"All right, let me look," Shelly said. "KGB-FM. You're right. You've confirmed the slot?"

"The news manager says ten or fifteen minutes, but I'm sure it'll end up about thirty seconds."

"At least you'll reach the surfers. Maybe they haven't heard of you."

"If they haven't, it's not for want of your trying." He tried to put on a petulant tone. He was in fact quite tired; he was sixty-eight years old, after all, and while comparatively hale and hearty, Hicks was not used to such a schedule anymore. Ten years ago, he could have done it standing on his head.

"Now, now. Tomorrow we have you set up for that morning TV talk show."

"Confirmed, tomorrow morning. Live so they can't edit."

"Don't say anything rude," Shelly admonished him. This was hardly necessary. Trevor Hicks gave some of the most polite and erudite interviews imaginable. His public image was bright and stylishly rumpled; he resembled both Albert Einstein and a middle-aged Bertrand Russell; what he had to say was consensus technocracy, hardly controversial and always good for a short news item. He had founded the British chapter of the Trojans Society, devoted to space exploration and the construction of huge orbiting space habitats; he was a forty-seven-year member of the British Interplanetary Society; he had written twenty-three books, the most recent being Starhome, a novel about first contact; and last but not least, he was the most public spokesman in the so-called "civilian sector" for manned exploration of space. His was not quite a household name, but he was one of the most respected science journalists in the world. Despite spending twelve years in the United States, he had not lost his English accent. In short, for both radio and television he was a natural. Shelly had taken advantage of this by booking him on a generic "whirlwind" tour of seventeen cities in four weeks.

This week, he was in San Diego. He had not been in San Diego since 1954, when he had covered the flight trials of the first jet fighter seaplane, the Sea Dart, in San Diego Bay. The city had changed greatly since then; it was no longer a sleepy Navy town. He had been booked in the new and stylish Hotel Inter-Continental, on the harbor, and from his tenth-story window could see the entire bay.

In those years, he had been a wire service reporter with Reuters, concentrating on science stories whenever possible. The world, however, had seemed to fall into a deep and troubled sleep in the 1950s. Few of his science stories had received much attention. Science was equated with H-bombs; politics was the sexier and more easily encompassed subject of the time. Then he had flown to Moscow to cover an agricultural conference, as part of the background for a planned book on the Russian biologist Lysenko and the Stalinist cult of Lysenkoism. That had been in late September.

The conference had dragged on for five excruciatingly dull days, with no meat for his book and worse, no stories to convince Reuters he even had a clue as to why he was there. On the last day of the conference, news of the launch of the world's first artificial moon, a 184-pound silvery metal ball called Sputnik, had come just in time to save his career. Sputnik had returned science to the forefront of world journalism. Trevor Hicks had suddenly found his focus: space. He had buried his book on Lysenkoism and forged ahead without a backward glance.