behind him.
Mo grinned and whispered, âLBJ, LBJ, how many kids did you save today?â
Seth shushed him. âThose TV lights, though. Johnson doesnât even look like heâs sweating.â
âThatâs make-up for you,â Sheridan murmured. âBelieve me, heâs sweating on the inside. He doesnât want to be the president who failed to stop the end of the world. On the other hand heâs not going to stand again in â68, you know. And who is his most likely successor for the Democrat nomination?â
âBobby Kennedy,â Mo breathed. âWhose guts LBJ hates. And who he just named as his Icarus czar.â
âLBJ! What a guy! With one bound heâs taking credit for establishing NASA, which is now going to save the world, heâs defusing the Cold War by inviting the Russians to join in, and heâs making sure his most realistic successor for the presidency is going to spend the next year staring at rocket equations instead of campaigning.â
Now the President had finished speaking, and faced a clamour of questions from the floor.
Sheridan put his heavy arms around the astronautsâ shoulders. âSo thatâs that. Now letâs get out of here and go find Deke Slayton. I got another assignment for you two . . .â
TWO
----
ADAM
2107â2199
8
There was a game he liked to play, every time the medics brought him back to consciousness. Could he tell where he was, just from the nerve signals reaching his brain?
Earth was easy. If he woke up sensing a one-gravity pull, it could only be one place in the solar system. There were other places with close-enough gravitational pullsâthe surface of Venus, the outer atmospheric layers of Saturnâbut there were certainly no cybernetic surgical clinics there. Of course, he had rarely been back to Earth itself since that decades-ago drama on the Sam Shore . Times had changed; the public mood now tended to regard him as a disturbing relic from the past, and when he was in the vicinity of his home world he felt a lot more comfortable staying in the elderly elegance of Port Van Allen, a thousand kilometres out in space. And, with time, Hope Dhoni had acknowledged the growing prejudice and transferred the supervision of Falconâs treatment and recovery to a medical facility at Aristarchus Base, on the surface of the Moon. But even that had not lasted long before Hope felt obliged to move her entire clinic and team out to the burgeoning human settlement on Ceres.
So, was he on the asteroid now? The gravitational pull was certainly too low for Earth or Moon, but not weak enough for Ceres. Titan, perhaps?There were settlements on Saturnâs moon, certainly, but that chill satellite was an unnecessarily cumbersome setting for a clinic. Callisto, moon of Jupiter? A moon with a significant and permanent human presenceâthe largest in Jovian space aside from Ganymedeâlying safely outside the giant planetâs radiation belts. There was a scientific facility there, at Tomarsuk Station; Hope had mentioned it, for her daughter was there, studying the biochemistry of the subsurface ocean. But no, this felt weaker even than Callisto. Somewhere else againâfurther out still . . . ?
âHoward? Can you hear me? Itâs Hope. Iâve just reconnected your auditory and vocal circuits. See if you can respond.â
âYouâre coming through loud and clear.â
âHow do you feel?â
âConfused. Adrift. In other words, same as usual.â
âThatâs helpful. Were you dreaming?â
He had been, he realised. âJust remembering a day I made a snowman. Or tried to.â
Falcon heard the clatter of a keyboard, the beep of a stylus. âIâm going to switch on your vision in a moment. If youâre able, lock onto my face.â
âYou make me sound like a weapons system.â
There was an intrusion of brightness,
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