travel by the world's governments. The younger people didn't remember that time and the older ones could still recall the good old days.
Isadora wasn't impressed. 'What sort of blue-jean space program is this?' she demanded.
'You weren't even around when they tried to make it look glamorous, kid. Space travel is just trucking companies now.'
She folded her arms, walking in that way until she realized how silly it made her look. 'My mom's
walked on the moon. She told me he was one of the Twelve.'
I nodded without paying any attention. Out of one of the building's sliding doors I caught another glimpse of the spacecraft standing tall in the last light of day. The top half caught the darkening red colors that had already passed from the canyon floor. The gantry lights came on just then, small points of tungsten white and sodium orange that glowed like Disneyland. I lost sight of it when we stepped through a pair of doors into Flight Prep.
Gunther was an old man in a tattered lab coat who moved with painfully slow steps.
'You four?' he asked with a trace of a German accent. His hair possessed the texture and color of cirrus clouds under bright sunlight. Beneath skin as tight and aged as a fine old leatherbound book, two bright points of joy twinkled in his gaze. He bent over Isadora.
'I'd wondered for whom was the little monkey suit.' He chucked her chin, laughing pleasantly. I hadn't seen a chin chucked in two decades.
She almost bit his knuckles apart. 'Keep your mitts off, pervo. What I've got you can't afford.'
'What you've got,' he said with a mildly stern expression, 'wouldn't draw interest even if you could bank it.'
'Sir,' Bridget interrupted, 'we are in quite a hurry, according to Mr. Ammo. Please explain what you would like us to do.'
The old coot straightened up to look at her. You could have heard the violins playing.
'Yes,' he said when he'd caught his breath. 'Why, yes. Of course.'
The flight suits hanging on the rack weren't the cumbersome, bulky, outrageously expensive abominations that NASA had utilized to the bitter end. 'Pork barrels,' Gunther referred to them ungraciously. Our flight suits were composed of just a couple of layers of tight black material that-except for the helmet ring at the neck-looked more like tailor-made wetsuits than like space gear. Our names had been embroidered in gold thread on the left shoulder.
Gunther handed them to us with polite ceremony. First Bridget, then Ann, then the kid. Finally, he handed me mine. Some joker had sewn GodKiller patches over the left breast of each outfit. I had to admit they looked good.
Gunther politely turned his back to the three women. 'I apologize for the lack of dressing facilities,' he said.
I turned my back to all four of them. The kid horselaughed behind me. Bridget shushed her.
'Are you two men Victorians?' Bridget asked.
'We are apparently both gentlemen,' Gunther replied.
The old woman huffed. 'Gentlemen do not ignore a woman's body as if it were something hideous.'
Gunther turned around halfway through the sentence to do his best at ogling. And the way in which the suits had been constructed gave him plenty of time both to sightsee and render assistance.
The phone rang. Gunther reached it on the third jangle.
'Are you certain?' was all he asked. After a pause, he cradled the phone. Off in the distance a claxon alarm blasted.
'I'm afraid,' he said, 'that you have just seven minutes left on earth.'
'
' we said, almost as one.
