TCT

They bugged  the wrong  phone  during  the May  1972  Watergate break-in. It was  just  a secretary's  phone  mostly  used  by staffers to order Chinese food, not the one actually used by the Democratic Party chairman clear on the other side of the office in a locked room. The resulting transcripts were useless and the Attorney General, loath to  piss away  $89,000 in  diverted and laundered campaign funds, threw good money after bad: He ordered a second break-in to square  things away because  the President himself insisted they keep collecting whatever information they could on his political enemies, around the clock.

So Daddy got his  Washington team back  together and  the Spook told the same group of burglars  he used the first  time to fly back up from Miami. It took two days to get everyone into place but there was no written plan and no rehearsal.

That fact   astonished  the  Shutterbug,  a   semi-retired  CIA operative who  had captained  a  boat  for over  three  hundred missions to communist  Cuba (some  of which  were extraordinary renditions of men  who might have been his friends  had he dared to lift their hoods). But his friend, the Realtor, a fellow Bay of Pigs veteran,  practically  worshiped the  ground the  Spook walked on.

The Fixer walked  nonchalantly through  the front  door of  the Watergate office building where  he had  previously registered. There he signed in, took  the elevator up one  floor, descended the emergency stairwell, then  used masking  tape to  cheat the lock on the door leading out to the B-2 level parking garage. He then ascended the stairwell to the sixth floor to  wait for his partners.

A private security  guard  named Frank  Wills  found the  tape, because his first task was  always to check the  basement doors for tampering when  he came  on to  his shift  at midnight. He pulled the tape off and called his supervisor, who  told him to check the other  doors, then take his fifteen  minute break. But what Frank did instead was go immediately on  break. He ordered some fast food at therestaurant in the  Howard Johnson's across the street and tried to  make tracks  with a young  lady intern there who was pulling a late-nighter.

The burglars got on their walkie-talkie and told Daddy the door was locked. The Locksmith and Macho offered to look for another lock to pick but the  Realtor and the  Spook got cold  feet and told Daddy they wanted to  abort the mission. The Photographer said he was ready  to do  whatever Daddy  decided to  do. Daddy decided to cancel the evolution and try again two weeks later.

So the Fixer went back downstairs and removed the tape from the door. By the time Wills finished his hamburger and actually did what his supervisor told him to do there was no  tape on any of the doors. He figured it had just been some lazy mover who taped the door open to avoid  the hassle  of fumbling for  keys while carrying something  big. So Wills  forgot  about  the  entire episode.

On July 1 the team  returned one more  time to the  sixth floor offices of the Democratic  National Committee at  the Watergate complex, bugged the  correct phone,  photographed ten  rolls of film of the Realtor holding  documents in his blue-gloved hands, and even made off  with some  blank stationary  with Democratic Party letterhead. What they didn't find was evidence that Cuban President Fidel  Castro  was  giving money  to  the  Democratic Party, which is what  they hoped  to find. But that was okay, because the President's master of dirty tricks  simply used the letterhead they stole and the photographs of various signatures to manufacture such evidence.

There was little profit in any of this illegal activity. All it really did was turn  what would have  been a  historic 49-state victory in November 1972  into an  even more  historic 50-state victory. Unfettered, Nixon brought about what he called the New American Revolution, which  actually  consisted  of making  the executive branch nearly omnipotent, with a cabinet and FBI chief whose heads were supremely loyal to  him. But his notion of an imperial  presidency was  going to  bite America  in the  ass in October 1973  when the Yom  Kippur War spiraled out  of anyone's control, even the control of a President-King.

Rewind to early Saturday  morning, June 17,  1972. A half hour after midnight Robyn and Judith  walked across the  street from the Howard  Johnsons and  entered  the  parking garage  of  the Watergate hotel/office complex. Robyn carried an empty US Postal Service mailbag that Ariel had  requisitioned for her. She led Judith one level down, then they walked toward the door leading into the  building. It was  locked,  because Frank  Wills  had removed the tape when he came on his shift just  as he had done on the previous loop

"President Nixon sent some burglars here  tonight," Robyn said. "Well, not the President exactly, but men working  for him did. The Democratic Party has their  headquarters on the sixth floor. If the  burglars get caught, there's  not going to be  a nuclear war. The President will be too preoccupied by the scandal."

"Why would a burglary become a scandal?"

"Because the burglars  have ties  back  to Nixon,  and it's  an election  year.  The  President  will abuse  his  power  to  try to  cover it  up,  and  the whole  thing  will  escalate out  of control. Eventually Nixon  will have to resign  and almost fifty government officials will be  convicted of conspiracy or perjury or what-have-you."

"So why don't we just call the police?"

"If we do they'll get away. They've got a lookout posted in our hotel. He's in the room right next to ours, in fact. And there's another one parked  on the street. But here's  the oddest thing: if I leave this mail bag right here, they'll get caught."

And that's just what Robyn did.

Judith said, "I wonder what it's like for you, standing here."

Robyn said, "Imagine  having a  vivid daydream  that you  can't stop.  If you  had my  talent you'd  see time  literally boiling around this  door. There's  a security guard  wrapped up  in all this. Great events pivot on everything here, even on that little piece of tape you see lying  on the floor. Yeshua has given much thought to this nexus, its one  of the sharper ones. The mailbag was his idea."

"How does an empty mailbag  help us?  No, never mind,  I'm sure it's too  complicated. I'll take  your word that the  mailbag is just the ticket to order things to our liking."

So they went back across the  street to their room  at HoJo and watched from the balcony. The balcony next to theirs had a car antenna taped to the railing with a wire leading  back into the room.

At one AM the Fixer  pushed open the  door from the  inside and noted that the  piece of  tape he  had placed  there two  hours before was missing. But he did not immediately assume  a guard had removed it, because he saw an empty US  Postal Service mail bag sitting just outside the door.

That made all the difference. The Fixer assumed a mailman had come and tried to use his key to unlock the  door but found the door was already accessible  thanks to the  strip of  tape. The Fixer also assumed the mailman had removed the tape, but that he would be too busy delivering mail  to think of reporting  it to anyone. That would give  the burglars  the  short window  they needed to get  inside. So he  replaced the  missing tape  with another strip to cheat the lock, knowing his team was instructed to remove the tape after they came in.

At a quarter to two Frank Willis pushed the  door open a second time and saw another strip  of tape  had been placed  along the edge there after he had removed the first. He realized he wasn't dealing with lazy movers. Frank pulled the tape again and went to the nearest phone to call the police.

At a quarter after two  Robyn and  Judith watched a  crappy car pull up across the street. Three informally dressed long-haired men got out of the vehicle and entered the hotel. Neither Robyn nor Judith  realized  they  were  plainclothes  cops  using  an unmarked car, and  neither did the Shadow  Man suspect anything, watching from  the balcony  right  next  door to  them. Judith flashed her best phony smile,  then went back inside  the room, leaving Robyn standing out there.

The Shadow Man was more than a little nervous  and he felt like he had to say something to explain  to Robyn why he  was out on his  balcony  watching  the  Watergate. "Beautiful night,"  he opined.

"You have no idea," replied Robyn.

It was getting late, but  Robyn and Judith watched  the growing police presence at the Watergate complex from  their balcony in the Howard Johnsons across the  avenue. Their funny neighbor had to check out quite suddenly.

"Did we do well, after all?" Judith asked.

"Oh yes.  This bust  right  here  isn't  enough  to do  in  the President, at least until after  the election, but he's going to try to  cover it up, and  he's going to botch  the cover-up, and that will  nail him in  the end. He will  have no choice  but to quit his job or be impeached.

"What about the war in the Middle-East next year?"

"We still get that, and Israel wins, barely, and only after you give Sharon our intel again. But at least it doesn't go nuclear. No one goes nuclear, in fact, until well into the next century."

"Not far enough out for Michael's purposes, I suppose."

"The space program just sort of peters out. It was always just a cold war stunt  and America  won. The  moon landings  are never followed up. But you can't uninvent nukes, so when they do start lobbing  them around  no one  is  thinking of  reaching for  the stars, which will suit Elyon and Chemosh to a tee."

"So you're saying  we just  traded a  dark future  for an  even darker one."

"Oh, it's not  all dark.  There's  some good  things that  will happen  too.  People  will   get  smarter  about  their  health. Computers get  so small  folks will carry  them around  in their pockets or purses, use 'em as telephones, cameras, radios, watch any movie  or television show  they want, whenever they  want to watch them.  Everyone will  be hooked  into this  big, connected network And that's how everyone will stay in touch, get the news or read books  in forty years, even in the  smallest villages of the poorest countries."

"With all that  going  for them,  why do  they  kill the  space program?"

"They don't kill it dead, they just switch to sending robots to do it  instead, take pictures of  all the planets so  people can see them on their little telephones. But that doesn't do us much good, does it?"

"We can try reverse  psychology, Robyn.  There's one  more moon shot scheduled,  and by luck  or by  design they will  land very close to Taurus City.  If they run into us up  there and we tell them their manned space program is  a waste of money, they'll do precisely the opposite."

"I like that plan," Robyn said. "Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair."

Six days after  leaving Earth,  during their  third day  on the surface of the Moon, Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt made the final moonwalk of Apollo 17. Gene Cernan had flown to the Moon before, on Apollo 10. That flight was with his  commander from the Gemini 9 mission, Tom Stafford. On that flight Gene flew a lunar module  to within a  tantalizing nine miles of  the Moon's surface, then  returned to  altitude, leaving  the honor  of the first lunar landing to Neil and Buzz on Apollo 11.

Robyn had  been following  live  television  broadcasts of  the mission from only  a few  miles away  at Taurus  City. Now she followed the mission with the radio  in her truck as  she drove down the flanks  of  North Massif  to reach  the  floor of  the Taurus-Littrow valley. The landing site of Apollo 17 was on the southeastern edge of  Mare  Serenitatis where  an asteroid  hit the Moon back  in the  Day. The unimaginable violence of  the collision created a basin four hundred miles across. The rim of Serenitatis is a ring of mountains which have collapsed in some places, making a  corona  of long  valleys like  Taurus-Littrow aligned toward the center  of the  mare. The pyroclastic flows that filled the "Sea of Serenity" had been  accompanied by lava fountains which covered the area with tiny  glass beads bearing bright colors such as orange and yellow. The outer, southeastern end of the valley  butts up  against a  large mountain. In the run-up to Apollo  17 NASA  reviewed aerial  photos and  took to calling this mountain the East Massif.

In the south a narrow canyon  leads to yet another  valley. The west side of this  canyon is  the sheer  wall of  South Massif. Crossing north to  the other  side  of East  Massif is  another canyon leading to still another  valley. Beyond this canyon is the so-called Sculptured  Hills, and to the west  of those hills is North Massif. Between North and South Massif is a valley is about four miles wide, partially  blocked by Family Mountain and a sharp fault ridge three hundred feet high. The eastern foot of that sharp ridge forms a gentle ramp leading up  and around the western slope of North Massif  to some rugged back  country. In that area, where it would be too difficult for landing craft to safely touch down, Michael had chosen  to build Taurus City in a deep "cut-and-cover" tunnel. A layer of lunar soil was carefully groomed to cover and disguise the ceiling.

There was a large, dark, shattered boulder wedged in the foot of North Massif where  geologist  Harrison  Schmitt was  gathering samples. Robyn was careful not to run over their electric Rover parked nearby. The Boeing-made Lunar Rover contained a built-in navigation system that kept track  of every turn of  the wheels and calculated the distance back to the Lunar Module. This was a safety feature. If the Rover became inoperative, the astronauts would have to  walk to  the LM.  This system  used Intel's  new four-bit microprocessor,  the  4004, which  was  essentially  a computer on a single silicon chip.

The boulder being  examined  by Schmitt  was  in five  separate pieces and lay  beneath a  long  furrow of  dents showing  it's recent plunge down  the face of the mountain. Apollo 15 Command Module pilot Alfred Worden  had photographed  the area  in 1971 from orbit. Worden's photos captured what resembled  tracks of wheeled  vehicles  and  bright  debris  that  did  not  resemble stones at all. But analysts, making inquiries of the Russians, concluded the anomalies were from natural  processes. They said the tracks and other debris were probably from boulders that had rolled down the face of North Massif in a "recent" (less than 20 million years) moonquake.

The truth  was,  Worden  had  found  evidence  of  Taurus  City construction, but the valley floor was pristine. Not even Robyn, with her gift,  could  sense a  significant  divergence of  the present timeline. She pulled her truck to  a stop,  pumped the atmosphere down to a near vacuum, then popped the  door open to wait for  the boys. Cernan and Schmitt hadn't heard  Robyn roll in, of course. And they were  so busy  it was  sixteen minutes before they looked up from their tasks and noticed Robyn's truck parked next  to them. Both of  the astronauts  uttered  sharp expletives and the  live feed  was  hurriedly cut. CBS cut to Walter  Cronkite for  commentary. The blackout would last  for nearly an hour  as NASA  claimed technical  difficulties. Robyn used her talent to probe her own future. Time was "lazy" as she well knew. You had to kick it in the pants to change it. Michael tried to explain how it was tied to the physics of black holes. The maximum degrees of  freedom in a  spherical region  went up with the area of that sphere rather than the volume. There was a constraint. Without this inertia, this  reluctance built  into time, the boiling of time as Robyn often described  it would be so intense not even she could see through the chaos.

Robyn noted, to her dismay, that NASA would swear the astronauts and flight control crew to silence, and cover up what Robyn had just done. So the timeline  she  kicked off  at the  Watergate Complex remained in place. But she kept trying. Robyn waved for them to come inside. There was plenty of room for at least one astronaut to be seated next to her, even fully garbed as he was. The sun illuminated  her  face  and they  could  see they  were dealing with a young woman. Cernan described the situation to Houston. A phone call was made to a contact in the Soviet Union asking if they were operating in the same area and didn't bother to tell anybody. The Russian thought the American joke  was in particularly bad  taste. "Is not enough you win Luna  race?" he said. "Now you rub it on?"

Cernan and Schmitt,  who  were watching  their oxygen  steadily spend down, gently prodded Houston they were  still waiting for instructions. At length C. Gordon Fullerton, the CAPCOM for that phase of the mission, said Cernan could approach the truck, and perhaps, if he chose, even to enter it. But he ordered Schmitt to wait outside and be prepared to abandon Cernan if need be and hustle back in the Rover  to the  Lunar Module, which  was then about four miles away.

Cernan walked over to the truck and performed a complete circuit around it. There was only  the one  woman seated  inside. This woman was wearing a  vacuum suit,  and she  was waving  at him, motioning for him to come inside. So Gene, now free to oblige, did so. She gestured for him to close the door and when he did, she began to  re-pressurize  the  cab of  the  truck with  pure oxygen, to just  3  psi. When the dial  read the  appropriate pressure Robyn removed  her helmet. The sharp spent-gunpowder smell of the lunar regolith assaulted her nose. She wrinkled it and said, "Do people ever imagine what the moon smells like? Oh, no."

But Robyn was  used to  it,  and after  two lunar  EVAs so  was Cernan. When he removed his own  helmet his first words  to her were, "You sound like an American."

Robyn looked him over and saw Gene was rather gaunt, and thought it was a shame a man in his thirties was  going gray. She said, "I was born on the high plains, Commander Cernan.  Smack dab in the middle  of the country,  or close  enough as never  mind. My name is Robyn, with a 'Y'. Just Robyn, no last name."

Cernan's ice  seemed  to  melt   a  little. He said,  'Forget 'Commander'. Just call me Gene."

"It's an honor to  meet you,  Gene," she  said. "I represent a privately  held corporation  named  Astrodynamics. Sometimes  we just call it Astrodyne. We're based  out of Seattle, but we have a few offices around the world,  and, believe it or not, even up here. We've been watching you fellows  drop by over last the few years, but  this is  the first time  you've come  within driving distance. We're  very busy, but  I couldn't resist  dashing over for a chit-chat, as brief as it must be."

"Well, Robyn, I guess I wonder what Astrodynamics Corporation is so busy doing."

"Thirty years ago we were a  church. We see human  history as a work  of art,  and  we are  making an  endeavor  to perfect  it. Humanity leaving the  Earth and spreading out  into the universe is much closer to perfection than staying home with all our eggs in one basket,  to use the cliche, especially  with the powerful weapons we now have, and the sheer insanity behind making them."

Robyn showed  him  a   binder  containing  many  documents  and photographs. 'The names in  this  dossier  will probably  mean nothing to you,  but they  will mean  a great  deal to  certain people in the government. Please accept this package and run it up  your chain  of command. Think of this  as a  long list  of serious grievances we have with the United States going back for more than a hundred years."

"I feel like I've stepped into the middle of  an old argument," Cernan said as he flipped through the binder  to briefly sample the information. Some of the documents, just as Robyn said, were on age-yellowed paper dating back to the Reconstruction period.

Robyn said, "If you have the time during your flight home, Gene, please take a deeper look at that material. I  think you'll see why we  didn't find it  a good idea  to get permission  from the government of the United States  before coming up here and doing what we have done."

Within the binder were also five sets of color photographs that drew Cernan's interest, with the negatives clipped  to them. He pulled them out and asked what they were.

"Images of each one of the previous Apollo landing sites, taken very soon after departure. Note the missing ascent stage in each photo. We thought NASA might want a photographic record. And the binder contains one  more thing, Gene. We  included the one-line charlie elements for  an object NORAD has classified  as a spent Soviet booster. You should tell your people to look at it again, maybe with radar. It's twelve  days before Christmas, Gene. I've got a hundred and fifty of your Earth pounds of presents for Dr. Harrison Schmitt out  there. Rocks from the  North Massif, taken at depths up to six hundred feet below the surface. There's also sulfur  from  a  channel  we call  Yellow  Rille.  Documentation provided with  the samples have  original location and  depth. I hope it will compensate for  the precious minutes you are losing talking to me."

"Why are you talking to me, Robyn? Is this  just a sales pitch? Am I to be your go-between?"

She smiled and shook her head. She thought he deserved an honest answer. "You may be  impressed that Astrodyne  got to  the moon before  Apollo 11,  but  the way  we get  here  takes a  strange shortcut. Your  lunar lander out  there, even your  CSM orbiting overhead, we don't have anything  like those. We could have done something together. But in the  end the whole Apollo program was just so you could stick it in  the eye of the USSR. The interest of the  American people  waned right after  Apollo 11.  You know it's true.  The space  race was  just a big  Cold War  stunt and after you  won it started to  look like spending a  lot of money for nothing. Now  to be fair, the Soviet Union  lost interest as well, after their big boosters kept blowing up and they conceded the race."

Robyn noticed a feeling of well-being that bordered on giddiness and looked at the cabin  pressure. It had crept past 4  psi of pure oxygen. Cernan's spacesuit was still running, and pushing fresh air through  his collar  ring  into the  interior of  the truck. She bled it down, then continued. "Nixon canceled Apollo 20 and designated that Saturn 5 to haul up a modified Saturn 1B upper  state as  Skylab,"  Robyn said,  resuming  where she  had paused. "After that Nixon  even canceled  Apollo  19 to  shift funding  to the  Shuttle. It  seemed to  us that  America wasn't looking outward anymore. So we visited the Soviets and told them there was hard currency waiting for what they potentially had to offer.  The moon  race turns  out to  be like  the story  of the tortoise and  the hare, with the  hare putting one toe  over the finish line  and turning  back. But the  tortoise is  closing in now, and  he's bringing a nuclear  third stage. What did  you do with your third stage, Gene? You let it crash onto the moon. One more reason we're glad things are  winding up with NASA. We live and work up here, you know."

"We didn't know that at  the time, Robyn.  And it was  just for seismic research.'"

"Okay, Gene, but dig this: The Soviet third stage is fired three times, once for Earth orbit, once for trans-lunar injection, and once more for the return. Their vehicle is just that third stage and a lander. They're  coming up  with a crew  of four  and the whole crew  gets to  land. So  they're doing  it after  you, but they're doing it better. Now if  the only reason you're going to the moon these days is for  rocks, I'm sure the Soviets can sell them directly to  you for much cheaper. The bottom  line is that NASA does not need to follow up with Apollo 18."

At that Robyn drew a sudden  breath of air and  paused briefly. What she had just said to Gene Cernan were  the magic words. It took another  Sputnik  moment  to get  America  to  react,  but react America did,  or rather,  shortly would. The purpose of Robyn's visit  was fulfilled. Nothing, absolutely nothing drove technological innovation faster than war, even  the faux war-by proxy of the  Cold One. Robyn had rekindled  it. Reality had diverged and the Moon Race was back on.

"Then, Robyn, I would say you are in luck. Apollo 18 has indeed been canceled. Dr. Schmitt out there  was supposed to be on that flight, but he  bumped one of my buddies to  be the Lunar Module pilot on this  one, to my great displeasure.  This mission truly is the last one."

"I'm sorry about your friend,  Gene. I didn't know  that. We've been disconnected  from things earthside,  just a bit.  We're so busy, as I already said."

"How did you get up here anyway?"

"Okay, suppose you're Captain Kirk at Starfleet Command, and you need to go to the moon. Do you ride  the starship Enterprise to get up here, or what?"

"No, you just beam up."

"Bingo, Gene. That's pretty close to what we can do."

"Okay, but what I don't  understand is  how you are  willing to work with  the Soviets. You  told me  you were born  in America. They're the enemy. They're communists!"

Robyn corrected him. "They really just socialists. Communism was the goal.  People  can  espouse utopianism,  and  claim  to  be utopians, all  while still living  in a crapsack  country. We're negotiating with  the Union  of Soviet Socialist  Republics. The enemy? Frankly,  competing theories of economics  bores the hell out of me. Besides, who owns your moon buggy?"

"The American people do."

"You see?  Socialism. That  dog-eat-dog,  every-man-for-himself stuff does not really work all  that well up here, any more than it  works on  the  aircraft  carriers you  served  on. But  time marches on, Gene, and your  backpack won't run forever. That was pretty much all I wanted to say. Thanks for taking this time out of your tait schedule to meet with me."

He blew out a puff of air with a sigh. "Now I would ask a small favor from you, Robyn."

"Any thing, Gene. Anything at all. Just name it."

"My beautiful ten year old little girl's name is Tracy," Cernan told her. "I wrote her initials with  my finger in  the ground near the  Challenger. I did it  far enough away that  our ascent won't erase it, but now that I know you're here I'm worried that new footprints might erase her initials."

"I can tell you  love your  daughter very  much," she  said. "I promise no one will ever come near the Challenger. We'll make it off-limits to the Russians  too. Little Tracy's  initials won't last  forever,  of course,  due  to  micrometeorites, but  close enough. A  million years? That's  much better than  anything you could do  for her Earthside.  Take care,  Gene, and have  a safe journey home."

When the men returned to the LM Harrison Schmitt snapped a photo of Cernan. He looked haggard,  exhausted, and  perhaps just  a little bit haunted. To his mind the young lady he met out there with her sheaf of papers and bundle of rocks and all the things she said spelled certain  doom for  NASA's entire  manned space program, not just the moon shots. But it was not the last time they would meet.

Early in 1973 Robyn suggested they try to get  in on the ground floor of a opportunity that promised to  transform society like nothing since the  harnessing of  steam power. But bad hiring decisions required Judith  to  intervene  personally. That was never good. A man likely to be a much more  suitable candidate for Robyn's project approached Astrodyne for an interview.

At roughly the same time  Captain Eugene Cernan sent  a message through FBI Associate Director Mark Felt  requesting to contact the leadership of the Astrodynamics Corporation. Judith knew it would make for a busy day but she decided to  attend to both of these visitors  at the company's  workshop. And she would allow Robyn to be present as well, hopefully so she could say, 'See, I told you so!' when things played out the way  she promised they would.

The place in  Washington  State where  the  Enumclaw and  Black Diamond Highway crossed the  Kent-Kangley Road was  called Four Corners, but there wasn't much there aside from a lumber yard, a grocery store, a gas station, and one modest strip  mall with a dentist and a  cafe. Astrodyne leased the vacant office between Dr. Tsugawa's practice and Nancy's Noodle Nook. Sometimes locals wandered in by accident, thinking it  was one or the  other. So vinyl lettering went up on the glass that formed the front wall denoting the  place as  'Epoch  Electronics'  but people  still wandered in thinking the place sold hi-fi stereo equipment.

When Mark   Shybear  visited   the  place  he   recognized  the receptionist, of course,  since it  was his  own aunt  Dory. Or uncle Dory. He muttered an oath and  let his breath  escape in exasperation, but Dory  said, "This isn't what you  think it is, Mark. We're not stalking you.

"Then what are  you doing?  Is  this another  one of  Michael's missions?"

"Michael knows how you feel about the Family. You only had to do that one thing in Haaretz and Michael only asked you to do that so you'd know  the Second Life was an option  for you. You could have refused Michael then, and you can still Michael refuse now. Just know we're not trying to bring you in from the cold."

"No, I guess you're right," he admitted. "I approached you."

There was a solid sound of steel moving within steel. Dory said, "I know you probably  want to  turn around  walk away  but your momma is  waiting for you  in the back  and she hasn't  seen you since '66. You  weren't around for the '71 sessions.  So go back there and give her a hug, at least."

The door to the left of her cubicle slowly  began to pivot open without human intervention. It seemed deceptively massive in the way it gradually slowed to a nearly imperceptible stop before it could crash through the adjacent wall. Mark ambled on through.

A Teletype was clacking along in the middle of  a print job. To Mark's delight he saw it was a model 33 ASR. That model, as Mark well knew, was  ubiquitous in  the United  States Navy. It was turning a stack  of  blank perforated-edge  paper into  another stack of finished printout. A large spool of paper  tape with holes punched in six-bit binary code was providing  the data to be printed. Hunky was there in blue shop smock manually reeling up the spent tape after  it fed  through the reader. Her smock wasn't buttoned up. Mark could see that she wore a black concert tee and blue jeans. One of the guitarists silk screened on the shirt was Dory.

Hunky saw Mark and said "They let me handle the tape because if I touch  anything else  I'll probably just  break it." Mark saw where the data had originated. There was a blue green cabinet six feet  high, six  feet  deep,  and  two  feet wide. It was minicomputer, a PDP-1, one of only about fifty ever made.

Mark's mother was there  too, wearing a  buttoned up  smock. He couldn't tell what she was wearing under  the light-blue cotton lab coat but he guessed  from her bare  calves it was  a dress. Robyn looked much younger than someone born in 1925 had a right to, because Michael had made her and the rest  of the Band skip most of the 1950s and 60s. Mark had done the math and knew his mother was only two years older than he was.

She had  her arms  out  wide  and Mark  gave  her  the hug  she expected, and he didn't  begrudge it to  her because  he always would, in fact, love  his own  mother, notwithstanding  all the grievances he had, the chief of which was those missing years.

Mark also saw  a  woman  standing there  that  he didn't  know, someone who looked like a female biker. She was wearing what had to be the most expensive leather  boots he had ever  seen. They were black, went  up over  her knees,  and were  articulated at every joint. Her thighs weren't bare, but her thigh muscles were evident, and he could tell  she was a  runner. In fact, it was entirely possible she ran miles in those boots. They looked that functional. The skin on her face was darker than Hunky or Robyn, but not darker than Dory. Everything that wasn't tucked into the boots except her hands and face was covered in deep red leather with zippers everywhere for pockets and for basic access to the garment. It was was glossy and richly red, like fresh blood. Her forearms were covered with more black leather.

"It's her outfit, I know," said Robyn. "People always stare. But she's homesick and that getup makes her feel like she's home."

"Where's home?"

"Salem. On Kemen, not Oregon. You're looking at Michael's wife, Lilith. But here  on Earth she is also Judith  Margolies and she owns our company."

"I have no choice, really,"  Judith said. "I'm the only person around here who can actually obtain a bank account without being arrested or  thrown into bedlam,  and before you ask,  I include Michael in that assessment."

Mark smiled at that, and nodded at the computer  next to Robyn. "So Green Acres  does  have a  PDP-1 after  all.  I thought  my friends were kidding."

"I want to  personally  thank you  for  approaching us,  Mark," Judith said. "And for not immediately walking away when you saw some familiar faces. I want to hire you for what you can do, not for your  blood ties, and your  reputation, as well as  mine are such that  I wouldn't  dare make  this a  useless waste  of your time."

"My friends told me you had a DEC  minicomputer squirreled away in here but I wasn't sure I believed them. You should know them. They said they  were on your payroll  for a time. And  I think I can  take an  educated guess  why  they aren't  working for  you anymore."

"I fired four of them  for good  cause. But I'm  surprised your friends did not try to scare you off."

"I think  they  might  have been  a  little  embarrassed  about screwing up a really good thing. What are you using it for?"

Judith said, "You already know when stars mate there's a span of time before they quicken a  newborn eloah. That  corresponds to the distance between  them. Michael has provided  that data, and we're  trying to  make it  fit with  data on  nearby stars  that astronomers here on Earth have  scraped together. The stars that we know about that the rest of the elohim don't know about might be in the  same situation that Bat-El and  Binah find themselves in.  They  might be  worth  paying  a  visit  one day.  But  I'm curious, Mark, why  you're in the job market.  Just curious, you understand."

He said, "I  crapped out  in the  draft lottery  but I've  been working it off  by teaching at a Navy college  down in Monterey, California. They cut me loose to finish my doctorate in computer science at  U-Dub. To my great  misfortune I find myself  with a slight cash-flow problem lately. I flew  back up in my own plane and that's a pretty expensive hobby. My four buddy pals said you had deep  pockets and they  said the work  you have in  mind was right up my alley."

Judith said, "We have the  best logistics in the  business, and that is no  idle boast. You are already well  aware of what your cousin Ariel can do. Anything you  tell Dory to order, no matter how expensive or rare it  is, absolutely will be here overnight, beg  steal  or borrow.  It  is  only  necessary that  your  item actually  exists.  You could  tell  Dory  to  get you  the  Hope Diamond, and the next morning you  would have it. We want you to use our supply  chain to turn that big box  there, our so-called minicomputer that's  really as big  as three coffins  stacked on top of each  other, into a box  the size of a  piece of luggage. Then we will  have the world's first microcomputer.  Will you do it, Mark?"

"So take something that costs as much as a lakefront home on the East Side and turn it  into something that  costs as much  as a used car, so anybody can have one?  Yes, I can do it, and I will do it,  Judith, but remember,  when I  do, there goes  the whole neighborhood."

"We asked your friends to help us, but they  used our parts and some local  girls we hired  as assemblers to build  these stupid boxes that make free calls and cheat the phone company."

Mark said, "I can  take a  good guess which  two of  my friends you're talking about there."

Judith nodded. "I heard they sold a hundred of  their boxes for one hundred fifty dollars apiece. I do hope they managed to save most of it. They might just  be able to pay their lawyers enough to avoid conviction  for embezzlement. After I  fired them there was another fellow working here  who actually did earn his keep. He wrote  a program to simulate  an 8008 micro processor  on our mini. Dig up that tape for me, Hunky."

Mark watched her  dig  around  in a  wheeled  Vidmar, find  it, and hand  it  off  to   Judith. "Unfortunately this  isn't  a one-size-fits-all simulation, it's set  up to compile statistics on  vehicular flow  so cities  can  adjust the  timing on  their traffic lights. Then your friend used our supply system to order everything he needed to build  a portable version. We built that traffic analyzer for  him and thought it  was our microcomputer. Meanwhile another bloke used our PDP-1 to host BASIC on an 8008, but we  don't have  that tape.  I don't  much fancy  playing the victim, Mark. So I fired both of them."

Mark said, "You must be talking about my two other friends now."

Judith nodded again. "They went into business  for themselves, something  called Traf-O-Data,  but it's  not going  anywhere. I sent their tape to the state  capital. It's going to be be tough selling their new box when every city from here to Spokane sends their data  to Olympia to  crunch. Robyn already told  them what I'll tell you: essentially, we have infinite money. But we don't have a  deep knowledge of  technology. That  puts you in  a very good negotiating  position, Mark.  Your friends clearly  did not believe we  were sincere in  our attitude about money  and about what we're trying  to do here. Now, I'll retain  the patents for the hardware, just to keep my  skin in the game, you understand? But software patents are still a  gray area legally. So you will be a full partner when it comes  to the licenses. You and I will be equal  co-owners of  anything you  write on  my time.  If you sublet to a third party I  will not block the transaction or try to undermine you in price. You can have all this in writing, but really, Mark, it will not be necessary. You already know how the B'nei Elohim esteem word-bonds, being B'nei Elohim yourself."

"How well I know about being B'nei Elohim!

She paused to catch her breath, then said, "What  do you think, Hunky?"

"I think playtime  is over,  Judith. No  more Romper  Room. The grownup is in the building."

"And you, Robyn? Do you get the feeling this  day is shaping up to be a good one?"

"This was a big deal, Judith. This was the last major alteration before Elyon wins. And any  day I get my  own son back  into my life is a good day."

Judith said. "Dory just told me Captain Cernan arrived a little early. He's next door at Nancy's.  So Mark, thank you for coming in. I'll leave it to Hunky and Dory to negotiate your salary and other such details, and to step you through the paperwork if you insist  on  any.  Robyn,  let's  go  eat  and  see  your  famous astronaut. Dory told Nancy to cook our usual."

Captain Gene Cernan, so recently the commander of the Apollo 17 moon shot, sat in a booth devouring a Chicago-style Italian beef sandwich, cut up with a  knife and  fork to avoid  staining his dress blue uniform, but the wetter the better, he  said, and it was so  good it made  him homesick. Judith Margolies sat across him over a plate of fried  cod, chips, and string  beans, which was what she called her "usual". Robyn sat next to her having already eaten her own usual, cheese frenchees and fries, and she was just starting in on her raisin pie. She said, "I'm glad we could meet again without the  time constraints we had last time, up there."

Gene said, "I want to retire  from NASA. Where could  I go from here? There's no way I'll ever  get another flight. But I agreed to do this  last job and meet  with you. Do any of  you know FBI associate director Mark Felt?"

Robyn said, "Judith does not,  but I remember him  fondly. He's not  exactly  an  ally,  but  he's a  voice  of  reason  in  the government."

Gene said, "You gave me a set of numbers that corresponded with an object in orbit around the Earth. We illuminated  it with radar and found the  return to be much brighter  than it looks  optically. What my people  want to know is whether it is artificial?"

"It is a combination  of artificial  and natural.  Did anyone find it interesting?"

Gene nodded his head. "They found it interesting enough that my flight will no longer be the  last one. We have a certain amount of hardware that is already built.  My friend Joe Engle, who was bumped off  my own flight,  will be on  the next flight.  What I came to ask you  was, will Joe and the rest of  the crew be safe when they arrive at this interesting object?"

Judith said, "I can't give  my assurances if they  do something stupid,  but  we ourselves  will  not  put  them in  any  danger whatsoever. They will even find, when they arrive, that they are welcome."

"But it's in  the Van  Allen  radiation belt.  They can't  stay long."

"Actually, Captain,  this  interesting  object  orbits  in  the so-called Safe  Gap between the  inner and outer belt.  The crew need spend  no more time  crossing the  inner belt than  you did when you  went on your  flight to Taurus-Littrow, and  they need not cross the outer belt at all."

"We propose to  link the  ascent  stages of  two Lunar  Modules together." He pulled a document out of his briefcase. "Here is a print with the dimensions."

Judith looked at it and saw how the main engine  of each LM had been replaced by a tunnel to connect the two and permit access. It would maneuver entirely by external thrusters. She said, "It will be snug but we can easily accommodate them."

"What  about    docking?   Will   they   need    a   compatible interconnection?"

"There will be no need for  that. They will see  why, when they get  there.  But  your  design  team will  need  to  modify  the thrusters to  use compressed  air only. I  don't want  my people breathing what the  notes on this drawing says  you're using for propellant."

He said, "They want to keep the flight under wraps. It's all Dee Oh Dee funding now. It won't have the publicity  that mine did. The communications will be, ah, secure."

She raised an eyebrow, took out  a pen and marked  '283 MHZ' on the drawing Gene had provided. "That's VHF, ship-to-ship, in the clear. Whatever arrangements you  made between the  flight crew and ground control in terms of comms, that is how you'll talk to us. And here's  the call sign." She wrote Midway Control on the sheet and passed it back to him.

"Why must Astrodyne be so mysterious?"

"Meet us halfway, Captain, and we'll go on to the next thing. If not, there are other sturgeon in the Black Sea, if you catch my meaning."

As Mark Shybear was putting the final touches on the Micro 73 it lacked a software best seller that would really put it on the map. Robyn remembered something that had briefly appeared in her mind after the Watergate alteration,  but before the  Apollo 17 alteration. When she described it to her son he was intrigued and set to work.

The program he came up with was a cross  between a double-entry accounting worksheet and  the 'Battleship'  game. Columns were marked A through  Z, rows  were from  1 to  256, and  where the columns and rows intersected, they formed  cells designated A1, B9, C117,  and so  forth. The customer  could enter  data  or formulas  into any  one  of  these cells,  and  each cell  could reference data anywhere else on the worksheet. If the customer changed data in  one cell,  all  the dependent  cells would  be quickly recalculated. Mark called this program 'Matrix'.

If a businessman  wanted to  find  the answer  to the  question 'what will my long-term  profits look  like if  I buy  a second sheet metal cutting machine  today?' he didn't  have to  hire a programmer to write a special program just to find out. He could just purchase a Micro. With a Micro running Matrix  the fellow could sit in his office and fiddle with the numbers himself.

So when the  Micro 73  hit  the market  in the  spring it  came bundled with punch tapes containing Matrix and an assortment of other applications  such as a  simple text editor. There was an 8008  assembler to  allow savvy  customers to  create their  own programs for the Micro,  but in the  main, everyone  from small business owners  to the  CFOs  of  large corporations  went  to dealers and plonked  down five C notes for 'one  of those Matrix machines.' Every time they did, one of those five Benjamins was pure profit for Astrodyne. Three thousand units sold in '73. Bill Gates quickly developed a BASIC language interpreter for the Micro but it was too slow it and had very few takers.

Apollo 18 Secret military flight

Charles M Duke

Vance D. Brand

Joe Engle

LM-9 / LM-15

"Orbital Excusion Module" (OEM) CSM-111

Deal made to transfer Astrodyne Lunar Telescope to NASA control, NASA pretends to install it. Justification to fund Apollo 19 and 20 again.

Intel offered their  next 8-bit  microprocessor with  plenty of time  to be  incorporated  into Astrodyne's  next computer. The 40-pin 8080 could address 64KB of memory all at once and it had four times the clock speed of the earlier chip. The new model of the Micro  switched  to  magnetic cassette  tapes  for  program storage and shipped with 16 KB of RAM. An external floppy drive was sold by a third party and Basic  Operating System Software, or BOSS, was written by  Mark to  allow the Micro  to manage this device as well as any printers or  other peripherals. Soon after the Micro-74 actually hit the street, a four kilobyte 8080 interpreted BASIC was written by Bill Gates for the new version of Astrodyne's computer. It sold for $500 on floppy disks. Most potential customers considered that price to be outrageous. The first 'tappers' to appear made their name by  breaking the copy protection on Gates' floppies, much to his dismay.

Apollo 19

2/10/1974 LM-13 CSM-115  Deke Slayton  49 Thomas  Mattingly, 37 Robert Parker, 37 First visit to Taurus  City. Russians already present.

H4 - CROWDED MOON NASA rolls out the Nova expendable booster for the much  larger payload  of  the  Apollo  18 mission. At the invitation of President Ford, Senator John Glenn (D-Ohio) took a hiatus from Washington to return to flight status with NASA. He flew on the Apollo 18 mission in a special non-partisan observer role for the United States  government. Glenn had authority to make deals  with the people  already on the Moon  who apparently were represented by Robyn Lokken. This was not public knowledge at the time. Glenn was not assigned  a role as  Command Module pilot or Lunar Module pilot, but he checked out on both. It was Richard Gordon  who  actually  commanded the  mission. He had already attained lunar orbit  as the  Command Module  pilot for Apollo 12 but never walked on the moon. He landed on the surface with Glenn and Fred Haise,  who had  almost walked on  the Moon once before for Apollo 13 but had to turn back around following an explosion. Vance Brand and William Pogue were space virgins. They stood port and starboard watch aboard the Command Module in lunar orbit for the three  weeks the teams were  separated. The Soviet Union transmitted to NASA the orbital elements for their Lunniy Orbitalny Korabl which parked over the Moon about a week before Apollo 18  arrived. They said the  craft was  currently unmanned and didn't want the risk of a collision, no matter how remote. The part about the  LOK being "currently"  unmanned was strange, but the Soviets refused to elaborate. Soon after Glenn, Gordon, and Haise landed, an electric truck identical to the one photographed by Harrison Schmitt arrived at the landing site and stopped. After that, the truck  driver found the  frequency the astronauts were using to talk to Mission Control and suggested, in English but with a Russian  accent, that they follow  him in their rover. Glenn and Gordon agreed to go, and  Haise was left behind to watch the Lunar Module. The route they took was like a long dirt ramp up the North Massif, but all the up-climbing took a toll on the battery  of the Lunar  Rover. At about the eight mile mark, Gordon got on the radio and said they'd have to turn around to recharge, or the  rover would  run out of  juice. The Russian voice suggested it wouldn't be a problem and they should keep going. After thirteen miles, with many  switchbacks, they rounded a hillock and  saw something like  a wide  garage door, which opened at the  command of the  lead truck. Both vehicles entered, and the garage door shut behind them. It took about an hour to fill the space with oxygen, then two men got out of the truck wearing jumpsuits and boots, nothing more. Aleksei Leonov and Oleg Makarov! Richard Gordon said. I recognize both of you from photographs in our briefing. I knew you were out here but I didn't know you were landing. Where's your LK? No LK, Commander, Leonov said. Astrodyne. We hitch ride down  here. There were brief introductions all the way around, then Makarov attached a power cable to the truck. He brought another power cable over to the Lunar Rover, and offered to plug it in, but first he had to convince Gordon it was safe. What sold Gordon was how the cable fitting was exactly tailored to fit the rover. Someone up here had done their research. The next space after the  garage was literally a locker room, with large lockers for the NASA crew to stow their pressure suits  and keep the  keys on  their person. Makarov said, This key  for peace  of mind,  no? And  the space after that opened on a balcony looking down upon the vast green interior of Taurus City,  lit by clever  sun reflectors  in the ceiling. Damn that air smells good, said Senator Glenn, taking a big breath. It better smell good, Leonov said. We pay for each lungful. They say, go  fetch Americans,  reduce  line item  on expense account.

Astronaut John Glenn and junior Senator from Ohio, reactived to flight status at the request of  President Ford to find out what the hell's going on up there on the Moon. Senator John Glenn, it really is an honor to meet  you,' Jill said. I'm not sure it's such an honor  anymore, he said ruefully. It seems I wasn't the first American to orbit the  Earth after  all. And you are? My name is Jill Pennell. If you were looking for Robyn, she's not here. Do you have authority to make agreements  with the United States? I remain in constant  contact  with one  who does. My companion Ambe has no such  authority but she must  attend this meeting, and she must also feed  her son Gordon, so  I hope you don't mind if  she nurses  him  right here. It's okay, that's natural. What's his name, if I might ask? Gordon Aspin, the same as the last name of your mission commander. And Aleksei Leonov, thank you for agreeing to be here  as well. This big boy is my own  son, Hunky. He's here because he's  so damn  cute, people can't resist doing whatever he  asks. I once told him  a story about a faraway kingdom where they treated a  princess the same way, but that was just to make her feel good. Hunky here is the real deal, that's how cute he is. Leonov and Glenn chuckled at this, but by the end of the session they would not find it funny at all. Jill also chose not to reveal that  Hunky had been born in 1974 but had  spent three  years growing up  in the  Land We Know, so  he was older  than one  would normally guess  from the calendar. Glenn said, This city  you  name Taurus  is a  truly amazing accomplishment, Miss Pennell, but what puzzles me is how you dug this big hole. I don't even see removed  soil piled up nearby. There should be mountains of it. We have a way to turn normal matter into what we call dark matter,  Jill revealed. We call it  dark  because  it  doesn't  interact  with  light. So chemistry doesn't apply to it anymore. It just goes away, sinks to the center of the moon or flies away into space. Works great for trash too. That is a very important discovery, Glenn said. You must share. Unfortunately, no.  We are  a  group of  very disgruntled American citizens, Senator Glenn. I've had to dodge federal bullets  myself,  for  one  thing. But think  of  the possibilities! Roads, tunnels, we could save taxpayers billions of dollars. I'm afraid I must insist  on this one  point, Miss Pennell. Astrodyne must share this discovery  with the American people. Nothing personal, but we  have  a variety  of ways  to encourage compliance. Mister Man, Hunky said, could you please stop bothering my mom? For you, son, anything. Sorry Jill, I withdraw my demand. There is one important thing, however. The Outer Space Treaty  of 1967  says non-governmental  activities, such as your group, obviously, must operate  under the approval and authority of a state which is signatory to the Treaty. I can tell you now he US would only extend such  recognition quid pro quo. Commander Leonov, do you  think Astrodyne could  be placed under the legal penumbra  of the Soviet  Union to  satisfy this treaty? No, I think this  request impossible, out  of question, Leonov said. Mister Man, Hunky said to Leonov, Pleeeeeeese? Very adorable child, Miss Pennell. Tell you what. Give us photos and names of people here, birthdays, I take home to Star City, maybe Kremlin. Who knows? Maybe next Korabl bring Soviet passports.

NERVA - Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application. NERVA XE design completed, but the program was defunded. Now the funding has been restored. The Apollo 20 mission will have  a modified CSM with a nuclear engine. To be left in cis-lunar space after return of command module capsule to Earth, to prevent radiation from raining down on Earth during reentry. B'nei Elohim suggest topping off the tanks of  propellant at Midway, so  the nuclear service module could return to Midway after ferrying the capsule on a descent  trajectory  to Earth,  then  handing the  service module over to the B'nei Elohim as payment in kind for allowing the US to keep an observer at Midway and another at Taurus City.

The Micro 75 was the  first to  have a modem,  sold separately. It crawled  at only  300  baud  but  users  were able  to  dial out to  Astrodyne  for  support and  downloads. The host  was the minicomputer in  Maple Valley. A 24 hour news  aggregator called Interworld  was  started  with free  access  for  anyone owning a Micro. For the marquee  application on  this version, Mark Mark's  and  his  stable of  five  programmers  created WordBoss, the first word  processor with  automatic hyphenation and paragraph justification, leaving the user free to just type. Dot-matrix printer support was also added. Every year the Micro became thirty  percent smaller  in  size,  yet the  price-point remained, as always, at $499. Twenty thousand Micros 75s sold, mostly to business and hobbyists,  but the public at  large was not yet aware of the growing world of micro-computing. Apollo 20 1975 LM-14 CSM-115a Last launch of the Saturn V. Thornton stays behind at Taurus  City,  makes  regular television  appearances from an  elaborate set  built  for  the purpose  of  simulating a space  observatory. Rendezvous with  Midway,  refueled  per agreement. ASM-1 enters descent ellipse, separation  of Command Module, Nuclear  Service Module  returns  to  Midway by  remote control. Stafford remains at Midway. First public announcement of existence of Midway. Thomas Stafford Bruce McCandless William Thornton

Every year the Micro became thirty percent smaller in size, yet. the price-point remained, as always, at  $499. Twenty thousand. Micros 75s sold,  mostly to  business and  hobbyists, but  the. public at large  was not  yet aware  of the  growing world  of. micro-computing

A 4 inch floppy disk drive with 128KB of space was incorporated inside the Micro 76. The cassette tape deck was dropped, but it was still available as an external device for legacy software. BOSS was changed to load from floppy, permitting fresh upgrades to the operating system. The 8080 chip was replaced by the Zilog Z80, an improved aftermarket clone. Astrodyne populated the motherboard with 32 Kb of RAM and it still came in at $499. An optional GUI called GUIDE (Graphical User Interface with Desktop Elements) ran on top of BOSS, in black and white. But the first truly 'What You See Is What You Get' (WYSIWYG) word processor, WordGuide, was the big star of the Micro-76 show. A spooler program converted documents for output on dot matrix printers exactly as they appeared on the screen, allowing for an endless variety of fonts. With a 1200 baud modem built right in, Micro 76s were able to communicate with each other point-to-point rather than just back to Astrodyne's mainframe, so email, data, and software could be copied directly between any two machines. That raised certain legal issues. The US government ordered Astrodyne to disable point-to-point file transfers to prevent piracy, but Astrodyne won in court using the argument that it was like trying to sue General Motors because the getaway car in a bank robbery happened to be a Chevy. A quarter of a million Micro 76 units were sold. Astrodyne bought out the whole strip mall at the southwest corner of SR-169 and SR-516 in Washington State, and built a proper business park and replaced their minicomputer with big iron. Meanwhile the US blocked Micros for export lest the technology aid the Soviet Union. Astrodyne was flattered, but all this really did was result in many Micros being manufactured off-shore rather than purely home-grown. Bill Gates tried to incorporate his own company as 'Micro-Soft' but he was sued by Astrodyne due to the similarity of names with their hardware and forced Gates to change the name of his company to Winspire. Nevertheless he kept going around saying he was 'W-I-N-N-I-N-G' and he did make a little money selling his BASIC interpreter. It made the Micro easier to program and was attractive to schools, but it was still too slow for serious work. Serious programmers compiled binaries which were directly executable by BOSS.

Prometheus 1 1976 Rusty Schweickhart William Pogue Karol Bobko Story Musgrave Rendezvous with Midway on way up, topped off with hydrogen. Thornton to Promethus, Bobko remains at Midway, antimatter operation revealed to Bobko by Stafford. Musgrave remains at Taurus. Schweickhart, Stafford, and Pogue return to Earth. AUS-1 (Advanced Upper Stage) has liquid hydrogen replenished at Midway and is transferred to Astrodyne after it is used to return the Command Module to Earth. Russian engineers at Taurus developing spacecraft on site.

The Micro 77 came with a 4800 baud modem, just fast enough listen to spoken word news commentary. The GUIDE interface used four bit color for the first time. A paint program was included to create images, but 16 colors was not quite good enough for photographs. A five megabyte external hard drive was also available for another $499. The 'killer' application for the Micro-77 was a new markup language that could turn simple text files into eye-pleasing documents featuring portions of text highlighted in green with an underline. If the user placed a trackball cursor over this green text and clicked, they were taken to a new document that could be stored locally, or on the Astrodyne server, or even on another Micro that was currently online. Winspire reverse-engineered the Micro's operating system and offered IBM something they called DOSS with only cosmetic changes to BOSS. Gates dared Astrodyne to sue. Soon after that, IBM began to offer a competing 'Personal Computer' using stock components and Winspire BASIC in ROM for all software and disk operations. There was nothing like GUIDE yet, but IBM blew that off by claiming a GUI was just for people too stupid to remember a measly set of two hundred DOSS shell commands and all their options. IBM considered GUIDE a toy for consumers and not for serious computing. The federal government deliberately purchased only IBM PCs despite the inferior quality and $1,500 per unit price, but they were very nearly the sole customer. Gates offered a ripoff of Matrix called Electronic Paper whose sole difference was cells labelled by rows and columns rather than like in Battleship. Judith Margolies had failed to get a software patent, and refused to do so on principle, saying it was like getting a patent on the quadratic formula. Gates, however, did get a patent for Electronic Paper, then turned around and sued Astrodyne. The government testified as a 'friend of the court', but the suit got tossed out by an 'activist judge' who was 'legislating from the bench' when Astrodyne showed prior art. Meanwhile the Micro 77 moved over four million units. The Micro had been transformed from a mere toy for hobbyists or a business tool into a genuine appliance for consumers. Prometheus 2 1977 Owen Garriot Stuart Roosa Robert Crippen William Lenore Bobko replaced by Crippen at Midway. Lenore stays at Taurus with Musgrave from the previous mission. During the pass-down Bobko reveals to Crippen that Midway is used to mine positrons ejected from the sun or from interstellar space which are trapped by the radiation belt and cluster in the "safe gap" where Midway lies. They are injected into molecules of C60, which traps them safely inside, and can hold enough to make the molecules up to nine percent heavier. C60 forms small brown mineral chips. When heated in an electric ark the positrons escape and render up enormous energy.

A five megabyte hard drive was built right into the hardware of the Micro 78 for permanent storage, and BOSS now booted from the hard drive. Graphics used 15 bit color, five bits each for red, green, and blue, for a total 32,768 possible colors. The internal modem attained 19,200 baud. Software, photos (mostly pornography) and electronic books were stored in small pieces across many computers in what soon came to be called the Swarm. Winspire's BASIC, which still shipped coded inside the Micro's system ROM, was now being cloned to RAM with a third-party tap called Ghostrider before being ran, which made BASIC run at least ten times faster and made it, therefore, almost usable. Bill Gates, CEO of Winspire, complained to the federal government that these transient RAM images represented a copyright violation, and the government responded by trying to shut down Ghostrider. They soon found it was impossible to track down every copy of Ghostrider in the Swarm. Instead they just seized the Astrodyne mainframe computer used to index files in the Swarm for search. Locked out from their own offices in Maple Valley, Astrodyne relocated to downtown Seattle. In reaction to the federal seizure of the mainframe, independent tappers created automated scripts to cruise and index the Swarm. Now, instead of a single vulnerable search node, the search nodes themselves become widely distributed. Astrodyne news and support services resumed after a short interruption, with the company itself becoming a normal user in the Swarm rather than a central node. Prometheus 3 1978 Edward Gibson Paul Weitz Charles Fullerton Don Lind Crippen replaced by Fullerton at Midway. Musgrave replaced by Lind at Taurus.

In 1979 Astrodyne rolled out a Micro with 32 bit color, giving over 24 million colors and finally reaching full photo quality. Onboard storage reached 64 megabytes and the modem attained 57,600 baud, the best that could be obtained by dial-up. Millions of users worldwide were now 'buzzing the Swarm' to communicate with each other. Suddenly there was a global library of information available to anyone with a Micro and a telephone line. Meanwhile Winspire offered IBM a nearly identical clone of GUIDE called Windows. Suddenly IBM stopped calling graphical interfaces mere toys. The IBM-PC was slashed in price to $1,200, hoping to jump start annual sales, which were still numbered in the hundreds. And even those paltry sales were mostly for government computers that were not even used, prompting some Winspire employees to call it Windows for Warehouses when they were out of earshot of Gates. The government tried a carrot- and-stick approach and offered a $750 subsidy to school districts if they purchased the IBM/Winspire boxes. They cut existing subsidies to school districts if they insisted on going with Micros. Sales of IBM's machine jumped to ten thousand units. But Astrodyne sold a thousand $499 Micros for every one unit sold by IBM. Gary Kildall decided to finally call Bill Gates on his bullshit and filed a lawsuit against Winspire for copyright infringement. Surprisingly, the case seemed to be placed on a fast track. Kildall found himself in front of Judge Samuel Watanabe in only a few months, not years. And if there ever was an open-and-shut case, this was it. GUIDE and Windows both consisted of exactly 51 files, and each file was exactly the same size, but with slightly different names. TASKSWAP.BIN in GUIDE became SWAPTASK.BIN in Windows. All Gates did was change the name of the file called out by the GUIDE kernel when it needed to scoot itself out of memory, which anyone could do with a simple editor without access to the original source code or recompiling. In the courtroom Kildall displayed the disassembled code of both operating systems to show they were absolutely identical except for when they called out one of the other fifty files. But the clincher was the Easter egg buried in the program by Gary Kildall for just this contingency. With Bill Gates' Windows product running with a projection monitor so everyone in the courtroom could see what he was doing, Gary put the trackball cursor in the upper left corner, then typed 'GOTCHA'. Suddenly a slideshow began to display cartoon versions of the GUIDE developers and in bold letters the text 'GUIDE Copyright 1979 Astrodynamics Corporation All Rights Reserved'. And Gary Kildall sat down, fully expecting the judge to ream Gates' ass and hand Winspire a multi-million dollar penalty. Nothing like that happened. To be sure, Judge Watanabe acknowledged that copyright infringement had taken place. 'Mistakes were made,' he said, pussyfooting around. The judge could hardly dismiss the case without being slapped down himself in the inevitable appeal. But Winspire was fined a dollar. One dollar. Judge Sam explained that brisk competition was commonly held to be a public good, and so Winspire, simply by offering an alternative to GUIDE and breaking the unfair monopoly in operating systems that Astrodyne currently enjoyed, had mitigated any damage to society they might 'theoretically' have done to Astrodyne's intellectual property rights. Astrodyne took retaliatory measures that would begin to bite the following year. Prometheus 4 1979 Joseph Kerwin Anthony England Henry Hartsfield Richard Truly Fullerton replaced by Hartsfield at Midway,. Lenore replaced by Truly at Taurus.

For the Micro 80 the modem, hard drive and floppy drives were completely removed, replaced by a little black box that was simply a locator for Chokhmah to place one end of a wormline linking back to something he called the 'Mother Node' deep inside his stellar body. Files were transferred and stored totally encrypted by Chokhmah himself. Even the latest BOSS operating system and GUIDE windowing environment were downloaded from the Mother Node at each boot, with on-the-fly decryption unpacking files during run time and absolutely goring Winspire's cash cow of reverse engineering. Customers could now carry just the keyboard unit (with a battery) and a headset and use their Micro as a telephone with no long-distance charges, or as a music player. Storage and bandwidth was effectively infinite and it was not even limited by the speed of light. This fact was soon exploited by stock Market traders until federal regulators caught on and implemented a sixty second delay for every trade. Movies as well as music began to be shared freely. Over a hundred million Micro 80s were sold. Thousands of songs and films became available in the Swarm for free, which soon impacted sales. The music and film industry realized it had a problem with a business model which depended on an artificial scarcity of content. Money sloshed around from lobbyists and soon Ford's Attorney General ordered Astrodyne to suspend all operations until they could be cleared of being accessory to Intellectual Property theft. Astrodyne complied with this order without filing for a stay in court or even a word of complaint, which all by itself sort of threw the government for a loop. The company suspended the manufacture of all new Micros in the United States, but continued to make and sell the units internationally, totally unabated. The value of unsold Micros already on retail shelves in the United States doubled overnight and would only go up from there. A thriving Micro smuggling trade appeared along the Canadian and Mexican borders. Machines that fell into disrepair were cannibalized for their black boxes to be retrofitted into older Micros or repurposed into local servers tied back into the Mother Node with older Micros networked to it. Micros were manufactured in Mexico, smuggled across the border, and arrived by ad hoc package delivery methods that could not be traced back to the source. With encryption firmly in place, Astrodyne then rolled out the concept of Microbux, electronic money which could be transformed to and from hard currency using local couriers for a nominal fee that included a small kickback to Astrodyne. Tappers tried their luck stealing Microbux, but Astrodyne guaranteed customers against any loss. They could certainly afford to do so, since Micros, as always, remained priced at $499 and the profit margin was huge. No tapper ever broke Chokhmah's encryption in any event. After this leap in technology the evolution of Astrodyne's hardware levelled off. Micros continued to grew incrementally smaller year-over-year, but the essentials remained the same. A classic Micro 80 would continue to work with the Swarm in the 1990s and far beyond. Meanwhile the United States government continued to put all their eggs in the Winspire basket. Redmond's systems never approached the technology of even the Micro 78 and they remained more expensive by a factor of at least three. None of them could access the Swarm. The Twenty-first Century arrived a generation early to citizens of even the poorest nations, who communicated with one another using video phones while the citizens of the United States remained mired in the 1970s as a deliberate policy of the Ford Administration.

Prometheus 5 1980 Gerald Carr Joseph Allen Robert Overmyer Jack Lousma Overmyer replaces Hartsfield at Midway. Lind replaced by Lousma at Taurus. Samael

Prometheus 6 1981 Ronald Evans Karl Henize Donald Peterson Fred Haise Join Truly and Lousma, six American astronauts on hand for the Moon War.