But that was a lot of crap, Muldoon thought. After all both Soyuz and Moonlab/Apollo technologies were ten years old; what the hell was there to steal? Besides, Carter and Ted Kennedy were putting a lot of muscle behind this trip; for Carter, the Moonlab stunt — originally a scheme of Nixon’s — had become a way of symbolizing his achievement in getting the Soviets to sign up for the SALT II treaty.

Sometimes, Muldoon felt bewildered by the pace of change; it seemed to accelerate as he got older.

“You know, Vladimir, we’ve been working on this program for a couple of years now, but it still seems odd to me sometimes that here we are, you and I, drinking vodka together in a Moscow bar. Even one run by the KGB.”

“How so?”

“If things had turned out differently, I might have found myself flying solo into Moscow with two nukes strapped under my wings, instead of my pajamas and toothbrush.”

“Nukes,” Viktorenko said. “Indeed. And now we are comrades again. But that is what makes us unique, men like you and I, Joe. We are aviators. We rise to our mission, whatever it may be. To the edge of the envelope, and beyond. Once our mission was to ferry nukes. And now our mission is to shake hands in space. And that we will do, as well as we can. These others — the paper-pushers, even the engineers: these others can never understand such things. It has always been so.

“Why, I remember my induction into the Vostok program,” he said. “I was put into an isolation chamber. A box. For several weeks. And then a thermal chamber, and then a decompression chamber. And then, straightaway, I was taken to the airport, put on a plane, and ordered to parachute back to Earth. The doctors, the quacks, justified such treatment by saying they needed to know how I would react on the abrupt change from an enclosed cabin to the boundlessness of infinite space. Ha.”

“Colonel Muldoon. Lieutenant Colonel Viktorenko. Good to see you here…”

It was Fred Michaels. The NASA Administrator stood not two feet away from Muldoon, his jowls peppered lightly with sweat; behind him Muldoon recognized the assistant administrator, Josephson, the quintessential paper-pusher.

Viktorenko made Michaels effusively welcome and insisted on pouring him and Josephson slugs of vodka.

Tim Josephson drew Muldoon away from the others. “I’m sorry to bother you with this now, Joe. But we need a decision from your crew tonight.”

“On what?”