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he'd been diagnosed with a rare form of cancer. So Owen joined the team. The oldest member of the crew at
forty-three, though he was in the most enviable physical shape of
any of them.
    He was also the only member of the crew to have left behind
an immediate family on Earth. On a long-term mission where the
crewmemhers were largely chosen based on their marital and social
status-or rather, their lack thereof-a team member with a wife and
young son who would have to live without him for two and a half
years for the sake of a mission was a hard sell to the public. NASA
argued that Owen's value to the team overrode all other concerns,
but that hadn't stopped the press from being particularly hard on
Owen and his family leading up to the mission's launch, invading
their privacy and labeling Owen as "the ultimate workaholic" and
"NASA's deadbeat dad."
    And those were the nicer headlines.
    Chris, who had personally chosen Owen's predecessor Mitchell
Dodd as his mission specialist, had been strongly opposed to Owen's
appointment at first, since NASA had overridden his authority and
insisted that Owen be added to the crew. Apparently they'd discovered him teaching at a small university, and his extraordinary mind
made him their new golden boy, an overnight sensation. But despite
the crew's early misgivings, Owen quickly earned their respect and trust by training alongside them day and night, putting in extra hours
to catch up to their levels of aptitude, giving one hundred and ten
percent during the mission, and never once complaining about the
realities of space travel.

    Chris noticed that Owen had sweat beads on his bald head, even
though his brawny frame was in optimum physical shape. It would
have taken more than the bulk of Owen's space suit to cause him to
perspire this much.
    "You-you carried me here from the runway? All by yourself?"
Chris said.
    "It was the closest shelter. That I could easily break into, anyway."
Owen nodded at the wall of glass windows and Chris noticed that
at the bottom right corner, a single pane had been shattered, tiny
pieces all over the floor.
    Chris nodded, then tore into one of the bags of cookies. A small
part of him didn't care if they turned out to be stale or not; it would
he the first time he'd had real cookies in more than two and a half
years. Much longer than that, in fact the crew's preflight training
had lasted more than two years itself, and his diet had been strictly
monitored in all that time.
    "Where are the others?" he asked with a mouthful of cookie,
looking around.
    "Firing Room. We'll meet them there once you've had a chance
to get your footing. I found a tour bus outside that has enough juice
to get us there. Trisha wants to get on the radio and see if she can
reach anyone. She also said something about reviewing whatever
video we can find, to see if we can turn up some clues about ...
what's happened."
    Chris nodded that this was a good idea, though he wondered
just how long he'd been unconscious, if this many things had been
decided without him. But then his thoughts returned to the crash and
how they'd emerged from it to find Kennedy Space Center completely
deserted. What was going on here? Was it just Kennedy, or ... ?

    No, he had to push all such fears aside. There was still a chain
of command, even when nothing made any sense, and he was still
at the top of it.
    "I don't need to wait. I'm fine," Chris said, already getting up.
"Never better."
    Owen rose beside him. "No one suspected otherwise, Commander," he assured him with sincerity.

    Trisha and Terry rounded a corner and opened the double doors
to Firing Room #2. It was one of two such control chambers located
inside the Launch Control Center, a long, narrow edifice adjacent
to the colossal Vehicle Assembly Building. Like most structures at
Kennedy, the LCC had lots of straight, clean lines and retro white
elegance. Its entire back side was covered with slanted windows