I grabbed the big steel beam that had once borne the thrust of giant, strap-on solid rocket boosters. Now it served as a convenient place to put the intercom.

“Ishido, this is Rutter. I’m on my way. Don’t let them sell us for scrap till I get there. Out.”

I put on my hardsuit, carefully double-checking each seal and valve. The lock cycled, and I emerged into vacuum, but not blackness.

Overhead the Earth spanned the sky, a broad velvet blanket of browns and blues and fleecy white clouds. From just five hundred kilometers up, you don’t see the Earth as a spinning marble in space. She covers an entire hemisphere, filling almost half the universe.

I drifted, but after a minute my boots touched the metal of the tank again. The same faint microgravity that held my pools inside the garden worked here on the outside.

The tank was the next to last in a row of forty of the great cylinders, nestled side by side. A parallel deck of sixteen huge tanks lay about sixty kilometers “overhead” linked to this collection by six strong cables. Twenty meters away from where I stood, one of the half-inch polymer tethers rose from its anchor point, a mirror-bright streak toward the planet overhead.

Sometimes a careful observer could make out B Deck without aid—a tiny rectangle about an eighth the apparent diameter of the moon—against the bright bulk of the Earth. When we crossed the terminator, the tanks in Group B sparkled like gems in Terra’s sunset tiara.

Today I hadn’t time to look for B Deck. The Feds had finally fired Edgar Bylinsky, the Tank Farm’s last big supporter in NASA. If we thought times were hard before, they were going to get worse now.

“Ralph?” It was Ishido’s voice again, now coming over my suit radio. “We’ve got the telex. I think this is the big one.”

I pushed off toward the control center. “Okay, what’s the news?”

“Uh, they’re moving fast. Pacifica’s coming in with a couple of official bad news boys.”