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three-by-three window opened and I saw the head and shoulders of a
very, very fat man about my mother's age. He had to weigh in at five
hundred pounds. SpaceScuttlebutt.com was as close as he'd ever get to
space and he knew it. He lived his spacegoing fantasies online, and his
knowledge was encyclopedic. I had no idea where he lived or what his
real name was, but his handle was Piginspace. A man with no illusions.
I was lucky to have run into him.
    "Broussard-san heap big bad medicine, Spacemanny," he said through
the tiny built-in speaker on my antique laptop. "Bad juju. Say his name
at Kennedy, you must leave the room, spin around twice, and spit."
    He talked like that sometimes. He enjoyed having information someone
else was looking for, and sometimes made you jump through hoops to get
it. But not this time.
    "I see he got a medal for an emergency landing. What do you know about that?"
    "Everything, my lad, the Pig knows everything. Knows all, tells...
well, whatever he feels young minds can safely handle. Short version...
it was early days in the second generation of the VStar program. The
Mark II had just received its spaceworthiness certificate from NASA.
Some of the jockeys felt there were a few bugs still to be worked out,
but the mandarins decreed it should be pressed into service most
tickety-boo."
    The VStar II
California
was less than an hour away from its
de-orbit burn when there was an explosion followed by a fire. The cabin
began to fill with smoke. Much of the cockpit electronics went down.
    Travis, working from what NASA called "hard copies"—tech
manuals and maps—and with only minimal help from his crashing
computers, fired the de-orbit engines within three minutes of the
explosion.
    There were three airfields designated by NASA as "trans-Atlantic
abort" sites, at Moron, Spain; Banjul, The Gambia; and Ben Guenir,
Morocco. None of them had ever been used, and in fact there was nothing
to recommend them other than a runway long enough for the old Shuttle's
landing rollout. For that purpose, Cairo would have been a better
choice, and Travis looked at it briefly, but it was too far north of
his path.
    Moron, Banjul, and Ben Guenir were already almost beneath him.
Impossible to turn and glide back with the VStar's steep angle of
descent.
    Johannesburg was too far south. Nairobi was too far east.
    He came out of the fireball hoping to make Entebbe in Uganda... but
he couldn't see anything. The ship was filled with dense smoke. They
all would have been unconscious or dead without the emergency oxygen
masks. He had to find a way to clear the smoke from the cabin.
    "He brought it down to about forty thousand and had another problem.
How do you make a hole to the outside, when the whole vehicle is
designed to prevent that? Can't open the door against the cabin
pressure. Can't even use the emergency explosive hatch bolts without
disarming a safety system, which was no longer disarmable because of
all four computers going down.
    "But he did punch a hole in a window, and the smoke got sucked out.
So there he was, twenty thousand feet over the jungles of central
Africa. Nothing but green, far as the eye could see. No hope of making
it to Entebbe. Very little maneuverability in the VStar, even when
things are going right. There were enough hydraulics surviving to steer
the beast, a little, and that was about all he had going to him.
    "So he rocked it to the left, looked out the window, and put the
damn thing through a three-sixty roll, which no one had ever tested in
a wind tunnel but anybody in his right mind would have said couldn't be
done. While he was upside down he spotted a line of red earth through
the trees, almost directly below him. Might be a runway, might not. He
put the ship into a turn twice as tight as the manufacturer
recommended, pulled about seventeen gees for a few seconds, blacked out
along with everybody else... and when he came to, lined the ship up
toward the red line.
    "Turns out it was a runway,