I could guess what they were coming to tell us. They’d say they were here for “consultations,” but actually it would be to say that Uncle Sam wasn’t going to sell us any more water.

“Don, when are the bad news boys due?”

“E.T.A. about an hour.”

“I’ll be right in.”

Another hop took me to the entrance of the control tank. It was sheathed in layers of plating cut from dismantled ETs, to protect the crew during solar proton storms.

While waiting for the airlock to cycle, I looked up at the Indian Ocean, where they used to dump our tanks back at the beginning of the shuttle program. That awful waste had been one of the reasons for founding the Tank Farm.

For years ours had been a lonely and expensive gamble. Now we had proved our point. Proved it too well, it seemed.

They let us get a monopoly, and now they want to break us, I thought. And they might succeed, if they cut off our water.

We had safeguarded the Key to Space for them, and expected them to be grateful when they realized its worth. We should have known better.

2

In the beginning there was the space shuttle. Never mind what came earlier. Before version two of the shuttle, space was a place for robots and daredevils.

With tight budgets and all, the Space Transportation System has stayed fundamentally the same. A big, complex manned orbiter is launched from Canaveral or Vandenberg, strapped to two solid rocket boosters and one huge fuel tank carrying 770 tons of cryogenic propellants for the shuttle main engines. The engines are part of the orbiter, so they can be brought home and reused. The solid boosters drop off minutes after liftoff and are recovered for refurbishment. Even the unmanned heavy-lift cargo launchers use the same basic system.