The Medusa Chronicles by Stephen Baxter

fly one of the early Apollo test and development missions. If things progressed beyond that , he ought to get a seat on one of the lunar flights themselves. That was what he’d devoted his career, hell, his whole life, towards.
    And now this stuffed shirt was telling him that all this was gone? Just like that?
    â€œSir—Mr. Sheridan—”
    â€œShucks, call me George, everybody else does. And we’re going to get to know each other pretty well in the next sixty weeks or so.”
    â€œSixty weeks . . . ?”
    Mo said sombrely, “Look, is this something to do with the fire?”
    Everybody was sombre when they spoke of the fire, and the 27th of January was a date that would be forever etched into NASA’s collective memory. Some short-circuit had ignited the oxygen-rich atmosphere inside a prototype Apollo capsule, killing three astronauts, holing the lunar programme itself below the waterline, and sending everybody involved with NASA and its contractors into feverish recovery mode.
    But Sheridan said, “No, son, it isn’t the fire. It sure doesn’t help, though, that this has landed in the middle of that fallout.” He plucked a cigar from a case and began the elaborate ritual of unwrapping it, cutting it, lighting it. “Because, while Apollo’s big, it’s nothing as big as Icarus is gonna get.”
    And that was the moment Seth Springer first heard the name that was going to shape the rest of his life.
    Mo asked, “Icarus? What’s that?”
    In answer, Sheridan pulled a copy of the previous day’s New York Post out of his briefcase. The cover had a still from the old movie When Worlds Collide , and a blazing headline:
    KILLER SPACE ROCK DOOM
    While the astronauts tried to take this in, Sheridan dug into his briefcase once more, and produced a photograph of a hole in the ground. “Recognise this?”
    â€œSure,” Mo said. “Meteor Crater, Arizona. We trained in there—along with a few other holes, including some dug out by nukes.”
    â€œYou know what it is? How it was made?”
    â€œImpact by a meteor,” Seth said.
    â€œAs the name suggests, Tonto,” Mo said dryly.
    â€œYou know all about impact craters, right? Because you’re going to be crawling all over them on the Moon in a couple years’ time. As for MeteorCrater, according to the notes I have, a rock about fifty yards across made a hole in the world that’s the best part of a mile wide. That was a long time ago, though. Now take a look at this.”
    He showed them a photograph of a domed building against a starlit sky.
    â€œPalomar,” Seth said immediately.
    â€œRight. World famous observatory in San Diego County.” Sheridan consulted a briefing note from his case. “In June 1949, an astronomer called Walter Baade made a discovery, a streak of light on a photograph taken with a Schmidt camera, and don’t ask me what that is. The streak—the mass that moved across the view field during the exposure—turned out to be an asteroid, a new one. But not just any asteroid. Most of those babies drift safely around out in the asteroid belt, which is somewhere beyond Mars—am I right? This one, when Baade saw it, was only about four million miles from Earth.” He produced a chart of the object’s orbit, a diagram the astronauts immediately understood: an ellipse that cut through the circles of planetary orbits. “And they called it Icarus.”
    Mo leaned forward, fascinated. “So this rock follows a very eccentric orbit. It goes all the way out to the asteroid belt at aphelion, then dives closer to the sun than Mercury, at perihelion.”
    Sheridan eyed him. “At ap-ho-what now?”
    Seth grinned. “White man speak with forked tongue. Farthest and nearest to the sun, sir.”
    Mo looked up. “No wonder they called it Icarus, with all that sun-diving. And no wonder it comes