He'd been in control of the countdown once before, but not with the whole world watching. That time, he was staring down the barrel of a gun, trying to will himself to pull the trigger. But his Catholic upbringing had won out. He didn't really believe in an afterlife, but if there was one, the idea of consigning himself to an eternity of something worse than the present was just barely frightening enough to keep him among the reluctant living. Long enough, anyway, to find a way out that even his catechism teacher couldn't disapprove of.

That was when he volunteered for this mission. It might be the only job in the Solar System for which a suicidal psych profile was an advantage. Rather than shooting himself in a drunken stupor, he'd go out a hero, striving for the betterment of mankind. Hurrah for Wynsten, the bold explorer. Someone had to do it because maybe it would work and humanity would actually be bettered. And if humanity wasn't bettered today, well, the techies supposedly learned something from each failure. Although there was a nasty rumor that they'd given up and were merely making random changes.

Still, being failure n-plus-one was an acceptable way for a world-weary pilot to make his exit. Other than the fact that he welcomed it, was dying this way any different from the soldier who falls on a grenade?

Wynsten expected to be dead a split second after he pushed the button. And because everyone else thought so, too, they were letting him proceed at his own pace. It didn't matter how long he spent on the preflight checklist, because the launch window was basically "any time you're ready." All that really mattered was not to die stupidly, overlooking some critical telltale. Burned-out pilots were cheap. Ships weren't.

Now that he was truly and publicly consigned to death, he could wait. Let the ship kill him in its own mysterious way, as it had its previous pilots. At least, everyone presumed they were dead. Technically, they were simply missing. The first time, an entire ship vanished. Humanity's first faster-than-light drive, launched for somewhere in the vicinity of Saturn ... never to return from hyperspace.

That first ship had been named Endeavor. When the same thing happened to its successor, the Space Authority had replaced the next ship's human pilot with a computer cube that happily delivered a cage of mice to Saturnine space, then brought them back. Alive, well, and oblivious to their epoch-making journey. Salamanders, goldfish, parakeets--all fared equally well. But cats and dogs were iffy. And humans always vanished. When they were given actual control over the mission, expensive ships went with them: the Enterprise, Beagle, Santa Maria, Victory, Magellan.

The current ship had never been formally christened, but the tech folks were calling it "Seven." As in Marie Celeste 7. Fitting, because like its namesake, it had a penchant for drifting crewless. Once, two people had been put aboard, just to see if that helped. It didn't.

The only reason this wasn't the Marie Celeste27 was that the Space Authority had gotten tired of losing ships. Now, "pilots" were little more than glorified passengers. Wynsten's only job other than riding a mostly ceremonial herd on his end of the checklist was pushing the launch button. After that, everything was automatic. If things went as before, the ship would indeed reappear ... minus Wynsten. There was even an automated return that could be activated from long distance. Saturn might be the shortest hop the quantum drive could do, but it was a long way to tow a ship back to Earth.

So far, the testing program had been the worst kind of good-news/bad-news joke. The good news: FTL travel was possible. The bad: only for drones or mice. Not exactly a golden age of exploration.