Not another second.

He swallowed hard. “Get out the Hudson brace drill. I’ll do the burr holes myself.” He saw the nurses’ startled looks, and added, with more bravado than he was feeling, “It’s like drilling holes wall. I’ve done it before.” While the nurses prepped the newly shorn scalp, Jack put on a surgical gown and snapped on gloves. He positioned the sterile drapes and was amazed to find his hands were still steady, even while his heart was racing. It was true he had drilled burr holes before, but only once, and it was years ago, under the supervision of a neurosurgeon.

There’s no more time. She’s dying. Do it.

He reached for the scalpel and made a linear incision in the scalp, over the left temporal bone. Blood oozed out. He sponged away and cauterized the bleeders. With a retractor holding back the skin flap, he sliced deeper through the galea and reached the pericranium, which he scraped back, exposing the skull surface.

He picked up the Hudson brace drill. It was a mechanical device, powered by hand and almost antique looking, the sort of tool you might find in your grandfather’s woodshop. First he used the perforator, a spade-shaped drill bit that dug just deeply into the bone to establish the hole. Then he changed to the rose bit, round-tipped, with multiedged burrs. He took a deep breath, positioned the bit, and began to drill deeper. Toward the brain. beads of sweat broke out on his forehead. He was drilling without CT confirmation, acting purely on his clinical judgment. He did even know if he was tapping the right spot.

A sudden gush of blood spilled out of the hole and splattered the surgical drapes.

A nurse handed him a basin. He withdrew the drill and watched as a steady stream of red drained out of the skull and gathered in a glistening pool in the basin. He’d tapped the right place.

With every trickle of blood, the pressure was easing from Debbie Haning’s brain.

He released a deep breath, and the tension suddenly eased from his shoulders, leaving his muscles spent and aching.

“Get the bone wax ready,” he said. Then he put down the drill and reached for the suction catheter.

A white mouse hung in midair, as though suspended in a transparent sea.

Dr. Emma Watson drifted toward it, slender-limbed and graceful as an underwater dancer, the curlicue strands of her dark brown hair splayed out in a ghostly halo. She grasped the mouse and slowly spun around to face the camera. She held up a syringe and needle.

The footage was over two years old, filmed aboard the shuttle Atlantis during STS 141, but it remained Gordon Obie’s favorite PR film, which is why it was now playing on all the video monitors in NASA’s Teague Auditorium. Who wouldn’t enjoy watching Emma Watson? She was quick and lithe, and she possessed what one could only call sparkle, with the fire of curiosity in her eyes.

From the tiny scar over her eyebrow, to the slightly chipped front tooth a souvenir, he’d heard, of reckless skiing) her face was record of an exuberant life. But to Gordon, her primary appeal her intelligence. Her competence. He had been following Emma’s NASA career with an interest that had nothing to do with the fact she was an attractive woman.

As director of Flight Crew Operations, Gordon Obie wielded considerable power over crew selection, and he strove to maintain a safe—some would call it heartless—emotional distance from all his astronauts. He had been an astronaut himself, twice a shuttle commander, and even then he’d been known as the Sphinx, an aloof and mysterious man not given to small talk. He was comfortable with his own silence and relative anonymity.

Although he was now sitting onstage with an array of NASA officials, most of the people in the audience did not know who Gordon Obie was. He was here merely for set decoration. Just as the footage of Emma Watson was set decoration, an attractive face to hold the audience’s interest.

The video suddenly ended, replaced on the screen with the NASA logo, affectionately known as the meatball, a star-spangled blue circle embellished with an orbital ellipse and a forked slash red. NASA administrator Leroy Cornell and JSC director Ken Blankenship stepped up to the lectern to field questions. Their mission, quite bluntly, was to beg for money, and they faced a gathering of congressmen and senators, members of the various subcommittees that determined NASA’s budget. For the second straight year, NASA had suffered devastating cutbacks, and lately an air of abject gloom wafted through the halls of Johnson Space Center.

Gazing at the audience of well-dressed men and women, Gordon felt as though he were staring at an alien culture. What was wrong with these politicians? How could they be so shortsighted?

It bewildered him that they did not share his most passionate belief. What sets the human race apart from the beasts is man’s hunger for knowledge. Every child asks the universal question, Why? They are programmed from birth to be curious, to be explorers, to seek scientific truths.

Yet these elected officials had lost the curiosity that makes man unique. They’d come to Houston not to ask why, but why should we?

It was Cornell’s idea to woo them with what he cynically called “the Tom Hanks tour,” a reference to the movie Apollo 13, which still ranked as the best PR NASA had ever known. Cornell had already presented the latest achievements aboard the orbiting International Space Station.

He’d let them shake the hands of some real live astronauts. Wasn’t that what everyone wanted? To touch golden boy, a hero? Next there’d be a tour of Johnson Space Center, starting with Building 30 and the Flight Control Room. All that gleaming technology would surely dazzle them and make them true believers.

But it isn’t working, thought Gordon in dismay. These politicians aren’t buying it.

NASA faced powerful opponents, starting with Senator Phil Parish, sitting in the front row. Seventy-six years old, an uncompromising hawk from South Carolina, Parish’s first priority preserving the defense budget, NASA be damned. Now he hauled his three-hundred-pound frame out of his seat and stood up to address Cornell in a gentleman’s drawl.

“Your agency is billions of dollars overbudget on that space station,” he said. “Now, I don’t think the American people expected to sacrifice their defense capabilities just so you can tinker around there with your nifty lab experiments. This is supposed to be an international effort, isn’t it? Well, far as I can see, we’re picking up most of the tab. How am I supposed to justify this elephant to the good folks of South Carolina?”

NASA administrator Cornell responded with a camera-ready smile. He was a political animal, the glad-hander whose personal charm and charisma made him a star with the press and in Washington, where he spent most of his time cajoling Congress and White House for more money, ever more money, to fund the space agency’s perennially insufficient budget. His was the public face NASA, while Ken Blankenship, the man in charge of day-to-day operations at JSC, was the private face known only to agency insiders. They were the yin and yang of NASA leadership, so different in temperament it was hard to imagine how they functioned as a team. The inside joke at NASA was that Leroy Cornell was all style and no substance, and Blankenship was all substance and no style.

Cornell smoothly responded to Senator Parish’s question. “You asked why other countries aren’t contributing. Senator, the reason is, they already have. This truly is an international space station. Yes, the Russians are badly strapped for cash. Yes, we had to up the difference. But they’re committed to this station. They’ve got a cosmonaut up there now, and they have every reason to help us keep ISS running. As for why we need the station, just look at the research that’s being conducted in biology and medicine. Materials science. Geophysics. We’ll see the benefits of this in our own lifetimes.” Another member of the audience stood, and Gordon felt his blood pressure rise. If there was anyone he despised more than Senator Parish, it was Montana congressman Joe Bellingham, whose Marlboro Man good looks couldn’t disguise the fact he was a scientific moron. During his last campaign, he’d demanded that public schools teach Creationism. Throw out the biology books and open the Bible instead. He probably thinks rockets are powered by angels.