In the cramped quarters of the shuttle’s flight deck nearly everything was within easy reach. It was possible— if you floated with your feet in between the pilot’s and copilot’s chairs and your head pointed toward the aft windows—to strand yourself without a handhold, but to manage it you had to be trying. Allen had put himself in (hat position once earlier in the flight, and he’d gotten the worst case of five-second agoraphobia that Judy had ever seen before she could rescue him. After that he kept a handhold within easy reach all the time.

Judy finished maneuvering the shuttle into its parking orbit and watched the shadows in the cargo bay for a few more seconds to make sure the shuttle was stable. She checked Carl’s progress as he latched down the manipulator arm, glanced upward through the overhead windows at the Earth, then turned to watch Allen.

Here, in her opinion, was where the action was on this flight. For years NASA had promoted the image of the shuttle as a space truck, and that’s what it had become, but for Judy the lure of space was in science, not industry. She wanted to explore, not drive a truck. But she was thirty years too late for Apollo, and by the looks of things at least thirty years too early for the planetary missions. If they happened at all. Driving a space truck that occasionally did science projects was the best she could hope for.

It hadn’t always been that way. For a while, when she’d first joined NASA, the future had looked as bright as ever. The collapse of the Soviet Union had left the entire defense industry without a purpose, so it seemed only logical that its vast experience with rockets and supersonic aircraft and other high-tech gadgetry would be put to use in space. Logical to people like Judy, at least. But the military, unused to peace, kept right on preparing for war, and just as Allen’s group had predicted, they had soon enough found another enemy. Dozens of them, in fact. It sometimes felt as if the Pentagon had joined the Enemy of the Month Club.