"Just click your heels together three times and say there's no place like Betelgeuse," Annie Caulfield muttered dryly to herself, aware she was about to make one of the most crucial decisions of her life. Immersed in thought, she sat looking out her office window at the tram that was moving across the JSC's landscaped grounds as it delivered personnel and visitors to its various installations. Then she rotated her swivel chair and began absently studying the three framed photos on her otherwise bare desk. By chance the first one her eye fell upon was of her parents, Edward and Maureen, an 8 x 10 taken five years ago at a party to celebrate their fortieth wedding anniversary.

Annie smiled a little. Their preferred travel itineraries aside, she'd had a thing or two in common with Dorothy in her formative years, being an only child whose beginnings had been in rural Kansas. Her father had operated a one-man air transport service, and their family had lived so close to the airfield where he'd hangared his rattletrap Cessna that Annie could observe his take-offs and landings from her second-floor bedroom window.

Perhaps that had been what eventually led to her interest in sky-watching, she didn't know, but when she was coming up on her eighth birthday Annie had asked for and received an inexpensive 60mm Meade refraction telescope for her gift, along with a Carl Sagan Cosmosphere that she had used to locate the planets, constellations, and galaxies from her porch on countless spring and summer evenings, Dad helping her level and rotate the tube on its tripod until she was old enough to manage it by herself. Seven years later he'd helped her accomplish another of her goals in the same attentive, patient way and given her flying lessons. By the time she was eighteen Annie had earned her license and was making air runs for him during breaks from school.

It seemed a sure thing in hindsight that her obsessions with astronomy and flying would converge into a desire to become an astronaut, though her decision to start her career by joining the Air Force had come as a total surprise to her mother and father. It had also been a source of great anxiety to them given the potential risks of warfare, risks that seemed particularly high in an age of limited regional conflicts for which the military relied heavily, and often exclusively, upon airpower to achieve their precision objectives. But her proficiency in the cockpit during her years of active duty had convinced her she could cut it with NASA, and Annie had submitted her application to its Astronaut Selection Office long before her F-16 Fighting Falcon was reduced to burning scrap metal while on a surveillance mission over northern Bosnia.