadn’t wished someone on Earth would recognize the waste, and come and take my tool shed away from me—to be used in some grand and wonderful plan.

Now they were trying to do just that, but not in a way I cared for at all.

“Boss? You still there? There’s a telex from J.S.C. coming in.”