He had shed a wife—there really was no kinder word for it—in 1965, and had lived with and broken up with three women since. Currently, he was a confirmed bachelor, though he had fancied the reporter from National Geographic he had met at the Galileo flyby celebration in Pasadena last year. She had not fancied him.

Trevor Hicks was not just accumulating a greater store of historical memories; he was growing old. His hair was solidly gray. He kept in shape as best he could, but . . .

He drew the draperies on the bay and the glittering, Disneylandish conglomeration of shops and restaurants called Seaport Village.

His portable computer sat silent on the room's maple-veneer desk, its unfolded screen filled with black characters on a cream background. The screen looked remarkably like a framed sheet of typing paper. Hicks sat on the chair and gnawed a callus on the first knuckle of his middle finger. He had gained that callus, he thought idly, from thousands of hours with pencil in hand, taking notes that he could now just as easily type on the lap-sized computer. Many younger reporters did not have calluses on their middle fingers.

"That's it," he said, turning the machine off and pushing the chair back. "Nothing for it. Chuck it." He closed the screen and put on his shoes. The evening before, he had seen an old sailing ship and a maritime museum on the wharf, just a short hike.

Whistling, he locked the hotel room behind him and walked on powerful short legs down the hallway.

"What do you expect mankind to find in space, Mr. Hicks?" asked the news manager, a young, bushy-haired man in his late twenties. The microphone on its tilting arm and spring suspension poked up under Hicks's nose, forcing him to lift his chin slightly to speak. Hicks dared not adjust it now; it was live. The interview was being taped on an ancient black and gray reel-to-reel deck behind the news manager.

"The war for resources is hotting up," Hicks said. More romance than that. "The sky is full of metals, iron and nickel and even platinum and gold . . . Flying mountains called asteroids. We can bring those mountains to Earth and mine them in orbit. Some of them are almost pure metal."

"But what would convince, say, a teenage boy or girl to study for a career in space?"

"They have a choice," Hicks said, still cold to the microphone and the interviewer, his mind elsewhere. Call it a reporter's instinct, but he had been feeling uneasy for days. "They can elect to stay on Earth and live an existence, a life, very little different from the lives their parents led, or they can try their wings on the high frontier. I don't need to convince the young folks out there who are really going into space in the next ten or twenty years. They know already."

"Preaching to the choir?" the news manager asked.