At nine-thirty P.M., an hour after her appearance on McCauley Stokes Live--which had concluded with a leering wink from the host, and was, blessedly, her final media engagement of the day--Annie Caulfield stood alone inside the Vehicle Assembly Building at the KSC, a structure that spanned eight acres at the north end of the Cape and rose 525 feet into the air, proportions that made the VAB the only indoor facility in America able to house the space shuttle's orbiter, solid rocket boosters, and external fuel tank both before and after they were mated into a vertical stack.

About a month ago, one of the center's two crawler-transporters had borne Orion across the three and a half miles from the VAB to Launch Pad 39A, its engines guzzling 150 gallons of diesel fuel per minute for the entire five hours it took to reach the pad. Earlier today, that same tracked vehicle had conveyed the spacecraft's remains back to the building before the solemn eyes of NASA personnel like a funeral wagon for a slain Colossus. And now the charred and twisted segments of Orion lay spread across the floor of High Bay 1, smelling of smoke, burned fuel, and melted plastics--the acrid, resinous odor seeping into the processed air of the facility so that it stung the inside of Annie's nose and made the lining of her throat feel swollen and irritated.

Why had she driven here tonight in her UpLink-leased Saab, making a detour to the Cape before heading back to her condo from the television studio, calling ahead to let her kids' nursemaid--Sown in from Houston with her family, also courtesy of Roger Gordian--know she'd be an hour late getting home? She scarcely needed to be reminded that her trip to Florida was no all-expenses-paid dream vacation won after a bouncy performance on The Price Is Right, or a knock on the door by someone from Publisher's Clearinghouse. She had been here at Canaveral only the week before, when the scorched wreckage in the aisles around her was still a commanding, majestic vessel about to pierce the upper limit of the atmosphere. When Jim Rowland had pointed to the Turnip patch on his chest, mouthing their old training class motto to her, flashing his crooked little grin before entering the silver bus that had carried him to his death. When Orion had been something other than a name that would be forever synonymous with tragedy and irrevocable loss.

Terra nos respuet.

No, she did not need any reminders about the reason she was in Florida.