Mitch plopped down in his chair, clicked through a few layers of folders on his Mac desktop, and brought a short document onto his computer screen.

It was a very short document -- that was all he'd written. This was July, the conference was September, and he had six weeks to write and polish the paper, get it through a tortuous approval cycle, and generate and rehearse a presentation.

Over the next two hours he made several trips between the coffee pot, the filing cabinet, and his desk, adding the men's room to his itinarary. It was hard-slogging work. He made two figures and a table. He formed phrases and sentences, paragraphs and sub-sections, sections and divisions, marching the words like soldiers down the page toward the grand fallacy that this paper would result in anything that would be read, understood, and appreciated by anyone other than Mitchel Harris and a score of other people in the world, most of them right here at The Lab.

He hated technical writing. It was one of the hardest things he'd ever done, yet he was better than most -- more readable than ninety-nine percent of all the other engineers and scientists that mutilated the language with excessive modifiers, passionless prose, dense logic, convoluted sentences, weak watered-down verbs, passive construction, arcane points of analysis ...

Only a handful of people would ever care about the contents of this paper. Why did he do it?

He didn't know, except ... maybe it was the technical work: the analysis itself -- the math, the computing, the observing and hypothesizing and iterative process of learning ...

No! He was going to a new world. He was on a mission, it was going to an asteroid, he was the navigator, and he would ride a spacecraft -- figuratively at least -- past the islands of the inner solar system to a tiny blip in the great ocean of space that nobody had ever seen up close before. That was why he did it. The tedious work on the computer screen in front of him was just one of the undesireable side effects. Someone had to write the paper. He was it.

He'd built up a full head of steam, generating two full pages of deathless technical prose -- three, if you count the figures and the table -- when the sleeping lab began to awaken and the normal morning hubub started chipping away at his attention.

Cathy-the-Secretary called: "Don't forget, I need your timecard today. Early." While Mitch tallied up his time and began to fill out the card, Roy White stopped by to chat in his interminable fashion, slouched just outside the doorway of Mitch's office, thumb parked on the lip of his coffee cup. Mitch felt the momentum draining away, like blood out of his head.

It was a blessing when the telephone rang ("'Scuse me a sec"), because it drove Roy away, but it was a curse, because Dave Steele, the mission engineer, wanted more orbit analysis done. While Mitch listened, his Mac beeped with new e-mail. He idly brought up the message while Dave droned in his ear and found that it contained a mandatory lab-wide survey. Fill in the squares. Due today.

The rest of what had begun as a promising early morning agenda expired little-by-little until it was dead, gummed to death by entropy. All momentum on the paper was lost. Mitch glanced at his watch and found that it was a few minutes after 10. "Damn!"

He grabbed a file folder containing the transparancies that he'd generated the night before and raced off to the large conference room down the hall. The meeting had already started and was filled almost to overflowing.

It was for Cassini, the other project Mitch worked on. Going to Saturn. Mitch had let himself be sweet-talked into doing some of the orbit analysis. "But don't let it interfere with Hokule`a," his supervisor had instructed. Right!

Mitch still marveled, after almost a decade at the Lab, that a roomful of apparently sober men and women could discuss a planet and its moons as if they were talking about a business venture -- as if designing a marketing strategy for women's apparel. Saturn! Really! And the satellites: Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys, Dione, Rhea, Titan, Hyperion, Iapetus, Phoebe, and clouds of assorted orbiting rocks, not to mention the rings. Here were people talking about outer space right down here on Earth.

Not that they couldn't make it boring. Mitch listened with half an ear, daydreaming about rockets and weightlessness while the first presenter buzzed on about the joys of telemetry data modes. He dozed a little, head bobbing up and down in random jerks, while the second presenter talked in exquisitely sonorous detail about spacecraft sequencing, using a long wooden pointer to tap here and there on slides filled with boxes and labels and arrows and bullets and graphs.

Then it was his turn to talk about the ephemeris work he'd done on Saturn's moons. All those children, a brood of siblings circling Saturn! Where were they? Exactly?

That was his job: track them down with a telescope, pin them against the stars, and project them years into the future, years forward in their orbits so that by the time Cassini got there, it would know where to find them.

At 12:35, Mitch carried his tray from the cafeteria to an outside table and sat down with his lunch bunch. Almost everyone was there. He wondered where Diana was until he remembered that she'd gone to Table Mountain the previous afternoon.

Pines and palms swayed in a breezy Southern California sky above seven engineers and scientists -- two women and five men -- who rubbed elbows and brains around a table built for six.

It was a boisterously eclectic bunch. They pounced on new topics like hockey players slapping at a free puck, or rival scavengers ripping the meat out of fresh carrion. They dissected fluctuations in the microwave background radiation and the Dow-Jones average; critiqued the long-term stability of the solar system and two-party politics; and chortled over the logical illogic of quantum mechanics and the judicial system. They cuffed around lawyers and politicians; sniggered at films, fashions, and UFO fanatics; and snorted at the effluvia of the media in general and talk-show hosts in particular. They laughed over Unix, militias, conspiracy theorists, religion, the Civil War, evolution, and OJ.

The conversation was usually good humored and frequently tongue-in-cheek, but few topics were sacred and few received praise, although the group did make a point once-in-a-while -- once a month whenever anyone remembered -- to declare a moratorium on excessive negativity and spend a lunch talking about half-full glasses and other happy things.

"Saw your Op-Ed piece in the Times a few days ago," Tryon Hill remarked to Mitch.

The vultures circled -- Mitch could hear the wind through their feathers. "And just when I thought I'd escaped alive," he said.

"Well written. Congratulations."

"Thanks."

"I hope they paid you."

"A little." Here it comes.

"Of course the premise was all wet," Cathy Boynton said.

"How's that?"

"Why do we need manned exploration of space? We learn everything we need to know by sending probes."

"Why? Really? I thought it was self-evident. We need an external goal, a frontier, a challenge. That's people, not machines. It's the difference between looking forward or looking backward. If we ..."

"Wait a minute, preacher," Joe Smith broke in, smiling unctiously. "The space program doesn't drive people. What drives people is greed. Or survival. Or sex. Your basic instincts, y'know, not high falutin' concepts like 'The New Frontier'."

"Yeah, Joe, 'basic' is the right word," Mitch laughed. "As in 'base'. But the new frontier did drive people when we had one. I mean the original one, 'the Great American West'. People wanted to go."

"Greed. They wanted land."

"Call it what you want, the frontier motivated them, it was someplace they could dream about, and if things weren't working out, they could pull up stakes and go."

"Sure." Lisa Sutton jumped in. "Like everybody can stake a plot on the moon if they want to. Grow vegetables, cattle, and kids."

"Well, I grant it's not possible right now, but someday we'll be able to ..."

"Bullshit."

"... someday, when we've got single stage to orbit and it's cheaper and easier to get up there ..."

"Dream on. Nobody gives a shit about space now that we're not competing with the Soviet Union anymore."

Mitch smiled and spread his arms wide, palms out. "Nail me to the cross, guys."

"That'll larn you to preach to the choir," Lisa teased. She reached around and patted his back.

Mitch smiled ruefully. "I hate to think what you'd do to me if you weren't the choir."

"Dream on, Mitch. Really. You're our resident space prophet. It's a nasty job, but somebody has to do it."

"People don't give a rat's ass about space," Brian Jones, the resident cynic, persisted. "All they want is scandals, circuses, and sex. Write about that, Mitch, and they'll pay you a lot more."

Mitch sighed. "Makes you pine for the good old days, doesn't it, when we had to win the big football game in the sky. Where are the meanies when you really need 'em?"

Fifty minutes whizzed by like nothing. By the time Mitch had to leave for his one-thirty meeting, the wind had picked up, and gusts blew napkins off the table.

On the way back to his office, Mitch stopped by his mail slot and found two letters. One looked like a conference announcement. The other was addressed in a hand-written, crabbed scrawl. No return address. Ah! The first mail for the Op-Ed. He flicked both letters across his chair onto the paper mountains rising out of his desk, risking that they'd be buried beneath an avalanch or lost forever in an unmapped ravine. He grabbed another manilla folder containing the transparancies he'd finished at eight o'clock the evening before ("When are you getting home?" Jennifer had called), and paced off toward the conference room.

He was about to answer the same question as in the first meeting: Where IS everything? Only the spacecraft and the destination were different. Four engineers sat around a small table in a small conference room, and asked "Where, exactly, is Nesbit in four years when Hokule`a arrives?"

Nesbit. An asteroid. A piece of solar system flotsam left over from the original debris, or maybe blasted off some larger body, orbiting endlessly along a pathway that, although invisible, was as real as an animal trail through the forest. Wait long enough and you'll see an animal come by.

The problem was, the trail was a little broad and fuzzy ... or rather their knowlege was broad -- the trail itself, obeying the laws of physics with perfect fidelity, was narrow and defined.

Hokulea would be launched in a little less than two years. On the way to her final destination, she passed through the main part of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. It would be a shame to miss a photo op.

Nesbit was a name that popped up a week earlier in a computer search for targets of opportunity. For the price of about a kilogram of Hokulea's precious maneuvering fuel, her path could be diverted slightly -- enough for a very nice close flyby. The question was, how close did they dare come?

Part of that question had to be answered by Mitch, but at the moment he couldn't answer it. He put up a transparancy that showed Earth in its circular orbit around the sun, Nesbit in its nearly circular orbit between Mars and Jupiter, and the smooth dotted trajectory of Hokulea connecting the two after looping around the sun twice, apparently flying right through the middle of the asteroid. He replaced the transparency with another that showed a blow-up of the encounter. The asteroid, still just a small dot at the center of the slide, was surrounded by a red error ellipse. Hokulea's trajectory was a straight line cutting through the ellipse.

Mitch stepped into the glare of the projector, throwing his shadow across Hokulea, and tapped the red oval with his pen. "That's about nine hundred kilometers. Not very good, but all we have is the discovery data from twelve years ago, and just two more sets of observation since then."

They wanted to fly by Nesbit close enough for pictures showing details down to one meter. That equated to two hundred kilometers distance. With an error of nine hundred kilometers, they could be on the wrong side of the asteroid, looking the wrong direction, clicking off hundreds of camera frames of empty space. Great resolution but lousy planning. Not acceptable.

"What if you get more observations?" Dave Steele asked.

"It improves, but we better do it right now since we're at the end of the current observing season. If we get just one night of observations right now, the error shrinks to less than a hundred and fifty kilometers, one sigma. In just a week, it starts getting lost in the twilight and there's no more opportunity until after launch."

Unlike most meetings, this one was blissfully short, and unlike most, this time Mitch had a clear sense of what was needed: more observations of Nesbit. He was it! He had to schedule some scope time.

He returned to his office, tossed the slides onto a pile on a shelf, went for a cup of coffee, and came back to stretch out for a minute in his rolling chair. He retrieved the two letters he'd tossed on his desk.

Just as he suspected, the first one advertised a conference, but not one he would have anticipated. It was from "The Committee to Welcome the Hokulea". Not spacecraft Hokulea, but the vessel it was named for, canoe Hokulea -- a double-hulled working replica of an ancient Polynesian sailing craft.

The letter began:

We take pleasure in offering you the opportunity to speak at a public celebration of the arrival of the Hokule`a in Long Beach next month. You were recommended to us by Tony Taylor, a former speaker from your organization ...

From the rest of the letter, it looked like it would be a big deal. There were a lot of organizations involved, most of them educational.

Mitch shook his head. I don't have TIME for another conference. Why did he do this to me? He made a mental note to complain tonight when he played tennis with Taylor.

He opened the other letter.

The scrawled handwriting on the envelope was repeated on a single folded sheet of paper inside. Mitch read it laboriously, stumbling over the crabbed lettering. Amazed, he read it two more times.

The Lord our God (His will be done) has looked with disfavor on your article in the Los Angeles Times and appointed me to rehabilitate you and bring you to the Light. There is no personal redemption without the Lord (our Savior), and no escaping His wise and just punishment for the unrepentent. Therefore, to show that you are willing to accept him and his jugement, you are instructed to write a retraction of your article in a letter to the editor within two weeks. Otherwise his wrath will be visited upon you.

The Lord's Humble Servant

EF

Mitch frowned and looked at the envelope again for a return address. None. Then he laughed. A fruitcake! Well, at least somebody read his Op-Ed, but this wasn't the reaction he'd expected. What this nutcase had found offensive in the article was a mystery not explained in the letter. What the hell was he supposed to retract?

While he mused, his Mac beeped. More mail. He brought up the incoming message panel.

Diana! From Table Mountain.

Mitch -

I'm moving my observation schedule around. Do you want my scope time until 1 tonite? Yes or no? (The price is one full day of your time next month. We can negotiate later.)

- Diana

Perfect! It didn't need a lot of thought. He moused on the "reply" button:

Diana,

Yes, yes, yes!

Love,

Mitch

He tossed both letters into his briefcase, pulled the overnight duffel bag containing a toilet kit and extra clothes that he kept for just such occasions out from the corner, left a voice mail for Cathy-the-Secretary, and walked to the west parking lot against the wind, which had picked up a little more since lunch, lugging the bag and his briefcase with him. He plopped the briefcase into the passenger seat of his jeep, hefted the bag into the back, and drove off.

Passing through the gate, he noticed that a demonstration was in progress just outside the lab. Maybe thirty people lined one side of Oak Grove Drive with placards and banners fluttering in the gusts:

He smiled and shook his head in wonder. All that misdirected fervor! It's like a religion. Here are some seriously underemployed people.

He drove south on Oak Grove, turned right on Berkshire, and came to the Foothill Freeway. Now he had a choice: go left on the conservative route by freeway out by San Bernadino -- easy but boring -- or go right on the winding scenic route up the Angeles Crest Highway and through the thick of the San Gabriel mountains -- hard but interesting. Either way took the same time.

Scenic. He went right.

Driving west on the freeway, he fumbled in his briefcase, pulled out his cellular phone, and punched in a number. It rang twice:

"Hello."

"Tony?"

"Yes?"
"Mitch. I'm on my way up to Table Mountain. I'm afraid I have to cancel tennis tonight."

Tony Taylor laughed. "Another excuse, eh? I'm beginning to wonder. Well, how about next week, same time?"

"Maybe. I mean I'm not ..."

"Chicken?"

"No way. OK, OK, you're on."

"Good. A new victim."

Mitch took the Highway 2 North off-ramp. "Speaking of victims, I see you volunteered me for the Hokule`a conference."

"Hmm, I guess so. I spoke for them a few years ago and they asked if I knew anybody as articulate and charismatic as I'd been. I couldn't think of anybody, so I gave them your name on a whim."

"Thanks. Thanks a lot."

"You don't have to do it, you know."

"Right. I don't have to."

"But knowing you, you probably will, huh?"

"Yeah, knowing me, I probably will."

"Good. You'll like it."

As his jeep pulled up the long straight stretch toward the foothills, buffeted by the ever-increasing wind, he made another call.

"Jennifer?"

"Oh, hi, Mitch. What a surprise. You hardly ever call me from work."

"I'm not at work, Jen. I'm driving up to Table Mountain."

There was a long silence.

"Jen? Jennifer?" He looked at the phone to see if it was still working.

"God DAMN it Mitch! So what do we do about the party at the Williamses tonight? Do I call them and tell them that you're just too damn busy to come to their unimportant little ole party."

Party? Oh no! He'd blown it two ways. Not only had he forgotten about the party, he'd scheduled a tennis match on top of it.

"Well, I, uh, I uh, ..."

"You've got your head in the Goddamn clouds again, Mitch. No. I won't call them. I'll go, and tell them in person what an asshole you are. And then I'll have a good time! They have such great parties, there's always a lot of attractive men on the make. I probably won't get lonely."

"Wait a minute, Jennifer, I didn't plan this, it popped up, and ..."

"Get fucked, Mitch. Or maybe I'll get fucked. This could be fun!"

"Jennifer, I'll make it up to you, I promise."

There was a long silence again. Again, Mitch looked at the phone to see if it was working. This time, it really wasn't. The battery was dead.

"Ohh." He moaned and put his hand to his head. He tossed the phone back into the briefcase and stewed. He turned off the air conditioning, rolled down the window, and let the wind blow through his hair. The first curve of the foothills came up and he was into the winding, twisty part of the Angeles Crest Highway. He turned on the radio and punched a channel.

"... the Truth Network. And here's the truth about all you weasel-faced liberals listening in ..."

Guy Conners, the Rush Limbaugh wannabe! This was the first time Mitch had tuned in since he'd been a guest on the program himself. He listened briefly to Conner's unique blend of buffoonery and demogogery, but he wasn't in the mood for it. He punched the scan button.

The next station played classical music. It was dull, pompous Sunday afternoon stuff, the kind he used to hate when he was a kid because he'd come to associate it with the end of the weekend and the end of fun. His finger found the scan button again as the jeep squeeled around a turn.

He was going a lot faster that he ought to. The wind was blowing up a gale, too, shaking the jeep. He looked up. At least it would clear out the smog, but if it didn't settle down by evening, seeing would be bad and he might end up wasting a night on the telescope.

The next station was country western. That lasted three seconds before he punched again, and heard a man shouting on the radio in a cadence, voice rising and falling in a heavy up-down rhythm:

"... and we CANNOT allow our VALUES to be TRASHED and our FAITH to be MOCKED ..."

Oh God! A religious freak show. On another day, Mitch might have listened for amusement, but today all he wanted was mindless music. His finger searched for the scan button while he negotiated another curve.

"... MOCKED by the ELITISTS of the MEDIA, the false PROPHETS of the FUTURE, by LEFTISTS and LIBERALS and LIARS like MITCHEL HARRIS ..."

Mitch's eyes dialated violently. His jaw dropped open. He nearly drove right off the side of the road into empty space before cutting the wheels into the turn, tires complaining loudly to the pavement.

"Oh, my God."