Kuhl sat, watched, and waited. In his taut silence, he could almost feel that gigantic, damnable eye overhead, looking down, pressing down. Seeing what it wanted to see, peering through every shadow, its relentless gaze scouring the world....

Yes, Kuhl felt it up there, he did, and was only hoping it would once again blink as he went about the lucrative business of destruction.

"There's smoke in the cabin. Elevated CA 19-9 and CA 125 levels. LH2 pressure's dropping. Terra nos respuet. "

Annie feels her book about to slip off her lap, catches it just in the nick of time. She blinks once or twice, completely out of sorts, guessing she'd sunk into a light sleep while reading on her sofa.

She had been reading, hadn't she?

She readjusts the book and glances up at the man standing in front of her, the man whose voice startled her from her doze. In his midfifties, he has reddish-brown hair, a full mustache, and is wearing a white doctor's frock. Phil Lieberman, she thinks. The oncologist who has taken over her husband's case, not exactly the type to make house calls. She wonders what he's doing in her living room, wonders whether one of the kids might have let him in the door... but then suddenly realizes that this isn't her living room after all, isn't even part of her home, and that the children are nowhere around her.

She straightens, blinks again, rubs her eyes.

The chair on which she is sitting is contoured plastic. The air has a recycled quality and carries commingled antiseptic and medicinal smells. The walls are an institutional noncolor.

It abruptly dawns on her that she is in the hospital.

In the hospital, in the third-floor waiting room that has become so numbingly familiar over these past few months, and where she must have dropped off like a stone with an open book on her lap. The hospital, of course. However strange it might ordinarily seem for her to have forgotten, these are far from ordinary days, and her brief disorientation is understandable in view of what's been happening in her life. She has gone for weeks with precious little rest, rushing from her husband's bedside to her training sessions at the Center and back again, trying not to neglect the kids amid her compounding pressures. It would not be the first time lately that the effort of keeping everything together has caught up to her without warning.

Looking at the doctor, she begins fidgeting nervously with the edges of the book--actually, she sees now, it is a magazine, a dog-eared copy of Newsweek with a featured piece about upcoming space shuttle launches connected with the ISS program--the magazine, then, that is spread across her thighs. The doctor's expression is unrevealing, his voice without intonation, but there is a sobriety in his eyes that sends a cold, silent shiver running through her.

"Like the old Titan rockets," he says. "Third stage fires, you're up and out. "