"Makes your fingertips tingle and your heart go pitterpat," Annie said.

He smiled. "Guess I can assume you haven't gotten blase about it yet."

"And I never will," Annie said, smiling back at him.

A moment later Gordian rose as NASA Administrator Charles Dorset arrived, clasped his hand, and bore him off to meet a group of officials in one of the adjacent rooms.

"So what's next?" Megan asked Annie, leaning across Gordian's vacated chair. "With so much going on at once it's hard to absorb everything."

"Don't sweat it. Sending human beings into space is a complicated process," Annie said. "Even the astronauts can't remember all their tasks without cue cards, and that's after years of training and a full dress rehearsal."

"Are you serious? About the cards, I mean."

"They stick 'em right on the instrument panel," Annie said. "One small step for man, a giant step for Velcro." She glanced at her wristwatch. "To give you a sense of where we stand, there's about an hour left till takeoff, and everything seems to be looking good. The closeout team's already secured the side hatch, and in a little while they'll be leaving the pad for the fallback area. Prelaunch checks started hours ago and are automatically sequenced by the computers, but there are a lot of switches aboard that spacecraft, and right about now the crew's going to be making sure they're in the correct positions."

"The number of personnel jammed into this room comes as a revelation," Megan said. "I've watched launches on television and expected we'd have plenty of company ... but there have to be, what, two hundred people at the consoles?"

"Good guess," Annie said. "Actually, the total's a little higher, maybe around two hundred fifty. That's half as many as there were back in the days of Apollo, and a third less than were needed just a few years ago. The new CLCS--that's Checkout and Launch Control System--hardware and software we've been adding have consolidated most launch operations."

Gordian was working his way back from the aisle. "Sorry to have left in the middle of our conversation, but Chuck wanted me to meet some of his deputies."

Chuck to you, Mr. Dorset to me, Annie thought. In the future, she would remember trying to conceal her amusement out of concern Gordian might take offense. I suppose it really is first names all around for some of us.

Megan had turned to Gordian. "I wasted no time picking Annie's brain while you were gone. It's been quite an education."

"I hope one more eager pupil won't be too much trouble then," he said, taking his seat.

Annie smiled. "Not at all. As long as we keep our voices down, you can both ask any questions you'd like."

Which was precisely what they did for the next fifty minutes or so. Then, at T minus nine minutes, a hold was put on the countdown and a waiting hush fell over the firing room. For the most part, the ground controllers sat at their stations in silent readiness. Across the room, however, the Mission Management Team--a group of key NASA officials and project engineers--began having quiet, serious discussions, a few reaching for telephones on their consoles.