Like most people, he had drawn up a list of everyone in the world he needed to say goodbye to, then gone through it and ruthlessly weeded out 90 percent of the names, since there wasn’t time. And then, during his last few months on Earth, he had sought out and said goodbye to the ones he needed to see in person. From orbit he had said goodbye to others on videoconferencing links or with carefully written email messages. Once he had said goodbye to a given person, he avoided communicating with them again. It was awkward to go out for a last night of drinking with a colleague, reminisce and cry and hug and say farewell, and then find yourself emailing the same person two months later with a question about their latest observations. Consequently, his scope of acquaintances had steadily narrowed as he had worked his way down the list. By this point he was down to his wife and his children. Reaching them became a lot more difficult after the Eight Ball had done its work. The volume of communications between Izzy and the ground was limited by the total bandwidth of the station’s antennas and radios. Personal communications had lower priority than operations, and operations were peaking as the final surge of launches was prepared. Or, as Dinah called it, the Splurge. Doob sent text messages to Amelia and the kids all the time; they sat in the delivery queue for minutes or hours, and half of them never got sent at all. Just when he was about to give up hope, he’d get a message back from Henry or Hadley or Hesper. Sending those messages, and seeing the responses, became more important than sleeping, so he "broke shift," as the saying went, and dozed whenever he could, lying on the floor of the Farm or just putting his head down on a table like a kindergarten kid, his phone right next to his face so he’d feel it jump when anything came through.