“What?…” But now his older senses registered it. “Ozone. Electrical fire.”

We’re not in a spacecraft now, dad, she thought. But still, maybe she should go get the kids—

Jays dropped the rock — it thumped dully on the wooden patio — and he tucked his hand under his arm. “Jesus, that’s hot.”

2

The day of Geena’s post-flight press conference was, it turned out, the last day Henry would spend in Houston. So Geena, with a sinking heart, realized she had no excuse to duck out of seeing him, one last time.

She drove the couple of miles to the Johnson Space Center from their abandoned Houston home, in the decaying 1960s suburb of Clear Lake. On NASA Road One, she found herself queuing in a bumper-to-fender jam. Once more, NASA Road One was being rebuilt; it was choked by huge, crudely-assembled contraflows, and the multiple surfaces made ramps that slammed into the suspension of her Chevy.

The short drive took her the best part of an hour, and she had no option but to sit there with her starched collar itching at her neck, the skirt of her suit riding up around her knees.

At length she crawled past the wire fence that separated JSC from the rest of the world. Through the chicken wire she could see the JSC buildings, black-and-white cubes scattered over the old cow pasture, looking small and cramped and closed-up, out of place in an era when every office building was a glass-walled rhomboid.

She tried the radio. Every station she found seemed to be playing country music, the modern stuff that sounded to her like soft rock. The DJs harangued her about a write-in campaign to have TNN — The Nashville Network, country music TV — retained by the local cable company. She flipped around to another station, 93.7FM, which seemed to play nothing but “fun oldies’. They had a policy of no repeats during a single day, and on Sunday mornings, she learned, she could enjoy breakfast with the Beatles. The music, every track of which she’d heard before, was depressing Boomer stuff, and sounded much worse than she remembered; it made her feel very old.

At last she found a news channel, and listened to an earnest debate about whether ebonics should be allowed in schools, and an ill-informed discussion about the latest news from Venus.

She had flown in space on four missions now: two Shuttle missions and two stays on Station. Her last Shuttle flight had finished a month ago, just before the Venus event. And every time she returned to this — from the black silence of space, the simplicity of her life and objectives up there — she felt depressed as all hell.

The traffic lurched forward in spasms.