Officially his was a “Spacetime Anomaly Detection and Transfer Application Experiment.” One of the two canisters was simply a high-powered radio transceiver, but the other was a mystery. It contained a bank of plasma batteries with enough combined power to run the entire shuttle for a month, plus enough circuitry to build a supercomputer, all wired together on a hobbyist’s integrated circuit board three layers deep. That in turn was connected to a spherically radiating antenna mounted on top of the canister. Rumor had it that someone in the vast structure of NASA’s bureaucracy knew what it was supposed to do, but no one admitted to being that person. Still, someone in authority had vouched for it, and it apparently held nothing that could interfere with the shuttle’s operating systems, so they let it on board. It was Allen’s problem if it didn’t work.

So on the second day of the flight, as Mission Specialist Carl Reinhardt finished inspecting the last of the return packages in the cargo bay with the camera in the remote manipulator arm, he said to Allen, “Why don’t you go ahead and warm up your experiment? I’m about done here, and you’re next on the agenda.”

Discovery, like all the shuttles, had ten windows; six wrapping all the way around the flight controls in front, two facing back into the cargo bay, and two more overhead when you were looking out the back. Allen was blocking the view out the overheads; he’d been watching over Judy’s shoulders while she used the aft reaction controls to edge the shuttle slowly away from the space station and into its normal flight attitude. He nodded to Carl and pushed himself over to the payload controls, a distance of only a few feet.