The suit’s control panel is showing twenty minutes of air left by the time he finishes splicing every wire for which he can locate a mate. He folds and replaces the knife and the tape, before pulling himself back over the top to the open airlock door, where he stops to make a critical decision.

It would be so much more meaningful to die out here,he thinks. Just a button push. But, if I do, I’ll never know if the repairs have changed anything. Is there any chance the radios could be working now and I could reach someone?

And what if, somehow, he’s reconnected the rocket?

No!he cautions himself. Don’t rekindle all your hopes! No way the engine is going to light off. That requires a professional. The best I can hope for is that somehow I’ve bumped something the right way and restored space-ground communications. But as long as I’m floating here trolling for meteors, I’ll never know.

Five more minutes,Kip decides, drinking in the view as the terminator slips by below, just past the Red Sea, and he watches the glow from what he decides must be the Saudi Arabian desert city of Riyadh sitting like a twinkling, grounded star against the darkness of the desert to the east.

He knows by now that the retrofire point—should he need it—is just under an hour away, which means that even if he decides to test the rocket motor, he’ll have to wait for that window. Not that anything is going to happen.

But he does feel the tiniest glimmer of hope.

Okay,he decides. Let’s get back in, and once I’m sure nothing’s going to change, I’ll come back out and end it here.

The Russian rescue mission and the administrator of NASA go into motion at the same moment. In Russia the Soyuzspacecraft clears the Baikonaur launch pad while in the Beltway Geoff Shear is already speaking to the White House aide he’s had holding for ten minutes.

“Okay. Put him on. Quickly.”

Less than a minute goes by before the President picks up to hear that the Russians are underway.

“I urge you to let me scrub our launch, Mr. President. It’s unnecessary now.”

“How much time on our countdown, Geoff?”

“Coming up on eleven minutes, sir. We just came off the hold.”

“Geoff, I want our guys to do the job. You know that.”

“Yes, sir, but…”

“And I’ll take the heat for the additional funds, but this is the sort of mission the shuttle was supposed to be able to do. Even if we have to compete with a parking lot full of spacecraft up there I want Kip on our shuttle. And that way the poor guy doesn’t have to ride to the space station first and spend, what, ten days before coming back? I mean, he could be injured.”

“He’s not injured, sir. He’s mentioned nothing about being injured.”

“Well, psychologically he needs to come home.”

“Yes, but, Mr. President, we’ve pushed everybody down there very hard to accomplish this emergency mission so we can comply with your directives, and frankly there have been all sorts of technical problems, and even though we’ve gotten past most of them…”

“When?”

“Today. During the countdown. And in the previous few days. We’re hanging it out.”

“Are you telling me the launch is unsafe?”

A contemplative silence lasts a moment too long.

“Geoff, are you saying on the record this is too dangerous? You have good reason to believe that?”

“I… don’t know for a fact that there’s any inordinate danger, more than usual, but whenever you push hard like this, things can go wrong.”

“What’s gone wrong?”

“Just a lot of computer problems and glitches and low readings. The countdown has been threatened over and over again. But it tells me…”

“But you can’t say definitively that you’re violating any safety parameters?”

“No.”

“Very well, then. We launch, Geoff. And that’s that. Get our guys up there and get Kip Dawson down safely. Clear enough?”

“Very well, Mr. President. Keep your fingers crossed.”

Geoff hangs up and sits for less than a minute, weighing the dangers of triggering what he considers his own “nuclear” option—his last chance to keep the shuttle grounded. It’s a no-brainer, he figures, and suddenly he’s pulling his cell phone from his pocket and punching up the screen to send a coded, numeric text message:

He checks the TV monitor on his desk. Less than ten minutes. The display loses one minute before his phone beeps and the return message appears with a simple “OK.”

Dorothy Sheehan stares at the cell phone display in disbelief, wondering if the number she’s been given as a code matches what she’s seeing.

She quickly checks a secure page in her PDA and feels a shiver when the number matches.

It’s the same!

If Shear had asked her to have a cyanide capsule embedded in a tooth against capture she wouldn’t be more surprised. The launch will be safely scrubbed, but she’ll be almost instantly traceable as the saboteur.

There’s no way she can use the computer in the office she’s been assigned, and there’s no time left to return to the vacant office and computer she was using. She snatches up her small briefcase and races to the door, confirming the hall is clear before entering and walking quickly to the far end of the corridor.

Why didn’t I prepare for this?she thinks, knowing the answer. What she’s already embedded can have no direct safety impact on the shuttle or the crew, but what Geoff Shear has just ordered could lead to a major computer shutdown just before liftoff. For the first time in days she feels her confidence ebbing away. Real fright is taking its place. This is her space program, too. It’s one thing to influence the scrubbing of a launch, and another entirely to do so at the very last second when the readings could confuse the launch crew.

The thought of just walking away and reporting there wasn’t time crosses her mind, but her deal with Shear depends on success. She knows him well. And Shear is the one charged with making the tough strategic decisions. She’s merely the operative, like carrying out the Company’s orders years ago. If she fails him on purpose, she’s second-guessing policy, as well as screwing up her own future. Besides, what he’s decided to do is keep everyone safely on the ground, and that can’t be bad.

Dorothy ducks into a stairwell, her heartbeat accelerating as she tries to think of a computer terminal she could reach in time that would leave no traces of her presence. Putting the commands into the master computer through the Internet is impossible. The NASA firewall is impenetrable. She has to use a computer connected to the main network and from inside. Shear thinks she’s preloaded everything and she should have. Dammit! She really should have!

God, that was arrogant to think I wouldn’t need it!

She glances at her watch. Just over seven minutes remain, and if she can’t insert it before T minus three, it’ll be too dangerous, both for the shuttle and for her.

Okay, think! If I use any office computer, they’ll have it traced in an hour, since I was in the same building and Griggs already knows my mission. I can’t get in from outside, and there’s no time to… wait a minute!

She tries the next three office doors, finding the third unlocked, and races to the most isolated computer terminal she can find. She brings out the laptop in her bag and starts it spinning up while she pulls on surgical gloves before making the entries in the office computer.

And within a minute she’s in, a connection established from inside to out through her laptop’s air modem.