Almost soothing.

She arrived at the conference room late. She took a seat quietly at the back of the darkened, half-empty room and tried to follow what was going on.

George Hench was chairing an engineering seminar on the design of a hab module for the proposed human-manned follow-up missions to Cruithne.

At the front of the room a technical type was standing at a lectern; a softscreen the size of a curtain was hanging on the wall behind him. Other techs sat around the first few rows, their arms draped over the backs of their chairs, their feet up before them.

These technicians were mostly men, mostly badly dressed, generally bearded. They were laden with doctorates and other qualifications. Many of them came from NASA itself, from corners of that sprawling bureaucratic empire called things like the Mission Definition Office or the Mars Exploration Studies Office. Behind each of these guys lay a whole fleet of beautiful spacecraft that had existed only in blueprints and mass estimates and a few items of demonstration technology, and that had landed on the Moon or Mars only in clean, software-generated NASA imagery, and in the dreams of their creators.

After Malenfant’s electrifying first launch, and his announcement that he was proposing manned missions to Cruithne and beyond — and despite the outstanding legal difficulties the company faced — Bootstrap had had no difficulty recruiting guys like these.

The speaker was describing the high-level design of the Cruithne mission’s hab module. He spoke in a mumble, directly to his softscreen, and the screen behind him showed a blizzard of bewildering images.

The hab was little more than a can, fifteen yards long. It had a small Earth-return capsule — a cone shaped like an Apollo capsule — glued to its lower end. The capsule would also serve as a solar storm shelter. Big winglike solar cell panels were fixed to struts extending from the can’s sides. Various antennae, thruster assemblies, and ports were visible through layers of powder-white insulation blankets. It reminded Emma a little of prehistoric images ofSkylab. But in the animated image the hab was spinning, end over end, to provide the crew with artificial gravity, at least at the can’s extremities. The speaker made great play of the mass limitations the craft was going to work under; it seemed that the whole design was right at the limit of what Malenfant’s BOB could throw into space.

Life-support systems engineering was far from Emma’s area of expertise. But attending meetings like this was all part of her general ongoing strategy to contain Reid MalenfanL She’d been around Malenfant long enough to know that it was worth her while to cast her net as wide as possible, to follow as much as possible, to anticipate as much as she could. Because, even here at the heart of Reid Malenfant’s secretive empire, she could never be sure under which rock the next rattlesnake lay coiled.

It was characteristic of Malenfant to be pressing ahead with the design, assembly, and even fabrication of his asteroid-pioneer spacecraft while the slow wheels of official approval still ground on. Not only that, he had become even more unobtainable than usual because he had launched himself into every aspect of the training of Bootstrap’s cadre of prospective astronauts, even to the extent of racking up flying hours and time in the centrifuge.

Meanwhile, Bootstrap’s destiny remained unresolved.

The fact that this next flight would — if it flew at all — be carrying human passengers just made the bureaucratic tangle that much worse. It had shocked Emma to learn that even comparatively unambitious human spaceflights incurred a lot of danger, much of it unacceptable to bodies like OSHA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

Beyond the shelter of Earth’s magnetic field, for example, the astronauts would be bombarded by radiation, sporadically violent flares from the sun, and a steady drizzle of fast-moving cosmic rays: relics from remote parts of the universe, a single particle of which, George Hench had once told her, could pack as much punch as a baseball. Then there were the familiar hazards of zero gravity: bone decalcification, immune and cardiovascular system degradation, muscular atrophy.

Emma formed a bleak image of the crew limping across space in a cramped, stinking, spinning module, earnestly pounding away at their treadmills just to keep alive, cowering every time the sun belched. There was something un-American about it, she thought, something dogged and Soviet.

What might save Bootstrap was once again the weakness and ambiguity of the current regulatory regime. For example, OSHA actually had no radiation exposure standards for human exploration missions. NASA had adopted supplementary standards drawn up by bodies like the National Academy of Sciences and the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements as the agency’s standard for crew dose limits. But even then NASA had left loopholes, saying the standards should be applied to all but “exceptional exploration missions.”

Where NASA led, Reid Malenfant was happy to follow.

The presenter was nearing the end of his talk, and he had started to wax philosophical. Before Copernicus, humans believed humanity was walled off from the heavens by a set of crystal spheres. Well, those spheres are still there, but they aren ‘t made of glass, but of fear. Let’s do this. Let’s smash those spheres.

Whoops, raised fists, a scattering of applause.

These technicians had tunnel vision, she thought. To them the mission was everything, the various obstacles a frustration that stopped them from doing things. And when they were forced to confront those obstacles they resorted to hopeful button pushing: Ptolemaic spheres, the frontier, the American dream, can-do attitude, the spirit of Wright and Lindbergh and Armstrong, the organizational will that enabled us to cover a continent, win the Second World War, blah blah.

But, she thought, maybe they had to be that way to get anything done at all. Dreams had to be uncomplicated to be achievable.

Now another technician got up to show a new type of chart. It represented a flow of raw materials to a schematic of the hab’s manufacture: electrical components from factories around the United States; structural parts from the big aerospace companies; raw materials from a variety of producers; a web of sources, flows, and sinks.

There was one box at the lower left corner that Emma had trouble reading. She sat forward and squinted.

The source box was marked “Dounreay.” And the product flowing out of it was “enriched U-235.”

And Emma had spotted her rattlesnake.

She got out of her seat and slipped out of the room.

When she got back to her office she booted up her softscreen and started to find out about Dounreay.

And, immediately after that, she booked a flight to Scotland.

She arrived at a place called Sandside: a tiny village, just holiday homes and a pub. She got out of the car — no SmartDrive — and climbed a low hill at the edge of the village.

She was on the north coast of Scotland, just a few miles from John O’Groats, the miniature tourist trap that was the northernmost point of mainland Britain. There was a sweeping beach before her, and then the sea itself, wild and gray under a flat lid of sky. On the horizon she glimpsed more landmasses, the Old Man of Hoy and the Orkneys. It was a rugged place suffused by wind noise, poised between sea and sky, and the wind seemed to suck the warmth from the core of her body.

And there, sprawled across the eastern horizon, was Dounreay: a mile-long sprawl of buildings, a giant golf ball shape, huge gray and brown sheds and chimneys. Somehow, oddly, even though she knew what this place represented, it did not offend the eye.