When Satellite Control called me, I was writing up the day’s progress report in the Observation Bubble—the glass-domed office that juts out from the axis of the Space Station like the hubcap of a wheel. It was not really a good place to work, for the view was too overwhelming. Only a few yards away I could see the construction teams performing their slow-motion ballet as they put the station together like a giant jigsaw puzzle. And beyond them, twenty thousand miles below, was the blue-green glory of the full Earth, floating against the ravelled star clouds of the Milky Way.

“Station Supervisor here,” I answered. “What’s the trouble?”

“Our radar’s showing a small echo two miles away, almost stationary, about five degrees west of Sirius. Can you give us a visual report on it?”

Anything matching our orbit so precisely could hardly be a meteor; it would have to be something we’d dropped-perhaps an inadpquately secured piece of equipment that had drifted away from the station. So I assumed; but when I pulled out my binoculars and searched the sky around Orion, I soon found my mistake. Though this space traveller was man-made, it had nothing to do with us.

“I’ve found it,” I told Control. “It’s someone’s test satellite cone-shaped, four antennae, and what looks like a lens system in its base. Probably U.S. Air Force, early nineteen-sixties, judging by the design. I know they lost track of several when their transmitters failed. There were quite a few attempts to hit this orbit before they finally made it.”

After a brief search through the files, Control was able to confirm my guess. It took a little longer to find out that Washington wasn’t in the least bit interested in our discovery of a twenty-year-old stray satellite, and would be just as happy if we lost it again.

“Well, we can’t do that,” said Control. “Even if nobody wants it, the thing’s a menace to navigation. Someone had better go out and haul it aboard.”