Into that silence stepped Laurel Freeman, a physicist from Stanford. She was almost sputtering with rage, but then Eratosthenes was her baby and as payload commander she took as a personal insult anything that affected its timely and successful deployment. Her father had been a stevedore on the Long Beach docks and in times of stress it showed up in her vocabulary. She was short and burly with a square face beneath a mop of untidy brown curls and it wasn't much of a stretch to imagine her offloading containers herself.

When Laurel paused for breath the mission commander stood up. "All right," Rick Robertson said. His voice was low and even, which had the natural effect of making them all shut up so they could hear him. "This is what's been handed to us. It sucks. Are any of you ready to give up your seat in protest?"

None of them were. There wasn't one of them who wouldn't have volunteered to be ballast on this mission or any other. Rick knew it. They all knew it. Rick was a test pilot from Texas Tech by way of the Air Force. This was his third shuttle flight and his second as commander. At five feet seven inches, he held himself with such parade-ground erectness that he seemed six feet tall. He looked at Kenai and said in his slow drawl, "Anything to add, Kenai?"

He'd deliberately mispronounced her name again, and it worked to defuse the situation. "It's KEE-nigh, not Kenya." She paused long enough for the delay to be felt. "Sir."

There was a very small laugh, but Rick gave her a brief, approving smile.

"Who's this guy again?" Bill said, his flush subsiding.

Rick consulted the bio Joel had handed him. "Well, at least he isn't a prince."

"The shuttle program already has its quota of princes," Mike said with feeling.

"Also U.S. senators," Laurel said, still steaming. "And U.S. representatives."

Heavily, Rick said, "He is a sheik, however."

"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph," Bill said. "And what lame-ass experiment is he bringing along?"

"Way-ull," Rick said, drawing out the word in the best Chuck Yeager imitation so dear to all aviators, "he ain't got no lame-ass experiment. We are deploying his satellite."

"The ARABSAT-8A?" Kenai said. "He's a Saudi?"

"No, Qatari," Rick said. "His family has a controlling interest in a media conglomerate." He paused, and then, with obvious reluctance and not a little apprehension, said, "A media conglomerate which owns, among many other things, Al Jazeera."

There was a moment of charged silence. Media coverage was a de facto part of any shuttle mission, but that didn't mean that any of them regarded the press as anything but the bane of their collective existence. They'd all been burned by the incautious remark in front of the wrong reporter, and they'd all learned to keep a discreet distance, especially lately, when astronaut adultery and boozing on the job, not to mention sabotage, were making more headlines than successful missions. The news that they would be spending seven days cooped up in the small confines of a shuttle on orbit with an owner of one of the largest and most influential international television networks in the world was news they did not welcome. In fact, "Oh, fuck me," Laurel said, and slammed out of the room. Mike wasn't far behind her and his language was even more colorful.

Bill looked at Rick. "Well, that went over well."

"They'll be all right," Kenai said loyally, and spoiled it by saying, almost pleadingly, "Is he going to be broadcasting on orbit?"

"Ya think?" Rick said.

They sat in gloomy silence for a moment. "The sun's about over the yardarm," Bill said.

Rick looked at the clock on the wall. "It's five o'clock somewhere," he said, and looked at Kenai. "Join us?"

"Building 99?"

Rick shook his head. "Too touristy. I know a place."

THEY GATHERED AROUND A TABLE IN A SMALL, DARK DRINKING establishment where the varnished wooden bar had a brass foot rail and the booths were upholstered in real leather. The bartender knew Rick by name, and the two people sitting at opposite ends of the bar looked up briefly and incuriously and then got back to the more serious business at hand. Bill had scotch, no ice, Kenai had a beer, and everyone had a good laugh, including the bartender, when Rick ordered a cranberry cosmopolitan. "I like the color of it," Rick said, refusing to be shamed into a more manly drink. "It looks like the sky over the folks' ranch at sunset."

They drank while reading their part-timer's bio. "He's studied communications and aviation, it says."

"Where?"

Bill tapped the bio. "It says here."

"Where here?"

Bill shrugged and handed Kenai the folder. "Doesn't name any schools. Doesn't say if he soloed. Doesn't say if he stuck it out anywhere long enough to pick up a degree. Looks like a kid with ADD whose daddy has too much money."

The bio was only a page long, and even that had been padded." 'Hobbies include skiing, scuba diving, and polo'?" Kenai tossed the bio on the table. It slid into a puddle of beer, and the paper quickly absorbed it, leaving a big brown stain. "Oh yeah. This is gonna be fun."

The two men were veterans of military aviation programs and both had seen action in the Gulf. Kenai wasn't military but she had spent the last five years in rigorous training, including flying in the backseats of T-38s, training in vacuum chambers and sea survival, and she'd been CAPCOM on the last shuttle flight. They'd all stood up under severe stress and performed, and performed well. Rick, Mike, Kenai, Bill, and Laurel had worked together, played together, partied together, and on occasion, mourned the loss of a comrade together. They knew each other and they trusted each other not to screw the pooch in an emergency situation, of which there had to be six or eight on offer every second of any mission.

Now they were being asked to accommodate a stranger, an unknown, unschooled, untrained, 330 miles up, for over two point one million miles, for seven days, one hour, six minutes, and sixteen seconds, with nothing between them and vacuum but a thin metal shell. It was an awfully long time, during which one error could put all their names on the Astronaut Memorial at the KSC Visitor Center. It was not one of the honors to which Kenai, a type A competitor like any other astronaut, had ever aspired.

"This is basically your NASA sales incentive," Bill said. "We'll give you a seat on the shuttle if you hire us to launch your satellite."

"Pretty much," Rick said. It wasn't anything that hadn't been done before, but no one liked it, least of all the astronauts. It burned mission specialists in particular, because the line to get into space was already long enough, and to have someone unqualified, inexperienced, a joyrider for crissake, jump in ahead of them was almost unbearable. A few couldn't bear it and quit. Everyone else stuck it out but none of them were happy about it.

And it was a mission commander's nightmare. "We'll run him through shuttle emergency escape procedures, how to eat, sleep, use the toilet." Rick fixed them with a beady eye. "But mostly we make it very, very clear that he doesn't touch anything. If he can be trained to take a shit without his ass touching the seat, do it."

They finished their drinks and went home, not as light of heart as a newly named Prime Crew ought to have been.

THE NEXT WEEK KENAI AND BILL WERE SCHEDULED FOR ONE OF THE unending meet-and-greets that astronauts were assigned to around the country, to show the NASA flag to the various services and contractors that designed, built, maintained, and manned the infrastructure that made shuttle operations possible, and to remind them of the real men and women flying the craft and operating the equipment the contractors built. They strapped into a T-38, Bill on the stick, Kenai in the backseat, and took off for Miami and the U.S. Coast Guard base there.