It seemed incredible, here in the morning sunshine, on a day like all the other days, stretching back to her first bright memories. But today could be the last day of all. Maybe, she thought, in a couple of centuries, all that will be left of us will be a few relics on the Moon, whatever Paula builds on Titan, a handful of ageing space probes heading out of the System.

She reached the Lincoln Memorial. She climbed the steps, and stared up at Lincoln’s impassive face.

She sat on the step at the top of the Memorial. She was looking east, in the direction of the Atlantic. The sun was well above the horizon now, the sky a clear blue dome. Traffic was beginning to seep into the brightening streets, and its distant noise rose to an oceanic roar, suffusing the landscape.

Sitting here, with the warmth of the sun on her face, the solidity of marble beneath her, she tried to comprehend that by the end of this nondescript day, all this — the labor of centuries — could be lost.

She was hungry, she found.

Benacerraf lay cocooned in her sleeping bag, on an improvised mattress of insulation material and space clothing.

Every time she woke, she had two priorities: to keep warm, and not to open her mouth.

There were several layers of hull metal and insulation — the base of the hab module and the orbiter’s cargo bay — lying between her and the hundred-and-eighty-below slush of Titan. Even so, the miles of ice below her sucked the heat out of her ageing body during the night. She woke up in exactly the same position as when she’d fallen asleep, as if she’d trained herself not to move in her sleep, no matter how stiff she got. She’d found that if she lay still, on the patch of her sleeping bag that her body had warmed up, she could stay relatively comfortable. But if she moved, she would tip over onto a colder place, and the warm air she had gathered around herself would spill out, leaving her shivering.

So she lay, hanging on to the last fragments of the night’s warmth, before she had to face the day. She opened her eyes slowly.

Her reading light was turned off, but enough light leaked around the door to let her make out the lines of the little room: the aluminum mirror on the wall, the lashed-up shelf with her softscreen and her precious paper books, the toothbrush with the broken handle she’d had to tape together…

The realization of where she was pushed its way into her consciousness with all its usual, unwelcome force, and she felt black dread welling inside her.

She sat up. The sleeping bag fell away from her shoulders, and immediately she was shivering, despite the thick Beta-cloth clothing she wore as pajamas.

Still in the dark, she got to her feet. The sleeping bag made a cloth puddle at her feet. She could see her face, dimly, in the scuffed aluminum mirror. She saw an old woman, her face lined and patched with shallow frostbite scars, her hair a dirty cloud, crudely cut, her mouth a bloody mess.

She opened up her tube of lip salve. She smeared it over the lumpy, scabs on her lips. Then she started to work the tip of her tongue gently against the lips, from the inside, until, slowly, they began to part, with little damage to the scabs that had welded together during the night.

Her lips had got damaged during an EVA, when her helmet seal had sprung a leak. She knew she had been lucky; she’d been just a few feet from the airlock. The cold, crowding into her helmet, had been intense. Startled, she had almost fallen, and her lips and chin had come into contact with the cooling glass of her visor. She had pulled her face back, leaving chunks of ripped flesh behind, and a violent burning sensation around her mouth.

She had clamped her eyes shut, and fumbled for Discovery’s airlock.

She got through with no serious frostbite damage. But her lips were a mess. Now, every time she ate, she got a salty mouthful of blood; and every spoonful of soup she lifted to her mouth was streaked with crimson. A couple of times, just after the injury, she’d opened her mouth during the night, or on waking, and had torn the night’s new lip scabs right off.

Cautiously, she stretched her mouth a little wider. The clustered scabs ached, and she could see how some of the deeper crevices had-opened again, so that they glistened bright red.

She thought ahead. She was due to spend most of today in the CELSS farm, cleaning out the nutrient pipes. And later she would have to find some time to work with Rosenberg on the details of the El Dorado EVA—

The door behind her opened quietly.

She turned, startled, and nearly fell; she banged her elbow against the shelf.

There was a figure in the doorway, silhouetted against the brightness of the hab module floods.

Anger welled up in her. This was her quarters, damn it, her one little island of privacy. “Rosenberg, I don’t care what the emergency is. Get out of here.”

“No,” he said; and that single, gruff syllable told her everything she needed to know.

It wasn’t Rosenberg. It was Bill Angel.

And, she realized with sudden horror, today his long decline was going to reach some kind of conclusion.

As the sun climbed and the mist burned off, the colors of Launch Complex 39 emerged more clearly. The snow-white of the toy Saturn was strongly contrasted with the battleship grey of the gantry which enfolded it.

After losing his NASA position to Al Hartle, Hadamard had entered semi-retirement. He couldn’t have gotten another position in Maclachlan’s Administration anyhow, and nor would he have wanted it. He had received a large payoff — that had been written into his contract when he was recruited from industry — and so he was financially comfortable. He had kept on his house in Clear Lake, but he hadn’t spent much time in Houston.

He had no living family, no particular ties. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to do with the rest of his life.

To Hadamard, looking back, his years at NASA had represented a kind of slow crisis for him, like a long breakdown.

He had gone into NASA to dismantle the Agency, much as he had dismantled and reassembled several corporations and Government departments before. By the time he emerged, he had spent years trying to defend it.

He toured the country, visiting relics of the space program: the rusting tracking station at Goldstone, the mothballed Shuttle launch facilities at Vandenburg, the old Saturn construction and test facilities around the country, abandoned or converted by Boeing and Rockwell. He gained a sense of the impermanence of it all; it was as if some insane occupying power had swept across the country, developed these immense facilities at enormous cost, and then abandoned their foothold.

Jake Hadamard, after years running NASA, still didn’t understand the meaning of the space program, nor even his own shifting reaction to it.

Perhaps there was no single meaning, no single valid reaction; perhaps the event was simply too huge for that. But he’d come to suspect that it was only for space — human footprints on the Moon, and on a satellite of Saturn — that his nation would, in the longest of terms, be remembered.

Or even, he thought, his species.

When he’d heard leaked reports of the incoming rock, he’d decided there was only one place he wanted to be.

…There was a spark of light, high in the sky.

Hadamard shielded his eyes with his hands and looked up, searching for the source. It had been hot, yellow, liquid, like rocket light.

It came in at an angle, far to the east, a blindingly white line scrawled across the sky. It was a crack in the Aristotelian dome, Fahy thought, allowing in the monsters.

Asteroid 2002OA had arrived.

She had to turn away, it was so bright.

It was going to be an ocean strike, then. Just as NORAD predicted. A few hundred miles off the coast, she guessed.