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downtown I found Max and Lance camped out up in accounting. Business was still streaming in; Max had Lance shunting in overload invoice servers into the corporate mainframe. Max was filled with enthusiasm for the judge’s journey as payload on the third rocket, but guarded about the details, as if he didn’t trust me with them. A marketing vision of cosmic proportions danced in his eyes: GD’s greatest triumph, he told me, the beginning of a whole new range of franchise-level services, symbolic of his joining with Lance.
    Then fires began to smoke the atmosphere. From the eightieth floor window I watched a sooty cloud rise from South Central, then a fireline start further south, by Long Beach Harbor, where Nomads lived on boats. The winds were pulling the smoke across the whole basin. Even as I watched, a string of brush fires ignited above Malibu.
    That’s when we flew to Mauna Kea, Unix and I.
    * * *
    Since the late 20th Century, Mauna Kea has been the premier optical and infrared red imaging site on the globe. Fourteen thousand feet high, isolated by thousands and thousands of miles of Pacific Ocean from the nearest landmass, Mauna Kea is impacted only by air pollution downstream from China, a high mustard haze which that week had slowly dissolved into nothingness.
    It is a rugged site, rust-red and black with lava ash and boulders, the fixed observatories on their little knolls, a gravel road winding up from the astronomer’s quarters a few thousand feet below. I found out I could image from the summit itself, a cinder cone just east of the large instruments. Unix and I staked out a spot and I deployed my small imaging package on the night we arrived. By midnight I’d set celestial coordinates, and we settled in.
    We had a little self-erecting tent and good down bags, picnic hampers of food, our own satlink to watch the madness back on the mainland. But mostly we watched the sky, rich with stars, the great silver swipe of Virgilius Maro wide across the heavens, Mars and Venus bumping one another on the horizon, as if jostling to get out of the way. The firmament seemed a vast deep blue bowl; up there, with the sky so clear and nothing around you, you feel yourself suspended in space, a cosmic traveler.
    We thought we could make out the launch of the Vandenberg rocket, its passage through the ionosphere. “Uncle’s up there,” I heard Unix whisper in wonder.
    Unix and I grew very close. Our zipped-together bags made a womb from which we emerged only late on the final day.
    As you know the nuke merely turned Virgilius Maro off course. It wasn’t the way it might have been in an old SF movie, blowing up. No, that would have sent fragments in the direction of Earth. Rather, it was a flash, albeit a diamond bright human flash, and then the turning, the quickening across the sky.
    I don’t mean to diminish it. What a night that was: the thrill of the comet turning, the colors spreading across the heavens, refracted light in bands of red and orange and water blue, Unix against my side, my equipment whirring. . . . It was lovelier, and more dangerous, than any other moment I have experienced.
    The comet streaked across the sky, some cosmic fulfillment, an instrument, a sign of change for myself, for the world I lived in. As the rocket had slivered into the comet’s albedo, as the nuke had blossomed, as the shifting colors had climaxed, I’d tracked the nearby click of servos and the squeaks of optical drives to confirm my hopes: my equipment had grabbed just the right fourteen seconds.
    In the ensuing silence we stood there, Unix and I, our breaths vaporizing before us, the cold rock hard beneath our feet, our hearts beating together. I cannot tell you how happy I felt at that moment, how fulfilled.
    My pager hummed against my heart.
    I took the call through the backup monitor on my imaging equipment, my chilly fingers fumbling with the thin lead. Keesha was on the tiny screen. She looked stricken.
    She was