He frowned, looking for a moment at his empty fingers.

"I could probably work up a launch window a few hours sooner if I calculate a greater liftoff thrust. But with this jalopy, we might blow a fuel pump, and you'll wind up scattered over the Midwest." He folded his arms, daring me to challenge his authority. He didn't know that I was ready to go up against the ultimate Authority.

"Give me odds."

"One in ten."

I carefully laid the M-16 across his desk blotter and grabbed him by his greying shirt's collar to pull him face-to-face again. He made a gulping sound but allowed me to speak.

"The odds of the people on our tail knowing about StratoDyne are fifty-fifty. They aren't interested in taking prisoners."

"Then the sooner you let go of me, the sooner I can reprogram."

I let go.

He straightened his collar and stood. "I'll get the flight programmers working on it immediately. Head over to Flight Prep and find Gunther. Tell him I'll be over in a while."

"Make it quick." I glanced at the three women and nodded toward the door.

"I'll make it right, if you don't mind." The launch director sat back again in his console chair and swiveled toward his terminal. The keyboard rattled like tapdancers on amphetamines.

People rushed past us as we wandered toward Flight Prep. No one wore any sort of uniform or identifying marks. Most of the people were young and energetic, though some very old people moved among them with easy determination. Almost nobody middle-aged was around. My generation had lived through the strangulation of space travel by the world's governments. The younger people didn't remember that time and the older ones could still recall the good old days.

Isadora wasn't impressed. "What sort of blue-jean space program is this?" she demanded.

"You weren't even around when they tried to make it look glamorous, kid. Space travel is just trucking companies now."

She folded her arms, walking in that way until she realized how silly it made her look. "My mom's dad walked on the moon. She told me he was one of the Twelve."

I nodded without paying any attention. Out of one of the building's sliding doors I caught another glimpse of the spacecraft standing tall in the last light of day. The top half caught the darkening red colors that had already passed from the canyon floor. The gantry lights came on just then, small points of tungsten white and sodium orange that glowed like Disneyland. I lost sight of it when we stepped through a pair of doors into Flight Prep.

Gunther was an old man in a tattered lab coat who moved with painfully slow steps.

"You four?" he asked with a trace of a German accent. His hair possessed the texture and color of cirrus clouds under bright sunlight. Beneath skin as tight and aged as a fine old leatherbound book, two bright points of joy twinkled in his gaze. He bent over Isadora.

"I'd wondered for whom was the little monkey suit." He chucked her chin, laughing pleasantly. I hadn't seen a chin chucked in two decades.

She almost bit his knuckles apart. "Keep your mitts off, pervo. What I've got you can't afford."

"What you've got," he said with a mildly stern expression, "wouldn't draw interest even if you could bank it."

"Sir," Bridget interrupted, "we are in quite a hurry, according to Mr. Ammo. Please explain what you would like us to do."

The old coot straightened up to look at her. You could have heard the violins playing.

"Yes," he said when he'd caught his breath. "Why, yes. Of course."

The flight suits hanging on the rack weren't the cumbersome, bulky, outrageously expensive abominations that NASA had utilized to the bitter end. "Pork barrels," Gunther referred to them ungraciously. Our flight suits were composed of just a couple of layers of tight black material that-except for the helmet ring at the neck-looked more like tailor-made wetsuits than like space gear. Our names had been embroidered in gold thread on the left shoulder.

Gunther handed them to us with polite ceremony. First Bridget, then Ann, then the kid. Finally, he handed me mine. Some joker had sewn GodKiller patches over the left breast of each outfit. I had to admit they looked good.

Gunther politely turned his back to the three women. "I apologize for the lack of dressing facilities," he said.

I turned my back to all four of them. The kid horselaughed behind me. Bridget shushed her.

"Are you two men Victorians?" Bridget asked.

"We are apparently both gentlemen," Gunther replied.

The old woman huffed. "Gentlemen do not ignore a woman's body as if it were something hideous."

Gunther turned around halfway through the sentence to do his best at ogling. And the way in which the suits had been constructed gave him plenty of time both to sightsee and render assistance.

The phone rang. Gunther reached it on the third jangle.

"Are you certain?" was all he asked. After a pause, he cradled the phone. Off in the distance a claxon alarm blasted.

"I'm afraid," he said, "that you have just seven minutes left on earth."

"What?" we said, almost as one.

Gunther moved as swiftly as his frail build permitted. "Our low level radar has detected three helicopters coming out of the southwest. The shuttle is being fueled now. They've worked up a trajectory, but it only has a three-minute window." He looked worried.

I closed a couple of intransigent zippers. "Let's go."

We followed the old man to a set of doors that opened to the outside. He pointed toward an ancient Dodge van upon which the fading remnants of psychedelic paint fought a losing battle with an encroaching battalion of rust.

At his speed, I wondered whether we'd have enough time to make it to the vehicle, let alone the launch pad.

We climbed aboard as he gunned the engine into life. Ann hadn't even sat down before he peeled away at a dragster's pace. The rear doors alternated swinging open or shut, depending on which way the van swerved.

After less than a minute of breakneck speed, we arrived at the foot of the gantry. Gunther ushered us hurriedly out, urging us into the elevator.

"T-minus five minutes, thirty seconds," blared a calm voice over the loudspeakers. The claxon continued to wail.

A dozen men and women scurried about the base of the launch pad and up the gantry. The chill cold of liquefied fuels ran down the sides of the boosters. I gazed heavenward.

The sky was almost black. Against the starry backdrop towered Starfinder. Something like awe began swelling inside my throat.

A firm hand shoved me into the lift.

"Move it!" Gunther closed the door and hit the power button. We rose with unsettling speed. Gunther watched us for signs of vertigo.

"Where's Canfield?" I asked him.

"He should be inside running through the checklist."

The elevator jerked to a halt, tossing us a foot into the air. Gunther slid the cage aside and led us across the gantry arm to the cockpit hatch.

"In order to avoid being apprehended," he said, reaching inside the pocket of his lab coat, "I want you to wear these disguises." He handed each of us a pair of Groucho glasses-the ones with the fake nose, eyebrows, and moustache. He paused long enough to laugh at our bewilderment.

"In. In." He pushed us toward the hatch. "Have a textbook flight. We'll see you when you come down."

"Gunther," I said, "those copters may be carrying bombs. You'd better clear everyone out."

He dismissed the warning with a wave of a wrinkled hand. "I survived the raid on Peenemunde. Three whirlybirds are nothing."

He took a loving final look at Bridget, winked, and sealed us in.

The hatch cycled with an ear-pressing sigh. I turned to see the cockpit. Everything was cockeyed. If you took an airplane and stuck it on its tail, the seats would run up the side of wall, too. It wouldn't matter once we were in orbit, and we'd be sitting properly while gliding back home. If we made it that far.