“Now who sounds like me?” Pat said, and poked him in the ribs. “That’s what I said a minute ago. You should spend more time with Sarah; then you and she would be echoing each other.”

“She’s asleep back there. Doing the last set of bloods and getting the data back to Houston took longer than she thought it would-that glitch showed up in the software again.” Sarah Levitt was an M.D. who specialized in biochemistry but was out of med school recently enough not to have forgotten what people were all about, either: a natural for Athena. For that matter, Irv knew that being married to her had not hurt his own chances.

“By now, everyone on this ship sounds like everybody else,” Frank said.

“In a pig’s ear we do.” Emmett Bragg glided through the cabin like a shark sliding through a tropical lagoon. If ever a man was made for freefall, Irv thought for the hundredth time, Emmett Bragg was the one. The pilot was close to fifty, a decade older than anyone else aboard Athena, and the only real astronaut on the crew. Before NASA, he had flown Phantoms in Vietnam. Once he had stayed loose on the ground for three days until a chopper got him out after his plane went down south of Haiphong.

Frank laughed. “Nobody wants to imitate that mouthful of grits you talk through, Emmett. What do the Russians think of it, anyway?”

Still without a wasted motion, Bragg strapped himself into the commander’s seat. “Matter of fact, the accent interests ‘em. One of ‘em said to me once I sounded like I was from Georgia.

I told him, naw, Alabama.”

Frank snorted, and Pat giggled.