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military type, with a round, blond head, shaven at the neck, eyes as blue as windows.
    Benacerraf was kitted out for the landing, in her altitude protection suit with its oxygen equipment, parachutes, life-raft and survival equipment. She was strapped to her seat, a frame of metal and canvas. Her helmet visor was closed.
    She had felt safe on orbit, cocooned by the Shuttle’s humming systems and whirring fans. Even the energies of launch had become a remote memory. But now it was time to come home. Now, rocket engines had to burn to knock Columbia out of orbit, and then the orbiter would become a simple glider, shedding its huge orbital energy in a fall through the atmosphere thousands of miles long, relying on its power units to work its aerosurfaces.
    They would get one try only. Columbia had no fuel for a second attempt.
    Benacerraf folded her hands in her lap and watched the pilots, following her own copy of the checklist, boredom competing with apprehension. It was, she thought, like going over the lip of the world’s biggest roller-coaster.
    On the morning of Columbia’ s landing at Edwards, Jake Hadamard flew into LAX.
    An Agency limousine was waiting for him, and he was driven out through the rectangular-grid suburbs of LA, across the San Gabriel Mountains, and into the Mojave. His driver—a college kid from UCLA earning her way through an aeronautics degree—seemed excited to have NASA’s Administrator in the back of her car, and she wanted to talk, find out how he felt about the landing today, the latest Station delays, the future of humans in space.
    Hadamard was able to shut her down within a few minutes, and get on with the paperwork in his briefcase.
    He was fifty-two. And he knew that with his brushed-back silver-blond hair, his high forehead and his cold blue eyes—augmented by the steel-rimmed spectacles he favoured—he could look chilling, a whiplash-thin power from the inner circles of government. Which was how he thought of himself.
    The paperwork—contained in a soft screen which he unfolded over his knees—was all about next year’s budget submission for the Agency. What else? Hadamard had been Administrator for three years now, and every one of those years, almost all his energy had been devoted to preparing the budget submission: trying to coax some kind of reasonable data and projections out of the temperamental assholes who ran NASA’s centers, then forcing it through the White House, and through its submission to Congress, and all the complex negotiations that followed, before the final cuts were agreed.
    And that was always the nature of it, of course: cuts.
    Hadamard understood that.
    Jake Hadamard, NASA Administrator, wasn’t any kind of engineer, or aerospace nut. He’d risen to the board of a multinational supplier of commodity staples—basic foodstuffs, bathroom paper, soap and shampoo. High-volume, low differentiation; you made your profit by driving down costs, and keeping your prices the lowest in the marketplace. Hadamard had achieved just that by a process of ruthless vertical integration and horizontal acquisition. He hadn’t made himself popular with the unions and the welfare groups. But he sure was popular with the shareholders.
    After that he’d taken on Microsoft, after that company had fallen on hard times, and Bill Gates was finally deposed and sent off to dream his Disneyland dreams. By cost-cutting, rationalization and excising a lot of Gates’s dumber, more expensive fantasies—and by ruthlessly using Microsoft’s widespread presence to exclude the competition, so smartly and subtly that the antitrust suits never had a chance to keep up—Hadamard had taken Microsoft back to massive profit within a couple of years.
    With a profile like that, Hadamard was a natural for NASA Administrator, in these opening years of the third millennium.
    And even in his first month he’d won a lot of praise from the White House for the way he’d beat up on the United Space