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Hudson brace drill. I’ll do the burr holes myself.” He saw the nurses’ startled looks, and added, with more bravado than he was feeling, “It’s like drilling holes wall. I’ve done it before.” While the nurses prepped the newly shorn scalp, Jack put on a surgical gown and snapped on gloves. He positioned the sterile drapes and was amazed to find his hands were still steady, even while his heart was racing. It was true he had drilled burr holes before, but only once, and it was years ago, under the supervision of a neurosurgeon.
    There’s no more time. She’s dying. Do it.
    He reached for the scalpel and made a linear incision in the scalp, over the left temporal bone. Blood oozed out. He sponged away and cauterized the bleeders. With a retractor holding back the skin flap, he sliced deeper through the galea and reached the pericranium, which he scraped back, exposing the skull surface.
    He picked up the Hudson brace drill. It was a mechanical device, powered by hand and almost antique looking, the sort of tool you might find in your grandfather’s woodshop. First he used the perforator, a spade-shaped drill bit that dug just deeply into the bone to establish the hole. Then he changed to the rose bit, round-tipped, with multiedged burrs. He took a deep breath, positioned the bit, and began to drill deeper. Toward the brain. beads of sweat broke out on his forehead. He was drilling without CT confirmation, acting purely on his clinical judgment. He did even know if he was tapping the right spot.
    A sudden gush of blood spilled out of the hole and splattered the surgical drapes.
    A nurse handed him a basin. He withdrew the drill and watched as a steady stream of red drained out of the skull and gathered in a glistening pool in the basin. He’d tapped the right place.
    With every trickle of blood, the pressure was easing from Debbie Haning’s brain.
    He released a deep breath, and the tension suddenly eased from his shoulders, leaving his muscles spent and aching.
    “Get the bone wax ready,” he said. Then he put down the drill and reached for the suction catheter.
     
    A white mouse hung in midair, as though suspended in a transparent sea.
    Dr. Emma Watson drifted toward it, slender-limbed and graceful as an underwater dancer, the curlicue strands of her dark brown hair splayed out in a ghostly halo. She grasped the mouse and slowly spun around to face the camera. She held up a syringe and needle.
    The footage was over two years old, filmed aboard the shuttle Atlantis during STS 141, but it remained Gordon Obie’s favorite PR film, which is why it was now playing on all the video monitors in NASA’s Teague Auditorium. Who wouldn’t enjoy watching Emma Watson? She was quick and lithe, and she possessed what one could only call sparkle, with the fire of curiosity in her eyes.
    From the tiny scar over her eyebrow, to the slightly chipped front tooth a souvenir, he’d heard, of reckless skiing) her face was record of an exuberant life. But to Gordon, her primary appeal her intelligence. Her competence. He had been following Emma’s NASA career with an interest that had nothing to do with the fact she was an attractive woman.
    As director of Flight Crew Operations, Gordon Obie wielded considerable power over crew selection, and he strove to maintain a safe—some would call it heartless—emotional distance from all his astronauts. He had been an astronaut himself, twice a shuttle commander, and even then he’d been known as the Sphinx, an aloof and mysterious man not given to small talk. He was comfortable with his own silence and relative anonymity.
    Although he was now sitting onstage with an array of NASA officials, most of the people in the audience did not know who Gordon Obie was. He was here merely for set decoration. Just as the footage of Emma Watson was set decoration, an attractive face to hold the audience’s interest.
    The video suddenly ended, replaced on the screen with the NASA logo,