It sounded like the title of a bad western. He supposed it was a hospital in Sacramento. He’d never been to Sacramento before. One of his reasons for wanting the shuttle mission was so he could see a little more of the States. He’d only been three times previously, and then never for long. As a child, growing up in the rapidly disappearing slums of east Edinburgh, he had dreamed of all this, of spacemen and of America, playing out the dream with toy spaceships that he would send hurtling to their doom.

‘The others …’ he began, but already the nurse had pushed at a buzzer above his bed. God, her body looked good, wrapped in the flimsiest layer of white cotton. He could almost taste … What was it he could taste in his mouth, right there behind the caked dryness and the lees of water?

It was smoke, blood, fear. And hands tearing at him. Why were hands tearing at him?

‘Good afternoon, Major Dreyfuss.’

A man in a white coat, stethoscope swinging reassuringly around his neck, had pushed open the door. Behind him came two others, one in a general’s uniform, the other looking like a worrier from the State Department. They stood slightly to left and right of the doctor, like tumours growing out of his sides. Good, thought Dreyfuss: his powers of description were coming back.

‘Hello,’ he said, but the doctor was studying his chart, and then studying the nurse. He smiled at her.

‘I don’t think I’ve seen you before, have I?’

She smiled back. ‘No, Doctor. The name’s Carraway.’

‘Well, Nurse Carraway, has the patient been behaving?’

‘Yes, Doctor.’ Now she was looking towards Dreyfuss, and there was that smile again. The doctor turned towards him too.

‘How do you feel?’

‘One hundred per cent, Doctor. When can I get up?’

The doctor laughed. ‘Not for a while yet, I’m afraid.’

‘What’s the rush?’ snapped the general. It was a serious question.

Dreyfuss closed his eyes.

‘I’ve had a relapse, Doc,’ he said. ‘I’m allergic to goons.’

‘Why, you sonofabitch—’ started the general, only to be stopped by the civilian’s upraised hand.

Dreyfuss opened his eyes and stared at the slats of the blind, trying to recall where he had seen that colour before, that golden colour, and heard those words before, too.

A ball of flame. Fuel igniting. And the voice of Hes Adams in his ear: you sonofabitch.

‘Leave him be, Ben,’ the civilian was saying. ‘He’s traumatised, probably doesn’t know what he’s saying.’

‘He knows all right.’

‘Come on,’ the civilian insisted, leading the general towards the door. ‘I’ll buy you a drink and you can bore me with the story of Bonn.’

The doctor watched them go and seemed to relax a little. He approached the bed.

‘Nice chaps,’ Dreyfuss commented. The doctor seemed not to understand, then smiled.