Voyage

York floated in her sleeping bag. She was dog tired, but sleep just wouldn’t come. Her lower back was sore, and she had a stuffy headache, as if she was developing a cold. Her heart was suddenly too strong; blood seemed to boom through her ears. She missed the pressure of a pillow under her head, the security of a blanket tucked in close around her. The bag was too big, for one thing; she found herself bouncing around inside it. And every time she moved, the layer of warm air which she’d built up around her body, and which stuck there in microgravity, tended to squirt away, out of the bag, leaving her chilled.

When she managed to relax, she had a feeling of falling. Once she almost drifted off, but then her arms came floating up, and a hand touched her face…

She let her eyes slide open.

She was inside her sleep locker, at the base of the Mission Module. The locker was little bigger than a cupboard, with a foldaround screen drawn across it. On the surface above her head was her overhead light, and a little comms station, and a fan. There were little drawers for personal things, like underwear; when she opened them the drawers had blue plastic nets stretched over them, to stop everything from floating away.

A lot of light and noise leaked around the foldaround screen. She could hear the hum and whir of the Mission Module’s equipment, and the occasional automatic burn of the attitude clusters as they kept Ares pointing sunward. With the bright, antiseptic light of the wardroom beyond her screen, and the new smell of metal and plastic, it was like trying to sleep inside an immense refrigerator.

Apparently there had been plans to provide solid doors on the sleep lockers. She even remembered seeing a memo which talked about the need to provide privacy for astronauts “significantly relating,” in the typically obscure, euphemistic double-talk NASA employed when talking about the functions of the warm bodies they were shipping into space at such expense. But the doors had been skipped, for reasons of saving weight. So much for significantly relating.

And — on top of everything else — she needed a pee.

She tried to ignore it, but the pressure on her bladder built up steadily. Christ. Well, it was her own fault; the relief tube — the Mission Module’s toilet, the Waste Management Station — was so uncomfortable she’d put off using it. Besides, she seemed to be peeing more than usual since coming up into microgravity.

She succumbed to the inevitable. She squirmed her way out of the bag, turned on her overhead light, and folded back the screen. When she moved, her back hurt like hell.

After the TOI burn, the Ares modules had undergone the first of the cumbersome waltzes the crew would have to endure before the mission was done. Under the command of Stone, Apollo, containing the crew, had separated from the nose of the stack, turned around, and docked nose to nose with the Mission Module.

When she’d first been talked through the mission profile, waiting until after the TOI burn to accomplish separation and docking had seemed bizarre to York. Why wait until you were already on your way to Mars to cut loose of your main ship? But it made a kind of sense, in the convoluted, abort-options-conscious way the mission planners figured those things. If the MS-II had blown up during the TOI burn, the crew, in Apollo, could have gotten out and done an abort burn to get home. And if the injection burn was successful but the docking hadn’t been, the crew could use the Service Module’s big engine to blast back toward Earth.

Anyway, after the successful docking, the crew had been able to crawl through a docking tunnel and started moving into the Mission Module, their interplanetary home away from home.

As long as she didn’t think about the wisdom of taking apart the spacecraft in deep interplanetary space, it didn’t trouble York.

York let herself drift across the wardroom. She was light as a feather and invulnerable; it was like moving through a dream. The Mission Module was a lot roomier than the Apollo Command Module had been, of course. But she was learning to move around, to operate in that environment. She’d found she couldn’t move too quickly. If she did, she’d collide with the equipment, dislodging switches and maybe damaging gear. It just wasn’t a professional way to behave. She was learning to move slowly, with a kind of underwater grace.

It wasn’t a big deal. Microgravity was just a different environment; she’d learn to work within its constraints.

The wardroom, with its little plastic table and three belted chairs, was clean and empty, bright in the light of strip floods. The walls and floors weren’t solid; they were a gray mosaic of labeled storage drawers and feet restraints — loops of blue plastic — and there were handy little blue rectangles of Velcro everywhere. There were up-down visual cues, signs and lighting and color codes. Everything was obviously designed for zero G.

The whole thing had the feel of an airliner’s crew station, she thought; it was all kind of pleasing, compact, well designed, everything tucked away. Like a mobile home in space. Of course everything was still bright and new, every surface unmarked; it would be different after a few months’ occupancy. Much of the Mission Module’s equipment was still in stowage; the crew would spend the next few days hauling ass around the module, configuring it for its long flight.

The Waste Management Station was a little cubicle containing a commode, a military thing of steel and bolts and terse metal labels. She pulled across the screen, swiveled in the air, dropped her pants and shorts, and pulled herself down. Thigh bars, cushioned and heavy, swung across her legs to clamp her ass to the seat.

She pulled a hose out of the front of the commode; the hose would take her pee to a tank, for dumping in space later. The hose justified the Apollo-era nickname, “relief tube,” that the crews still used for the waste station. In a cupboard beside her there was a set of funnels, all color-coded to ensure they weren’t mixed up by the crew; hers, anyway, were of the distinctive female variety. The cupboard was already starting to stink a little, and the clear plastic of the funnels was turning yellow. Eighteen months of this.

She fitted the funnel to the hose, clamped it over her private parts, and opened the valve to the urine store.

There was a certain strategy to it, which involved aiming for the minimum of pain when using the device. If she opened the valve too soon, the suction would grab at her. And when it resealed itself it was liable to trap a little piece of her inside it. The way round that was to start pissing a split second before opening the valve. But there was a danger that the funnel would just slip off, and off would float her piss in little golden globules.

It took her a few seconds to be able to let go.

Now that she’d gotten set up there, she considered whether to try taking a dump. That was actually easier, mechanically, than peeing. She’d have to start up the slinger, a spinning drum under the commode. The shit would stick to the walls of the drum, and later she would turn a switch to expose the drum to vacuum, and the shit would be frozen and dried out.

But, though she felt a pressure in her lower gut, there was nothing doing; she suspected it was going to take her a few days to relax enough to unclench. And besides, there was no gravity to help her, as the guys had informed her with glee; she wasn’t looking forward to the experience.

She took a couple of wet wipes and cleaned out the inside of the funnel. The wipes might have come out of any drugstore back home, except for the strong stink of disinfectant about them.

She unlocked herself from the john seat. She pushed her hands into the washbasin, a plastic globe which sprayed water across her skin and out into a waste tank. One or two droplets escaped the basin and went oscillating around the john, but she swatted them out of the air easily. There was a row of towel holders on the wall, little color-coded rubber diaphragms: towels, their corners shoved into the holders, hung out in the air like flags. She dried her hands.

She heard a noise; she turned.

Ralph Gershon was in the wardroom, wearing a T-shirt and shorts. He was just floating, with a plastic can of Coke in one hand and a silver-gray lithium hydroxide canister in the other. The lith canisters were used to scrub carbon dioxide out of the recycled air, and they had to be checked and changed regularly. The familiar red-and-white Coke can was pretty much the normal size and shape, except for a baby-style microgravity dispenser at the top.

Gershon held a finger up to his lips — evidently Stone was still asleep — and he held the can out toward her.

She shook her head. “Too gassy.”

“Yeah,” he whispered back. “Coke paid a million bucks to get these cans on the Mission Module, but they just can’t get the damn mix right.” He started to juggle with the lith and Coke cans, sending them spinning and oscillating from hand to hand. York had already observed that microgravity was like a three-dimensional playground for the guys; as soon as they’d gotten into the Mission Module’s big workshop area Stone and Gershon had started doing cartwheels and loops and spins, throwing bits of gear to each other like Frisbees.

Gershon’s eyes kept straying to her chest.

She resisted the temptation to fold her arms across her T-shirt. Well, that’s it. She had a stock of sports bras, and in future she’d be wearing one every time she left her sleep cubicle. No significant relating on this damn mission.

Gershon looked away and sipped at his Coke.

“What’s with the lith cylinders?”

He shrugged. “You know me. I catnap. I’m not sleepy now; I figured I might as well get ahead of myself.” He cackled. “You know, I even got a little shut-eye during the docking.”

That was true. And, with York still unable to rest, there he was, drinking Coke and ogling her chest and getting ahead of his chores.

“You’re an asshole, Ralph,” she said with passion.

He grinned at her. “I know how you’re feeling, by the way.”

“You do?”

“Sure. Stuffy head, right?”

“I know what it is. Zero G. Blood gathering in my chest and my head—”

“Look, if it’s really bad, you should take a scop/Dex.”

“I’ll be okay.”

“Suit yourself. What else? You got a sore back, right?”

“Yeah.” She rubbed at her lower spine. “How did you know?”

“You want to know where that comes from? I’ll tell you. In your bag, you’re never perfectly stable. There’s always a little bit of movement. You drift this way and that. And you know what your body does in response?”

“Tell me.”

“Your toes clench. Right up, into tiny little balls.”

“Why?”

“Because here we are flying to Mars, but we’re still goddamn apes who think we’re going to fall out of a tree any minute. Anyhow, that’s where the back pains come from.”

“So what do I do?”

“Just unclench.” He grinned. “Chill out and unclench. And, Natalie. Use eye masks and earplugs if you have to. What the hell. I won’t tell.”

She went back to her closet. Maybe I’ll give up on trying to sleep and follow Gershon’s example. Get ahead of the day. But she climbed back into her sleeping bag, and it felt warm, and she turned off her overhead light and stretched out again.

She made a deliberate effort to uncurl her toes. Immediately, her back felt easier. Hey, what do you know? The asshole was right.

She closed her eyes.

Wednesday, May 24, 1972

The United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics:

Considering the role which the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. play in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space for Peaceful Purposes;

Striving for a further expansion of cooperation between the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space for Peaceful Purposes;

Noting the positive cooperation which the parties have already agreed to in this area;

Desiring to make the results of scientific research gained from the Exploration and Use of Outer Space for Peaceful Purposes available for the benefit of the peoples of the two countries and of all the peoples of the world;

Taking into consideration the provisions of the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and other Celestial Bodies, as well as the Agreement on the Rescue of Astronauts, the Return of Astronauts, and the Return of Objects Launched into Outer Space;

In accordance with the agreement between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on Exchanges and Cooperation in Scientific, Technical, Educational, Cultural and other fields, signed 11 April 1972, and in order to develop further the principles of mutually beneficial cooperation between the two countries; Have agreed as follows…

ARTICLE 3 (of 6)

The parties have agreed to carry out projects for developing compatible rendezvous and docking systems of United States and Soviet manned spacecraft and stations in order to enhance the safety of manned flights in space and to provide the opportunity for conducting joint scientific experiments in the future. It is planned that the first experimental flight to test these systems be conducted during the second half of the decade, envisaging the docking of a United States Apollo-type spacecraft with a Soviet Salyut-type space station, and/or a Soviet Soyuz-type spacecraft with a United States Skylab-type space station, with visits of astronauts in each other’s spacecraft and stations. The implementation of these projects will be carried out on the basis of principles and procedures which will be developed in accordance with the summary of results of the meeting between representatives of the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences on the question of developing compatible systems for rendezvous and docking of manned spacecraft and space stations of the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R., dated 6 April 1972…

Source: Extract from Understanding Signed by President Richard M. Nixon and Chairman of the Soviet Council of Ministers A. N. Kosygin. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Richard M. Nixon, 1972 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1972)

Saturday, October 28, 1972

Ben Priest called her after midnight.

“It’s over, Natalie. I thought you’d like to know. We lost Mariner.”

She sat up in bed. “Oh? How come?”

“They’d just taken more images of Tharsis and Syrtis Major, and the pictures were on the tape; but then Mariner had to position itself to point its high-gain antenna at Earth to play back the pictures, and — zippo. Nothing. Out of attitude gas. So we lost fifteen pictures.

“But what really pisses me,” he growled into the phone, “is that Mariner still has fuel on board; it’s just in the wrong place — in the retrorocket tanks, not the attitude control tanks. We could have run tubes to carry the retro stuff to the attitude control jets. If we’d done that, we might have another year of useful life out of Mariner.”

“But…”

“But it would have cost another thirty thousand bucks. Out of a hundred-rnillion-dollar mission. So we didn’t do it.”

“Oh, well, Ben. I guess nobody figured that Mariner would last so long anyhow. The basic mission plan was only ninety days.”

“Maybe. But if I’d known, I’d have paid up the thirty grand myself. And then the fuckers axed Viking!”

She had to laugh. “Come on, Ben. This isn’t like you. You’re the great Man-In-Space hero. That thirty thousand bucks has probably gone to pay your salary anyhow.” That was basically true; the unmanned scientific exploration of Mars had been scaled right back, with the savings being pulled into the manned effort.

“Well, I sometimes get my sense of priority back, Natalie. It’s not the lost year that bugs me, you know; it’s, just those fifteen pictures. There they are, sitting on that tape, even now…

“We had to send up a last command. To make Mariner turn off its radio transmitter.”

Oh, God. The poor, brave little probe. She pushed her pillow against her face until she was sure she wouldn’t guffaw. After all, it was only a couple of days since she’d called Ben in a similar mood herself, after an evening spent poring over the latest polls showing Nixon heading for a landslide over McGovern. “How long before Mariner’s orbit decays?”

“Oh, fifty years.”

“Well, maybe we’ll have a manned mission by then. You’ll get there yourself, Ben. Maybe you’ll be able to retrieve your pictures. And maybe pick up the old spacecraft itself; who knows?”

She heard him laugh. “Sure. Why, we’ll bring it back and hang it up in the Smithsonian where it belongs.”

“What next for you, Ben?”

She heard him sigh. “Apollo-N. The test flights for the NERVA. Some time in Tomorrowland.”

“At least you and Mike might get to see more of each other. Maybe I’ll see more of the two of you, in fact.”

“Perhaps. But the flights are looking a long way off, Natalie.”

“Now I think I ought to get some sleep, Ben.”

“Okay. Good night, Natalie.”

“Yeah. You, too, Ben.”

She lay in the darkness, wide-awake.

Mike wasn’t there, of course, or anywhere within five hundred miles of her. He was losing himself in the NERVA developments. As Ben had hinted, that damned project was slipping again.

Anyway, she realized, things hadn’t been quite the same between the two of them since that day in 1969 when she’d gone out to Jackass Flats with Mike and Ben.

She’d tried to talk it through with Mike. It had gone beyond a simple argument for her, beyond the kind of sparky debating exercise they’d enjoyed so many times in the past. NERVA seemed to symbolize, to her, a lot of her unease about the way the country was being run. And eventually that seemed to get through to Mike. Impatiently, he’d shown her schemes to trap the venting hydrogen, to bury the expended cores more deeply…

Somehow that didn’t help. Obviously Mike was smart enough to understand the issues that concerned her, but it was pretty clear he didn’t care; not as much as he cared about a successful project, anyhow.

She loved Mike, she believed. And he loved her. But, she thought, their disparate lives, their different perspectives over the value of projects like NERVA, all of it was steadily pulling them apart.

They’d gone out to Jackass Flats, she recalled, just six months after they’d met. And that was all of three years ago. Maybe she should start regarding those first happy six months as the anomaly, not the norm.

Meanwhile, in March — four months into Mariner’s orbital survey — the first detailed maps of Mars had begun to appear from the U.S. Geological Survey people at Flagstaff. York had gotten hold of copies of those and pored over them.

Mars was very different from what anyone had expected.

Mars was asymmetrical. The whole of the southern hemisphere was swollen, the land lifted well above the datum level and heavily cratered. The northern hemisphere was mostly below the datum, and was a lot smoother than the south… but the north had Tharsis.

Tharsis was a bulge in the planet the size of southern Africa. It was as if a quarter of the whole surface of Mars had been lifted up by some colossal event. The bulge was surrounded by an array of cracks and grooves: to the east of Tharsis, in the Coprates region, a huge canyon system stretched nearly a quarter of the way around the circumference of the planet.

The ancient cratered terrain in the south was cut by gullies and channels which seemed to have been incised by running water. York was entranced by images of Moonlike craters, eroded by flash floods. But there was no sign of water on the surface, in the quantities needed to cut the gullies; maybe the water had escaped from the atmosphere, or was trapped under the surface.

It was what intrigued her about Mars, she’d decided, the mix of exposed, lunar terrain and Earthlike weathering, a combination that made up an extraordinary world: neither Earthlike nor lunar, but uniquely Martian.

But it had nothing to do with her.

The work she was doing, she’d long realized, was building up into a solid, if unspectacular career. She was becoming just another rock hound: her future was probably in commercial geology, and would be spent in messy oil fields, or mines. She could expect a life of heat, cold, rattlesnakes, cow pies, poison oak…

The prospect left her poleaxed with boredom.

She never got to see Mike. She wasn’t interested in her work. And, meanwhile, she spent her spare time imagining geologic traverses across the ancient, battered surface of Mars.

What it amounted to, she told herself with brutal frankness, was that her personal life had been on hold for, hell, years. Just like her professional life.

She felt a germ of a new resolution somewhere inside her, like a dust mote around which a new future might crystallize.

I have to get closer to this Mars stuff. And not for Mike, not even for Ben Priest. For me.

There might be a way. Maybe she could transfer into the Space Sciences Laboratory, right there at Berkeley, that big white building on top of Grizzly Peak.

She got out of bed, dug out her loose-leaf folder of Mars photos, and began to study the eroded craters again.

Thursday, June 7, 1973

Phil Stone was the first to understand Seger’s suggestion.

“My God,” he said. “You’re going to send us to the Moon. Aren’t you?”

“Yes. Yes, that’s right. That’s what I’m considering. I want to reassign your mission a Saturn V and send you to lunar orbit.”

Chuck Jones stared at Seger, astonishment crinkling up his squat face. “Like hell you will.”

For long seconds, the three of them sat in silence.

Stone felt stunned; there in that sterile, mundane office, on an ordinary Thursday morning, it was impossible to absorb such news.

Skylab B, the second Earth-orbital Saturn Wet Workshop, was to have been Stone’s first flight into space. He’d already been training on the science and operational aspects of the mission for months. And Seger was thinking of changing it all around and sending him to the Moon? Jesus.

Seger played with the carnation in his lapel. “You got to look at the bigger picture. The NERVA is slipping again, so its program of test flights is being cut. And that’s freed up a Saturn V. And we need to use it, or we’ll lose it. And I want to use it to send you boys to lunar orbit.”

Stone frowned. “It’s a man-rated Saturn V, for God’s sake. It’s already built. How can we lose it?”

Seger shrugged. “We may have built the thing, but we haven’t yet spent the money to make it fly.”

“We can’t go to the fucking Moon,” Chuck Jones said. “We’re still waiting on the J-2S.” Lunar-orbital workshops were planned, but a few years down the road, following extensive modifications to the S-IVB: the upgraded J-2S main engine, additional payload capacity, a self-ullaging system, electrical heating blankets and Mylar insulation, additional batteries, upgraded electronics… “The fucking S-IVB doesn’t have the power to inject itself into lunar orbit.”

“No, it doesn’t. But it doesn’t need to. Look at this.” Seger had a glossy presentation on his desk; he handed them copies.

Stone looked quickly. It was a summary of an old McDonnell Douglas study called LASSO — Lunar Applications of a Spent S-IVB Stage (Orbital). It showed how Saturn components could be used to establish lunar orbit workshops of varying complexity and weight. It was full of cutaway isometric diagrams and color pictures and big bold bullet-point blocks of text, and — naturally, as it came from the manufacturers of the S-IVB — it was relentlessly optimistic: some of the projected dates were already in the past.

“Look at Baseline 1.” Seger pointed to sections of the presentation. “That shows how we can take a workshop to lunar orbit without the J-2S upgrade, or any of the rest of it…”

A Saturn V would be launched looking superficially like those for the Apollo landing flights. But instead of a Lunar Module, the booster would carry an airlock module, fixed to the front of the third stage.

The S-IVB would send the spacecraft toward the Moon. Just like the landing missions. But, once exhausted, the third stage wouldn’t be discarded. The Apollo would decouple and dock with the empty stage via the airlock adapter. The stack would follow a long, lower-energy trajectory to the Moon: a day and a half more than the three-day landing flights. Then the Apollo Service Module’s main engine would be used to brake the whole stack into lunar orbit.

The empty stage would have the same weight and dynamic characteristics, roughly, as a loaded LM. So an Apollo would indeed be able to deliver it to lunar orbit. The only modifications needed for the S-IVB would be the usual passivation and neutralization kit — equipment to turn the stage from a dry fuel can into a working station — and equipment brackets and pallets. Enough supplies could be carried for a four-week stay in lunar orbit, and the station would be refurbished for later crews.

As he read, Stone began to see the feasibility of it. It could, he realized, be done. But…

“Why?”

Jones looked up from his own reading; Seger fixed Stone with a glare.

“Why what?”

“Why are we doing this, Bert? It’s just a stunt. We’ll have to cut out so much to save weight, we’ll be compromising a lot of our science objectives for Skylab B.”

“I know about the science, Phil. But we can send all that stuff up on the second crew flight, can’t we? And your flight will simply turn into a more limited engineering trip, with less emphasis on the science.” Seger was a thin, intense man, with black, slicked-back hair and an Irish darkness; Stone found him unnerving. “If you’re in my chair, Phil, you have to look at the benefits for the program as a whole. Beyond your one mission alone. Yes, it will be a stunt. But a hell of a stunt. It will put us right back on top of everything…”

Jones talked about the training they’d already completed toward their Earth-orbital mission. “And what about the Russians?” The Soviets were proposing to dock a Soyuz ship with Skylab B in Earth orbit. “Changing that stunt around to a lunar-orbit rendezvous mission is a hell of a trick,” Jones said. “I mean, the Russkies haven’t lifted a single cosmonaut out of Earth orbit yet.”

“The Soviets still say they’ll have at least a circumlunar capability in a couple of years — within the life of the station,” Seger said. “So we can get around that. And even if we can’t, maybe we could downgrade the Russian thing into a simple dock with an Apollo in Earth orbit. Anyhow, never mind the damn Russians. Chuck, you’ll be hanging out over the edge. Fitting out a station in lunar orbit. Nobody’s done anything remotely like that before. I thought a challenge might appeal.”

Jones looked thoughtful.

Stone knew Seger was pressing the right buttons, as far as Jones was concerned. The thought depressed him.

Stone could see Seger’s point, to some extent. Morale in NASA had been low, paradoxically, since the Mars decision. A lot of staff had been geared up to the abandoned Space Shuttle program, which they’d seen as new and exciting, technically; by comparison, the Skylabs looked like an extension of 1963 state of the art. And the continuing budget cuts had put endless pressure on the Agency’s ambitions.

If you counted contract staff, only a hundred thousand people were still working on space programs, compared to a peak of half a million during Apollo. There had even been a program of terminations, at Houston, Marshall, and the other main centers.

Meanwhile NASA had run into a lot of flak over the first orbital workshop, Skylab A. Pete Conrad had led the first setup mission to open up Skylab. But then the second crew had been military, a consolation for the DoD after the shuttle cancellation. Ken Mattingly, an Apollo veteran, had led a crew of military astronauts — Manned Spaceflight Engineers — through a secretive program testing “Terra Scout” and “Battleview” surveillance equipment, radiation-monitoring gear, encrypted-communications beams. Every previous NASA flight had been completely open; it had been a deliberate and popular policy going back to Kennedy.

And, meanwhile, U.S. Intelligence had learned that Soviet cosmonauts in Salyuts had overseen military exercises in Eastern Siberia, sending down realtime tactical information to battlefield commanders.

A lot of people thought the militarization of space was a deeply shitty development, a fall away from the dream of Apollo. And Jack Kennedy had attacked it, publicly.

So maybe Seger was right that a morale-raising stunt was a good idea at this point. But it would be a stunt.

Stone had a military background himself. But he hadn’t come into the space program to play spies in space, or to fly stunts. For him, the proposal was a sour compromise. Screw the science, for the sake of the politics. Just like the old days.

And, to him, it didn’t say a lot for Seger’s sound judgment.

Seger cut the discussion short. “Chuck, Phil, every so often you’ve got to take a chance like this. To go back to the Moon so soon would be a hell of a thing for us. A hell of a thing. The nation needs a boost right now: why, you’ve got two White House aides testifying in the Senate against the President right this minute. And as for the risks, remember, they flew Apollo 8 to the Moon and back on only the second manned Apollo, the first manned Saturn V, and the first V to fly after the unmanned Apollo 6, which was a shambles…”

Stone finally understood. Seger had been reading his history. This is Bert’s Apollo 8. Back to the Moon! A grandiose stunt, a way to make his mark. And Skylab B is to be sacrificed for it.

Seger was saying, “Just think what a hell of a lift it will give us when you’re successful…”

“If, Bert,” Jones said. “If.”

When he’d thought it over, Stone still wasn’t happy.

But he wanted to fly in space. If he was going to have to swallow this ill-thought-out, gung-ho crap to do it, then that was the price he would pay.

And anyhow — Stone reflected, in the midst of the revised, hectic training schedule — he kind of liked the idea of going to the Moon…

Friday, July 20, 1973

The piece was splashed over the front page of yesterday’s Washington Post. Ralph Gershon sat in the public library of his hometown, reading it over and over.

…American B-52 bombers dropped about 104,000 tons of explosives on Communist sanctuaries in neutralist Cambodia during a series of raids in 1969 and 1970… The secret bombing was acknowledged by the Pentagon the Monday after a former Air Force major described how he falsified reports on Cambodia air operations and destroyed records on the bombing missions actually flown…

Ralph Gershon felt a deep satisfaction. At last it was coming out.

He was convinced all that covert crap had worked against his career progression in the years since. Maybe it had also killed off the tentative feelers he’d put out about getting into the space program. That and the color of his goddamn skin. Maybe there were people afraid of what he might say, if he got to be a public figure, right? Well, at last it was all going to be out in the open, and there was nothing anybody could do about it.

He made his decision, sitting there in the musty heat of the library’s reference section, with some old guy opposite him drooling in his sleep. As soon as he got back to his squadron he’d start preparing a new application to NASA.

Before he got up he read some more about how Ehrlichman and Haldeman were going to have to testify in front of the Senate. At last, he thought: at last that asshole Nixon was getting his. Erosion by Catastrophic Floods on Mars and Earth

Ronald R. Victor (Department of Geological Sciences, University of Texas at Austin),

Natalie B. York (Space Sciences Laboratory, University of California at Berkeley)

RECEIVED MARCH 18, 1974; REVISED OCTOBER 6, 1974.

ABSTRACT:

The large Martian channels, especially Kasei, Ares, Tiu, Simud, and Mangala Valles, show morphological features strikingly similar to those of “channeled scabland.” Features in the overall pattern include the great size, regional anastomosis, and low sinuosity of the channels. Erosional features are streamlined hills, longitudinal grooves, inner channel cataracts, scour upstream of flow obstacles, and perhaps marginal cataracts and butte and basin topography. Depositional features are bar complexes in expanding reaches and perhaps pendant bars and alcove bars.

Scabland erosion takes place in exceedingly deep, swift floodwater acting on closely jointed bedrock as a hydrodynamic consequence of secondary flow phenomena, including various forms of macroturbulent vortices and flow separations. If the analogy to the channeled scablands is correct, floods involving water discharges of millions of cubic meters per second and peak flow velocities of tens of meters per second, but lasting perhaps no more than a few days, have occurred on Mars…

Source: From The Bulletin of Geophysical Research, vol. 23, pp. 27 — 41 (1974) Copyright 1974 by Academia Press, Inc., all rights reserved.

July 1976

Later, York would pinpoint the divergence in the trajectory of her life to a couple of days in the middle of 1976.

After that point, things just seemed to unravel, for her, as she fell toward a new destiny.

York wished she had something to drink. Even with all the windows open, the sun beating down on the roof made the car as hot as hell. Her sunglasses kept slipping down her nose, and every time she rested her arm on the sill of the window frame she burned her skin.

She rattled her nails on the steering wheel, waiting for Ben Priest.

In the middle of the aimless mess of her life, she seemed to be regressing, to some kind of childhood.

She’d had a huge image of Mars taped to her bedroom wall, a black-and-white photomosaic compiled from fifteen hundred Mariner 9 photographs, with the scar of Olympus Mons square at the center. At least, she’d had it there until Mike had made her take it down. He said Olympus Mons looked like a huge nipple.

And here she was hanging around at the gates of JPL — without a security pass — like a goddamn groupie, hoping to get an early look at the Soviets’ new pictures from the Martian surface.

At last, here was Ben Priest. With his graying crew cut he looked every inch the military man. He was carrying a fat cardboard folder with a blue NASA logo stenciled on the front. He was moving at a half trot, despite the heat, but he showed no signs of sweat; his crisp short-sleeved shirt glowed white in the brilliant noon light.

This time he hadn’t been able to get her into the lab itself. Nobody was supposed to see the stuff the Soviets were sending back from Mars.

Ben clambered into the car beside her. “Got it.”

She reached over. “Give.”

“Hell, no. Is that any way to greet an old friend? Let’s get out of this heat first. Mars can wait a few more minutes.”

She suppressed her eagerness. Be polite, Natalie. And, after all, it was Ben. She started the car. “Let’s find a bar. Do you know anywhere?”

“Only the water holes where the JPL hairies hang out, and I’d rather take a break from them.”

“I’m staying at the Holiday Inn. It’s only a few minutes from here.”

“Go for it.”

She pulled out.

“I was expecting to see Mike, too,” Ben said.

“Oh, in the end he couldn’t get away. He has his head shoved much too firmly up a NERVA 2 exhaust pipe.” Or up his own ass, maybe, she thought sourly.

“You know the NERVA thing still isn’t going too well. My flight on Apollo-N has been delayed again, and—”

“Mike doesn’t tell me anything. Half of it’s classified, anyhow.”

“Well, that’s the word in the Astronaut Office. So how’s life for my favorite girl-geologist?”

She grunted and pushed her slippery sunglasses back up her nose. “Shitty, if you want the truth. My professor at Berkeley — Cattermole — is a jackass.”

Priest laughed out loud. “I wish you’d say what you mean.”

“Cattermole’s smart at departmental infighting, and putting together grant applications. But that’s it. The rest of his head shut down long ago. His projects are lousy, as are his methods. He sees Berkeley’s Space Sciences Lab as just a way to chisel money out of NASA. If I was smart enough to have seen that before I signed up, I wouldn’t have gone within ten miles of the man.”

“But your contract is only short term.”

“Yeah, and then I have to find another.”

“Which you will. If you want it. You’re a bright girl, Natalie.”

“Don’t patronize me, asshole.”

He laughed again.

“Yes, I’ll find another job. Maybe I’ll even get an assistant professorship somewhere. But…”

“But you don’t think life as a rock hound is going to work out for you.”

“I don’t know, Ben. Maybe not.” Not even working on Mars data was satisfying her.

“So what’s your alternative?”

“Well, there are plenty of jobs for geologists with the oil companies. Good pay; lots of travel.”

Ben said nothing. When she glanced sideways, he was pulling a face.

She felt infuriated. “So what else do I do, smarty-pants?”

He grinned, and patted the folder on his lap. “It’s obvious. Your trouble is, thousands of geologists have been to Alaska before.”

“So?”

“So, I know a place where there are no geologists at all. Your problem is you’re working on the wrong planet.”

The bar at the Holiday Inn was pretty full. It was July 5, the day after the Bicentennial. Bunting drooped around the walls, and there was other Bicentennial debris: a couple of newspaper pictures of Operation Sail, the big regatta in New York Harbor, and yellowing, handwritten, out-of-date signs for local pie-eating, baton-twirling, and greased-pole-climbing contests.

York found them a table in the corner. When Ben went to get drinks, she grabbed the folder out of his hands and spread the Soviet material over the veneer tabletop.

The first couple of images were Soviet publicity shots of a Mars 9 lander mock-up on a simulated Martian surface. The craft landed hard, closed up into a ball, and then four petals unfolded to reveal instrumentation and antennae; in place, the lander was a splayed-open sphere, four feet across.

Ben returned with drinks: Buds, in bottles that glistened with dew.

She pushed the publicity shots across the table. “Look at these damn things. Red sand and blue sky.”

He laughed. “Well, you can’t blame the Soviets. That’s what we expected to find down there, too. The trouble is, we want Mars to be just like Earth.” He took one of the pictures. “Still, isn’t their Mars lander pretty?”

“Oh, sure,” York growled. “But Viking would have been a hell of a lot prettier. Viking would have had stereoscopic cameras and a full meteorology station and four biology experiments. And Voyager would have had a surface rover.” Voyager, a heavy Mars probe to be launched by Saturn V, had been killed by budget cuts in 1967, and the Viking landers in 1972. “Think of it. After traveling hundreds of millions of miles, if we want this Soviet probe to see behind some rock twelve feet away, we can’t do it. Pathetic.”

He held his hands up. “Don’t ask me to argue. Anyhow, the Soviets haven’t done so badly.”

“We’d have done better, Ben. You know it.”

All NASA had to show for this Mars opportunity was another Mariner orbiter, taking high-resolution photos of equatorial landing sites, plus one hard-impact probe which had sampled the atmosphere before crashing into the surface. It was just like the lunar program of the 1960s; the unmanned science program had been completely subordinated to the operational needs of the manned mission to come. The new Mariner, laden with imaging equipment, wasn’t a scientific probe but an advance scout for the manned missions. And we could at least have sent a couple of Vikings.

Meanwhile the Soviets were sending up their own clumsy probes, evidently intent on genuine science. In fact the Soviets had sent probes to Mars in every launch opportunity since 1960. And of the current year’s pair of probes, Mars 8 had failed, but Mars 9 had started transmitting surface images the day before — on America’s Independence Day. Humanity’s first Martian lander had probably provided all the propaganda benefit the Soviets could have wished for.

Priest dug more pictures out of the folder. “Here. This is what you want to see…”

She grabbed the photographs and started leafing through them eagerly. The pictures were grainy, and the resolution wasn’t great. But they were in color. Soon the bar table was covered with images of crusty, rust brown Martian regolith, a rocky horizon, a pink sky.

Ben said, “These are strictly for JPL consumption only. The Soviets passed them over because we gave them Mariner images of their landing site, in Hellas. So you’re not seeing them now. Okay?”

“Sure.” Her heart pumped harder. “Oh, God, Ben, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this. It would have taken me months to get my hands on this stuff otherwise.”

He touched her hand, briefly; his palm was cool and dry, the feel of his skin somehow startling. “You know, it means a lot to me to see you like this.”

She looked at her hand inside his. She felt confused, conflicting emotions surging. So her dubious relationship with Ben Priest was still dubious.

She pulled back her hand, unwilling to think about this. Not when she had Mars on the tabletop.

The Soviet lander was sitting in the middle of a flat, undulating landscape of ocher-colored material, with boulders scattered between small dunes. It was, she thought, like the stony deserts of North Africa, North America, or Asia. Some shots showed pieces of the lander itself: an unfolded petal, resting on the regolith, there a jumble of clunky Soviet equipment on the upper surface, a series of white-painted boxes contrasted with the pink sky. Another photo showed a sampling arm upraised, as if in triumph, over the surface; she could clearly see trenches, scooped out of the sandy regolith by the arm.

It looked very real, the rocks so sharply pictured it was almost as if she could reach into the frames and pick them up…

“Natalie? Are you okay?”

She looked up at him. He looked blurred; she found some kind of hot liquid rolling down her left cheek.

“Natalie?”

“Yeah.” She wiped her eyes, quickly, with a napkin. “I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have to apologize.”

“It’s just that it’s as if I’m there. Sitting on top of the lander, on Mars itself…”

I know where I am, precisely.

I am in Hellas. One of the deepest impact basins on the planet.

It is a little before the solstice: deep midwinter, here in the southern hemisphere of Mars.

The surface is reddish, boulder-strewn. Over there I can see what look like impact craters, between the dunes. Those dunes are obviously of windborne material. And I see other wind effects, such as those trails of fine grains lying between the boulders. That tells me that the prevailing winds here are in quite consistent directions.

But it’s obvious that the landscape doesn’t owe its morphology just to erosion and deposition by winds. Over there, I see stretches of a hardened vitrified surface. Vitrified: a crust of mineral salts, left behind by evaporation.

There has been water here, shaping the surface…

He ordered them both more beers; she drank, and felt the cool glow of the alcohol suffusing her.

“Now. Look at this stuff.” Ben dug out a photostatted report. “This is the real pay dirt.”

She scanned it quickly. It was a statement of preliminary conclusions by Academician Boris N. Petrov, of the Soviets’ life sciences team. The report seemed very guarded. It was couched in the language of a discipline with which she had only a nodding acquaintance, and further masked by cautious Soviet official-speak.

She dropped the paper back on the table. “It’s so damn circumspect. It’s hard to make out anything at all.”

“Yeah.” He cradled his glass. “Well, the results are ambiguous. The life experiment is a gas chromatography mass spectrometer!”

“We’d have done better. Viking would have carried—”

“Yeah, I know. Anyway, the GCMS looked for organic molecules in the regolith.”

“And?”

“The GCMS found nothing, Natalie.”

“Nothing? But that’s impossible…”

Organic molecules didn’t necessarily imply the existence of life. “Organic” just meant “carbon-based.” But organic molecules were a necessary precursor to Earth-type life, and they had been expected on the Martian surface; organic materials had even been found in meteorites from outer space.

Ben said, “The JPL guys figure there must be some process on Mars that actively destroys organics. Ultraviolet flux from the sun, maybe.”

“So the surface is actually sterilized.” She felt a crushing disappointment. She had, she realized, been hoping, unreasonably, that some kind of life might turn up after all. Maybe a hardy lichen clinging to the lee side of a rock… “Mars is dead.”

“Should you be jumping to conclusions like that, a true scientist like you?” He found another piece of paper. “Hey, listen to this. It’s from their meteorology team. Winds in the late afternoon were again out of a generally easterly direction. Once again the winds went to the southwesterly after midnight and oscillated about that direction through what appears to be two cycles. The maximum wind speed was twenty-four feet per second but gusts were detected reaching forty-five feet per second. The minimum temperature attained, just before dawn, was almost the same as on the previous day, minus ninety-six degrees centigrade. The maximum, measured at 2:16 P.M. local time, was minus forty-three degrees. This was two degrees colder than at the same time on the previous day. The mean pressure… Natalie, my God, this is a weather report from Mars.”

She looked up at him. His blue eyes were on her, his face gentle; she felt as if he were looking right into her.

For years, she thought, she had been heading toward Ben Priest, maybe toward that moment, like some dumb spacecraft on its blind trajectory to a target planet.

She pushed toward him, leaning across the photographs of Mars. Their lips touched, gently, almost timidly. His skin felt cool, a little rough. She pressed again, and this time the kiss was deep.

This has been coming for a hell of a long time. Ben Priest and Mars. It was a potent combination.

Eventually they broke.

He touched her cheek. “Now, where the hell did that come from?”

“The Soviets have sent pictures from the surface of Mars,” she said. “It’s a hell of a day for all of us, for all of humanity. Maybe a new step in our evolutionary history. What else do you want to do to celebrate?” She reached into the pocket of her shirt and dug out her room key. “Come on.”

Long after Ben had fallen asleep, York remained awake. It had turned into a hell of a night, the darkness laden with heat and humidity; the sheets lay loosely over her, faintly damp against her skin. She heard the ticking of the small clock beside the bed, the creak of the window shutters as they cooled. Mars 9 pictures and printouts were scattered over the floor at the end of the bed, with clothes piled loosely on top.

She could feel the tousled warmth of Ben beside her. Ben had flown around the Moon, and there he was, in her bed.

She remembered Ben’s question. Where the hell did that come from? Where, indeed. And where were they going?

She wondered if she should ask him about Karen, and Peter.

He hadn’t mentioned them; York didn’t even know where Karen was at this time. He had told her they were having difficulties with their boy: young, enthusiastic Petey had metamorphosed into Peter, a difficult seventeen-year-old, who had painted the walls of his room black — covering up the stars and astronaut pictures he’d pasted there — and spent more time listening to Alice Cooper than to his father.

But Ben didn’t say much about that, even though she could see it caused him distress. Ben rarely talked about his family, in fact.

And York was being a hypocritical asshole. A couple of hours ago, she couldn’t have given a damn about Karen.

Would Ben ever leave Karen? They went back a long time, obviously. And theirs was a Navy marriage. When Karen married Ben, she took on a lot of separation, of anxiety. Perhaps Ben thought he owed her.

Anyhow, if he did leave her — what then? Would York want him?

What about Mike?

It was all, she thought, just one hell of a mess. It was hard to understand how, for a person who had advanced so far on her rationality and logic, she could work out so little about a small affair of a handful of people, and their unexceptional relationships to each other.

She stopped thinking about it.

She picked the folder off the floor and, quietly dug farther through the contents of the Soviet file.

She found XRF results. The X-ray fluorescence device had sent back to Earth a preliminary assay of the composition of Martian regolith. She scanned it quickly. Silicon dioxide, 45 percent; ferrous oxide, 18 percent… There was a lot of silicon, iron, magnesium, aluminum, calcium, and sodium. But the proportions weren’t like any terrestrial rock. There was a lot of iron there. And not much potassium. That was probably significant; it meant that Martian rock hadn’t suffered as much differentiation by internal heating as had the Earth. Maybe Mars didn’t have a large core of nickel and iron, as Earth did…

She swore under her breath. She was speculating. Those data were so limited. That Soviet lander had set down in just one spot, on a planet with a land area the same as the Earth’s. And she could see the limitations of the sampling scoop just by looking at the photos of it. It was only going to be able to sample loose, friable material; what geologists called fines. It just wasn’t enough to give a complete picture.

What we need is someone out there, climbing off the lander, with a spade and a hammer.

Now that she’d gotten over her initial disappointment, she didn’t much care about the life results. It was geology that fascinated her; life was just a second-order consequence of geology, after all. A positive biology result would have been convenient, though. If only we had seen a silicon-based gorilla jumping up and down on the damn Russian camera, we’d be going to Mars tomorrow Even a fossilized trilobite would do.

She remembered those scratchy Mariner 4 pictures. And later, those astonishing images of Phobos, and Olympus Mons, from Mariner 9. Humanity had learned more about Mars from the probes in the last decade or so than in the whole of previous human history. She was lucky to live at such a time, when so many ancient mysteries were being resolved.

Lucky. Maybe.

But it was as if Mars was somehow teasing her. Enticing her.

She put down the reports. It was time she was honest with herself. This dribble of data isn’t enough I don’t want to spend the next thirty years as I have the last two or three, poring over grainy Mariner images, constructing hypotheses I can never confirm. I want to go to Mars, damn it. I want to get down on my hands and knees on that rocky ground, and dig a trench, and bury my gloved fingers in the surface. I want to see the pink sky, and the twin moons, and drive to the peak of Olympus Mons, and stand on the lip of the Valles Mariners.

Mars, with its slow, teasing unveiling, was seducing her.

She realized that Ben had seen that more clearly than she had. And certainly more clearly than Mike, who could barely see anything beyond his own concerns.

But the dream, the ambition itself, wasn’t the problem. The problem was, she had an outside chance of getting there. As Ben kept telling her, York was the right age, with the right qualifications, to compete for a place in NASA.

The problem was, she might actually try to do it.

But joining NASA, trying to get to Mars, meant throwing away her whole life. It meant she’d have to go back to school, and she’d have to go through endless, meaningless training with those assholes at NASA, and she might spend years in low Earth orbit working on crap outside her specialty.

It probably meant, too — it occurred to her suddenly — that she wouldn’t have any kids.

Did she really want to sacrifice all that, to go through so much shit, just for an outside chance of walking on the slopes of Tharsis?

But her fingers itched to get into that dirt, to dig around, to get beyond the loose surface crust of Mars.

The very next day, she was supposed to meet Mike. She’d booked them into a hotel in downtown L.A., so they could spend some time together.

After last night she felt truly shitty about going ahead with the meeting, or date, or whatever the hell she was supposed to call it at that point in her relationship. But she decided to go anyhow; she didn’t see much choice.

Before they parted, Ben dug a leaflet out of his jacket pocket. “Here,” he said. “For you.”

Eighteen hours later, in their L.A. motel room, York rubbed the tension out of Mike’s shoulders, and at last he slept.

After that it was York who seemed to be stuck awake.

She was stiff and a little cold, and the sheets beneath her were crumpled, digging into her back as she lay there. The mellow feeling from the minibar brandies had worn off, leaving her feeling stale, her heart overstimulated.

And besides, she had something she needed to talk over with Mike.

She opened the drawer of the bedside table and pulled out Ben’s leaflet.

In the soft glow of the splinters of light on the ceiling she couldn’t read any of it, but she could make out some of the images: the famous photograph of Joe Muldoon standing on the Moon with his hand across his chest, little schematic diagrams of spacecraft flying around the Solar System. At the back there was a tear-off application form; she ran her fingertip along the perforation.

Issued by the National Academy of Sciences on behalf of NASA, the leaflet was tided “Opportunities for Scientists as Astronauts.” It set out a glowing future in space: expanded laboratories in Earth orbit, more stations around the Moon, even semipermanent scientific colonies on the surface to follow the preliminary toe-dips of Apollo. And then there were NASA’s goals beyond cislunar space: the first manned Mars mission, orbital surveys of Venus — and even, more ambitious still, manned flights to the asteroids and the Jovian system. All within the lifetimes of the scientists it was meant to enlist.

It was an application form to be an astronaut.

She’d been tempted to throw the leaflet into the trash. She was immensely disappointed by that garbage: typical NASA dreaming, predicated on an unwavering expansion of funding and an unrelenting political will. For that, she should sacrifice her career, throw away a decade of her life? After all, none of that astounding program was real…

None of it. Except, maybe, Mars.

Everyone knew about the problems: Mike’s NERVA program was years behind schedule, there were delays in the enhanced Saturn booster development, and the Mars lander base technology project was underfunded and lacking focus… And so forth. In the end, if it succeeded at all, NASA would probably reach Mars much as it had reached the Moon: not as part of any long-term integrated strategy of expansion into the Solar System, as set out in that glossy little pamphlet, but as a precarious one-of-a-kind stunt. NASA seemed organizationally equipped for no other mode of working.

But, for all that, progress was being made, and funding seemed secured for the near future. Jimmy Carter’s attitude to space remained to be demonstrated, but Ben told her that Fred Michaels, the NASA Administrator, had thrown his weight behind Ted Kennedy as Vice President, and helped him secure the nomination against Walter Mondale — who was well known as a critic of the space program, all the way back to the 1960s. Carter/Kennedy were clear favorites to win the November election. And after that, things would look better for Michaels, with his links to the Democrats, and allies among the Kennedys both inside and outside the White House…

NASA, it seemed, was still headed for Mars.

She’d intended to talk to Mike about it tonight. Somehow, though, the subject hadn’t come up.

She put the leaflet back in the drawer.

Beside her, Mike shifted a little, but he didn’t wake up. He was turned toward her, and his hair lay in a dark halo about his head. He slept like a child, she thought: facedown, with his arms up around his head, and his face turned sideways. In sleep the tension had drained out of his face, and he looked years younger than his age of thirty-four.

She’d hardly seen Mike in the last few months. His schedule was grueling. NERVA 2 was only seven months away from the Critical Design Review at the scheduled end of its Phase A development. After that Phase B, production and operations, should be starting up in earnest, with the first unmanned flight tests scheduled for 1978, and the Preliminary Flight Certificate — issued after the first manned flight — to be obtained by mid 1979.

But Mike’s people still hadn’t been able to demonstrate a sustained burn of their huge new engine for more than a couple of seconds.

Mike seemed to be taking it particularly hard. He’d clearly been working fifteen or eighteen hours a day for weeks. He’d become gaunt, his eyes sunk deep in shadows, his clothes and hair rumpled and ill maintained. She wasn’t sure if that reflected the way he was coping personally, or the fact that a lot of the problems seemed to be in the cooling systems for which he was responsible.

Still sleepless, she turned on the TV.

An old Star Trek rerun was flickering through its paces. The warp engines were in trouble again, and Mr. Scott was crawling through some kind of glass tube with a wrench.

“If only it was as easy as that,” Mike mumbled.

His head was lifted off the pillow, and, bleary, he was squinting at the TV.

“I didn’t mean to wake you, Scotty.”

He reached for a cigarette. “You want something else to drink?”

“No. The brandy is keeping me awake, I think.” The comforting smell of stale smoke reached her; it reminded her of her mother. “It’s times like this I wish I smoked.”

He grunted. “Don’t even think about it.”

She debated telling him about the form in the bedside drawer.

But he was checking the clock. “I think I’d have woken up anyhow. They should be running the latest burn about now. Something inside me, some dumb kind of tinier, wakes me up at moments like this, even when I’m twenty miles away from the facility.”

“The burns. The tests. Always the fucking tests. Mike, unless you can figure out a way to relax, you’ll make yourself crazy.”

He blew out smoke. “I think we’re all a little crazy already.”

The trouble was, driving people like this had become part of NASA culture. We all worked eighteen hours a day for eight years to get a man on the Moon with Apollo, and if we have to do it all over again to get to Mars, well, by gosh, that’s what we’re going to do…. But mistakes had been made on Apollo, and those mistakes had claimed lives.

She put her hand over his; she could feel how it was bunched up, almost into a fist. She stroked his knuckles. “Listen. I’ve been thinking. We don’t see enough of each other.”

“Hell, I know that. But what can we do about it? We’ve always known what the deal would be.”

She sought for words. “But I think our lives are kind of hollow, Mike; we’ve been neglecting ourselves too much. Too many other things to distract us.” She waved a hand at the motel room. “We need something more than patches of neutral territory like this. We need something solid. I think we should get a place to live—”

He snorted out a billow of smoke. “Where? We’re lucky if we’re both in the same state for more than twenty-four hours.”

She was irritated at his dismissiveness. “I know that. ‘Where’ doesn’t matter. Anywhere. Here, or Berkeley maybe. And it wouldn’t even matter if the damn place was empty for three-quarters of the year. It would be ours, Mike; that’s the point. It would be a kind of base for us. At the moment, all we have is this. Holiday Inn. I don’t think it’s enough.” I’m twenty-eight years old, for God’s sake.

He stubbed out his cigarette and watched her; on the TV screen, ignored, Captain Kirk was facing another crisis. “You’re a crazy woman, Natalie York.”

“Maybe so. What do you say?”

“Why now? I mean, it’s not going to make a damn piece of difference to the way we live our lives, the extent to which we see each other. You’re not going to give up your career.”

“Of course not, and neither are you.” She pulled at his fingers. “But that’s not the point.”

Then what is, Natalie? What primeval instinct has dragged this up, after all this time? And right at this moment, when you’re thinking of getting on a road that could take you off the Earth altogether…

She surely hadn’t come to terms with what had happened last night, yet.

Maybe this — tonight, with Mike — was all just some kind of way of dealing with Ben, she thought bleakly.

But if that was true, where did it leave her and Mike?…

Christ. What a mess.

The phone rang, its sharp tone startling her.

“Jesus.” He reached out and took the receiver. “Hello?… All right, I’ll be there.” He put the phone down.

“Mike—”

He was already halfway out of bed; he scrabbled over the floor, looking for his pants. “The burn was another failure. Sustained for less than half a second. Shit.” He touched her hair. “I’ve got to be there, Natalie. You go back to sleep.”

“I haven’t been asleep.” She kicked away the sheets and stood up; the air in the room was distinctly cold. “I’ll come, too.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I’d prefer it. Anyway, we have a conversation to finish.”

Mike had already pulled on his shirt; he was muttering to himself, as his mind started to whirl around the problems of the engine.

He’s probably already forgotten what we were talking about.

They set off for me test facility a little after 3 A.M. It was going to take half an hour to drive out to Santa Susana from downtown L.A.

Mike drove out of the San Fernando Valley, and York could see streetlights glowing down there, neat rectangular blocks of light plastered over the valley floor and walls.

Mike drove anxiously, too quickly, without speaking to her.

The test facility was nestled in a rough, boulder-strewn depression in the Santa Susana Mountains. When Mike stopped the car, she was struck by the chill of the air.

She walked with Mike to the center of the facility.

The stars were out overhead, though the young Moon had long set.

Santa Susana was operated on behalf of NASA by Rockwell International. It had been built as part of the development program for the old S-II, the Saturn V second stage. There was still some S-II development work going on there, in fact. The whole site was a swarm of activity, with technicians — some of them in flameproof or radiationproof gear — crawling all over the rig. To York, they looked like ungainly insects.

The NERVA 2 engine stood upended at the heart of the facility, surrounded by a wire-mesh safety fence. Glowing in powerful floodlights, the broad engine bell flared toward the sky.

When they got close to the rig, technicians came up to Conlig. Mike managed one last, apologetic glance back at York, and then he was lost.

Alone, she began to walk slowly around the rig.

“Hi. You look like you need this.”

She turned. A man was at her elbow, grinning; he was tall, pale, with blond hair; he wore grimy coveralls. He looked as if he had been up all night. He bore two plastic cups of a brownish liquid. “It’s from a dispenser. It’s supposed to be coffee,” he said, “but I wouldn’t bank on it without a full chemical analysis.”

“I know you. Don’t I?”

“Yup. Adam Bleeker. We took a field trip together a few years back, in the San Gabriel Mountains.”

“Oh.” The Cold Warrior astronaut. “With Ben and Charles Jones. What a disaster that was.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that. You did your job well. And everyone calls him Chuck, by the way.”

“Whatever.”

She took the coffee gratefully and sipped it. It was warm, but almost flavorless.

Bleeker told her he was the Astronaut Office representative on the project there. Ben Priest had covered the same assignment some years before.

“It’s kind of an odd time of day to run an engine test,” York observed.

“Well, we’re so far behind schedule. Every hour counts.”

“Tell me about it. I came out with Mike. Do you know him? — Mike Conlig—”

“Sure.”

“Nothing was going to keep him away from here, once the call came.”

They started to walk around the test rig, slowly. Technicians were everywhere, arguing desultorily. There was an almost tangible air of tension, of depression; it was Mike’s mood writ large.

The contrast to Jackass Flats — to the raw enthusiasm Mike had represented to her there — was marked.

In the middle of it all, the huge NERVA 2 engine stood erect and silent, aloof, remote behind its safety cordon. That motor, Mike had told her, was the “Integrated Subsystems Test Bed Engine”; it was a complete, more or less operational machine, but it was trapped in that ungainly test rig, and, when it fired, it could only drive itself into the solid Earth.

Just looking at the rig, York could tell that NERVA was still years away from flight status, from delivering its promised two hundred thousand pounds of interplanetary thrust.

The upturned nozzle sat atop a short, fat cylinder, and two smaller bells protruded from the cylinder’s sides. The cylinder was the pressure shell which contained the radioactive core, and the smaller nozzles, gimbaled, were attitude control rockets. She saw the ring of cone-shaped actuators at the base of the engine; the actuators operated the control drum, which moderated the reactor. A huge spherical hydrogen tank sat close to the engine, and pipes snaked from it to swaddle the pressure shell and nozzle. Plumes of vapor vented from the tank, and sheets of ice encrusted its sleek metal walls.

Adam Bleeker helped her trace out the engine’s operation.

“Liquid hydrogen works as both propellant and coolant — it’s called regenerative cooling. A pump pushes the hydrogen through that cooling jacket surrounding the pressure shell and the bell. Then the hydrogen is forced through the radioactive core, where it flashes to vapor, and drives its way out through the bell…”

There was still no trap for the vented hydrogen, York noted absently.

Bleeker showed her how an efflux pipe from the reactor carried a proportion of the hot hydrogen gas to a turbine, to power the engine’s pumps in flight. The turbopump exhaust was used as attitude control gas, vented off through the small supplementary nozzles.

“What’s the problem tonight?”

“Cavitation. Gas bubbles in the liquid hydrogen flow. We raised the core temperature to its working regime, and we’d started the hydrogen flow. We reached nominal thrust, for about half a second. But then the core temperature started to climb. We were cavitating, somewhere below the pump: hydrogen bubbles, stopping the circulation of coolant. And that was why the core temperature was climbing. We had to shut down.” He sounded tired. “You can imagine the safety restrictions we’re under here. If the pressure shell had been breached, we’d have had radioactive products reaching the atmosphere, and there would have been hell to pay. So as soon as we saw the problem, we had to obey the rule book, which said to shut off the hydrogen, and flood the whole damn core with water to ensure the temperature comes down. Now we’re going to have to siphon off all that radioactive water, and take the core apart by remotes, and make sure the propellant flow cylinders haven’t been damaged in the heat… It will be days before we’re set for the next test.”

“Christ. What a mess.”

York studied his profile; picked out by the powerful floods, Bleeker’s skin looked thin, almost translucent. She found it hard to read Bleeker’s own reaction to all this. Was he impatient at the restrictive rules, the need for safety? Did he have any qualms about handling lethal substances in such an unstable, unproven rig? She couldn’t tell. Just as when she’d first met him, Bleeker struck her as utterly calm, cool. Or, perhaps, completely without a soul.

“You’re all under a lot of pressure,” she said. “I know a lot of questions are being asked about the ability of NASA to deliver NERVA 2.”

“By who?”

She shrugged. “The press. Congress.”

“Yeah,” he said evenly, showing no resentment. “Well, hell, maybe there are questions to ask. You know, the program’s led by the Germans, from Huntsville. And they didn’t pick the design goal — which is two hundred thousand pounds of thrust for thirty minutes — because they knew they could build it; they chose the goal because that’s what we need for the Mars mission profile. They didn’t go through a lot of analysis to try to figure it out; they just started building toward it. It’s the way they’ve always worked. And it’s kind of hard to argue against their kind of record. But…”

“But you’re not so sure.”

He hesitated. “The truth is, the development schedule we’re working to was modeled on experience of chemical technology. Nuke stuff is different. I think they’re only just figuring out how different. And that’s even after we’ve eliminated a lot of nice-to-haves, like a deep throttling capability… I think maybe we’ve underestimated the schedule, here. We’re pushing too hard.”

Now a crew, in white protective gear, was moving into the cordoned-off zone, converging on the NERVA. York wondered vaguely if one of them was Mike. There was no way of knowing.

She stared at the inert NERVA 2, resentful. Thanks to that broken-down thing, I’m not going to see a trace of Mike for weeks now.

Bleeker had to leave her, to get on with his own work.

She watched the slow, painstaking demolition job for a few minutes, then she went back to the car and managed to fall asleep in the passenger seat.

When she awoke, the sun was well above the horizon, and the car was stuffy and hot. There was no sign of Mike. She found a bathroom, and left a note for Mike.

She drove herself back to L.A. Mission Elapsed Time [Day/Hr:Min:Sec] Plus 004/21:38:11

Daily execute packages were uploaded from Mission Control overnight as twenty feet of teleprinter output. The packages contained suggested time lines, and a few personal messages. York split up her portion of the list and put it into her ring binder, throwing away yesterday’s draft, and began to figure out how to follow the day through.

She looked down the list, searching first for time-critical items. Then she looked for stuff that would need advance setup and preparation, and items that weren’t solo, where she’d have to work with the others.

The execute package wasn’t so much a detailed time line, as the first generations of astronauts had had to follow, but a “shopping list” of objectives. Mission planning was a lot more laid-back, compared to the days when moonwalks had been choreographed down to the minute. The shopping list approach had evolved during the long-duration Skylab flights of the 1970s. York was relieved; she was a senior professional, after all — they all were — and she didn’t need her activities handheld by some remote roomful of experts down in Houston.

In her pocket, to help her with the timing, she carried a small personal alarm clock, a cute clockwork thing she’d picked up from a five-and-dime in a mall in Nassau Bay. Its crudity and lack of accuracy appealed to her, in the midst of all that high technology.

Her main objective for the day was going to be powering up the Ares Transfer-Orbit Science Platform. She drifted upward, along the cylindrical length of the Mission Module.

The Mission Module was based on the design of the Skylabs, which had been in use for more than a decade. Such was the lifting capacity of the Saturn VB that the Mission Module had been delivered to Earth orbit “dry” — carrying no fuel — and with interior partitions and equipment already fitted. The crew occupied what had been the hydrogen tank, all forty-eight feet of it, with its domed ceiling and floor. Hidden under the floor was the lox tank, much smaller, a cramped, squashed sphere. The lox tank was used to hold stores, and with its thicker walls it would serve as the crew’s storm shelter — shielding them from solar flares, if any blew up in the course of the mission.

The hydrogen tank was split into three levels by partitions of triangular metal mesh. York was wearing Dutch shoes, with V-flanges in the sole, to enable her to cling to either side of the floors. There was a fireman’s pole running down the middle of the workshop, and there were straps and guide ropes and harnesses everywhere.

The tank’s bottom level was “home” — the wardroom, sleep and waste compartments. The middle belt doubled as a command and control area, covering all of the spacecraft’s subsystems, environmental processes, and flight operations, and as an experiment and exercise area, with a running strip around the tank’s circular wall. The exercise machines, still in their launch configuration, were strapped against the pressure hull. And the top level, closest to the prow of the Ares cluster, was the Science Platform.

The whole module was something like a big engine room, York thought, with clunky tanks and storage boxes stuck to the curved walls, and cables and pipes running everywhere, under smooth covers of yellow plastic.

When she floated up into the science platform, it was like entering an octagonal cave. Bulky equipment racks and storage bays were fixed all around the curved hull. One side of the octagon served as a ceiling, broken by a couple of high-quality viewing ports — disks of darkness — and by small science-experiment airlocks, sturdy wheeled hatches like the doors of little safes. Everything was still in its place, stowed neatly away, still in the wrapper.

She pulled herself to the right-hand wall and locked her feet into a couple of stirrups. It was the display and control console: a long rack of switches, cathode-ray displays, and numeric and qwerty keypads. She closed switches and began booting up the science platform’s computers, then started to power up and check out the rest of the equipment.

As it started to come to life, the cramped little science station reminded her of some bespectacled kid’s bedroom laboratory; it was compact, miniature, kind of sweet.

Some of the experiments carried by Ares were part of long-term microgravity research programs. There were experiments in protein crystal growth, and the diffusion of bacteria in microgravity conditions, and a chunky arrangement called the heat pipe performance experiment, a dry engineering test of the diffusion of heat from hot spots on pipes and ducts in microgravity.

But Ares offered some special opportunities. There was a scheme to observe major solar events like spots and flares from the two widely separate vantage points of Ares and Earth, and so there was a whole bunch of instruments which would be directed at the sun: a coronagraph, a spectroheliograph, a spectrographic telescope. Since in flight the Ares cluster would keep itself aligned to point at the sun, to save boiloff, all the equipment was mounted in a pallet, which would be unfolded and held out from the body of the Mission Module, like a rearview mirror.

The setting up took longer than she expected. The computers, Hewlett-Packard minis, were slow. The models Ares was carrying were out-of-date: the design of the platform, already nearly a decade old, had become frozen around those customized, low-weight, low-power machines years before. Hewlett-Packard and the other computer suppliers had made a commitment to keep supporting NASA’s in-flight equipment as long as was necessary. But it was ironic that York was — in deep space, en route to Mars — having to make do and mend with technology which no self-respecting middle-sized savings and loan in Gary, Indiana, would put up with anymore.

And besides, microgravity was turning out to be a pain in the butt to work in. Anything that wasn’t tied down just floated away. It was easy enough to remember that for major pieces of equipment, but it also applied to her notebook, pens, pencils, handkerchief, and she wasted a lot of time chasing down elusive items of equipment. And she had to make a conscious effort to anchor herself — with foot stirrups, or by holding on to a rack surface, or by wrapping her legs around a strut — before she tried to move anything. Otherwise, every time she turned a switch on the control panel, the switch would just turn her back.

It was like working on an ice rink: a huge, invisible, three-dimensional ice rink, across whose surface items kept escaping from her, slithering away along perfectly straight lines, and on which she felt she was constantly losing her balance.

When York came floating back down into the wardroom, Phil Stone was already in the little galley area, working on the lunch. Food packages and trays floated in the air beside him.

A TV camera, fixed to the wall of the wardroom, was fixed on him; York vaguely remembered that they were scheduled for another public broadcast. She wondered how many people were still watching.

Stone glanced up at York. “You’re starting to look like an astronaut, Natalie.”

“How so?”

“Take a look in the mirror.”

The nearest mirror was fixed over the washbasin. York floated over and inspected herself. Stray wisps of hair floated up around her head in a kind of halo, and the skin under her eyes looked puffy, as if she had been crying. That was another effect of microgravity: the accumulation of fluids under the skin of the face. She prodded at the fleshy pads under her eyes; the skin was tender, as if stretched.

Gershon came soaring down the fireman’s pole, upside down. “Hello, Japan-ee lady,” he said, pulling his eyes slantways.

There was a hiss of static from the comms panel fixed to the wall. “Ares, Houston. We see a box of goodies there, Phil.” Capcom today was Bob Crippen.

York sensed the others stiffening, subtly. Crippen’s forced banter signaled they were going out to the public. We’re onstage again, guys.

Stone held up an anonymous brown bag. “Good day, Bob. Would you believe you’re looking at chicken stew? All I have to do is push the pack inside this little sliding drawer here, like so, and that injects the bag with three ounces of hot water, and I pull it out and mush it up a little. And there you go; beautiful chicken stew.” He stuck the stew onto a tray floating beside him; the tray held four bags, a can of nuts, and a sachet of tropical punch, all fixed with Velcro. Stone floated the tray to Gershon. “Come and get it.”

“Yum.” Gershon snipped the top off his chicken stew bag and began to spoon it into his mouth. He waved at the camera and grinned; he was eating his meal upside down relative to Stone.

Stone said smoothly, “We’ve been flying in space now for more than twenty years, and I guess we’ve figured out how to provide decent food. We’re basically having much the same kind of food that the workshop crews, in lunar and Earth orbits, are eating right now. We have a menu that repeats, every six days or so. Most of our food is rehydratable. Like my noodles and chicken here.” He pointed at his tray. “That’s because rehydratable gives the best food value per pound of weight. But we do have some foods which are thermostabilized — cooked before launch, and then stored in a cold box. I’ve got here stewed tomatoes, and ground beef with pickle sauce, for instance. And some foods we can carry in their natural form, like my almonds here. And then I have these freeze-dried pears, and this strawberry drink… We don’t have a refrigerator or a food freezer, as the Skylabs have, but we do have something new: an oven. It’s fan-forced, of course, not convection. Because hot air doesn’t rise anywhere in zero G. And we’ve even got hot and cold running water, here in this little galley of ours.”

Gershon said sotto voce, “Tell him about the farts, Phil.”

Oh, sure. Hot mike, asshole.

Actually the farts were a real problem. There was a device in the spigots that was supposed to scrape excess hydrogen, which was a by-product of the Mission Module’s power cells, out of their water supply. But the gizmo didn’t work too well, and a lot of gas got into their stomachs. And out again almost as quickly.

“Ares, Houston.” Ares was already so far from Earth that it took a full six seconds for their signal to reach Houston, and for Crippen’s reply to come back. “Phil, we’re told we have a pretty good audience here.”

“We’re gratified to hear that.”

“Phil, would you say you actually enjoy the in-flight catering?”

Stone hesitated. “It’s hard to say. Even stuff in its natural form tends to taste different, somehow, up here; I guess there’s some subtle physiological change — a response to microgravity — we don’t understand yet. Then there’s the packaging. I know this form of food has a lot of advantages. There’s little chance of food particles getting into the equipment. But the Russians have been sending their cosmonauts up with cakes and bread since 1965…”

Six seconds.

“Copy all that, Phil,” Crippen said, “but it wasn’t quite the question I asked.”

Stone said firmly, “It’s the answer you’re going to get, Bob.”

After the delay, York heard laughter in the background, in the MOCR.

“Ares, Houston, thank you. Ah, Ralph, Phil, Natalie, could we get you all in one shot for a moment, please?”

Stone looked puzzled. “Say again, Houston.”

“If we can have you all in the camera’s field of view for a couple of minutes.”

Stone drifted close to York, who stayed by the table; and Gershon floated down behind them, facing the camera.

“Ares, Houston,” Crippen said. “Just about now, ah, at five plus one plus forty-two” — one hour into the mission’s fifth day — “you are passing a significant boundary. Although you may not feel it. It’s something you might like to think about as you eat your meal today.”

“We look forward to hearing about it, Bob.”

“…Maybe one of you could tell us what you can see out of your picture window right now.”

York turned. The “picture window” was a two-foot-wide viewport set in the wall of the wardroom, big enough to have to curve to follow the concavity of the pressure hull; it was triple-paned, with the thick, tough feel about it of an airplane window.

“I see Earth and Moon,” she reported. “They’re both pretty much full, although I can see a thin slice of shadow down the right-hand limb of each of them.” Earth was so distant, its sphericity wasn’t obvious; it was reduced to a flat blue bowl of light, with its pale, shrunken companion close by its limb. “The Earthlight is still bright,” she said. “Strong enough to read a book by, I’d say. But…”

“Go ahead, Natalie.”

“Something is different.” She peered into the window to see better. “The sky is just like a clear night on Earth. And — my God — it’s full of stars. Earlier in the flight the glare of Earth was so bright it blacked out everything else. Now, I can see the stars. I can recognize the constellations again, for the first time on the trip.”

“Ares, I guess you’ve really gone up into night.”

“Yes, we have. A huge, empty, cold night at that.”

“Ares, Houston. Thank you, Natalie. Ares, here’s the significance. You’re now almost exactly five hundred and sixty-two thousand statute miles from the Earth. That’s twice as far as any human has traveled before. And you’re now passing out of the Earth’s sphere of influence.”

Sphere of influence — an imaginary bubble in space centered on Earth, an almost perfect sphere where the gravitational potential of Earth and sun were in balance. Inside the sphere of influence, Ares had essentially been in an orbit dominated by Earth; beyond that point, however, the craft had escaped from Earth and was in solar orbit, a new planet.

Stone said, “Thank you, Bob. We understand, and we’re impressed, almost humbled, with the thought…” Stone seemed dissatisfied with his own trite words. He was looking at York thoughtfully. “Natalie, you want to add anything to that?”

She stared back, frozen, her mind suddenly empty. Well, you’ve griped often enough about the inarticulate grunts they send into space. Now’s your chance to do better.

For some reason she thought of Ben Priest. What would he advise her?

Just say what you feel, Natalie. Don’t hide behind technicalities. And don’t let it embarrass you.

“Houston, Ares. I guess what strikes me now is that we humans have spawned at the bottom of a hole. A deep gravitational hole dug into space-time by Earth’s mass. And of all the humans who have ever lived, all the billions of them, only the three of us — Phil, Ralph, and I — have ever climbed to the lip of that hole…”

She was aware of Gershon and Stone exchanging doubtful glances; Stone waved Gershon to be still.

York stared back at the receding Earth. She held up her hand, and covered the Earth-Moon system with her palm. “I’m holding up my hand now, and the whole of human history — including even the voyages to the Moon — are hidden from my view by my palm. We’ll spend another year in space before we see Mars loom close, just as Earth is falling away now. A year in this collection of tin cans, with nothing but the stars and the sun beyond the windows. We know it’s going to be difficult, despite all the training and the preparation. But what’s important is that we’ve come out, over the edge of the gravity hole, and now we’re going to see what lies beyond. We have indeed gone up into night, Houston.”

Stone nodded. He was still looking at her, thinking.

York shivered. Suddenly the Mission Module — drifting through space with its ticks and whirs and smells of food and stale farts — seemed like a little home to her, impossibly fragile, the only island of warmth and light in all that dark night.

Sunday, August 15, 1976

After a couple of days of floating around inside the Command Module in their long johns and jumpsuits, Jones, Dana, and Stone started to help each other back into their pressure suits. To go through the Lunar Orbit Insertion burn they were going to have to return to their couches and strap on their canvas harnesses.

They finished up a meal: soup and cheese and spreads on crackers, with a grapefruit-orange mixture to drink. Dana had a plastic bag of pea soup. He would take a spoonful of the soup, tap the handle, and the glob of soup would float off, still holding the shape of the spoon. But when he poked the liquid with a fingertip, surface tension hauled it quickly into a perfect, oscillating sphere. Dana leaned over to suck it into his mouth, a little green marble of pea soup.

Jim Dana found life in microgravity startling, the endless unexpected details enchanting.

Most of it, anyhow.

Before suiting up, Chuck Jones decided to take a dump.

That involved stripping stark naked, and climbing into the storage bay under the three metal-frame couches. Apollo’s waste management system consisted of a collection of plastic bags, with adhesive coatings on the brim, and finger-shaped tubes built into the side. Jones had to dig into the bag with his finger — nothing would fall, after all — and hook his turds down into the bag. And afterward he had to break open a capsule of germicide, drop it into the bag, and knead it all together.

In a moment the sounds and smells of it were filling the cabin.

Dana just sat and endured it. The lousy design of the system was hardly Jones’s fault.

The irony was that the Apollo system had been heavily upgraded in the last few years. Rockwell had stretched the original lunar flight design, making it more robust and reliable, and increasing its capacity; Apollo was mostly used as an orbital ferry craft for taking crews to and from the Skylabs, but even flying solo it was capable of supporting as many as four men for eight days in orbit. Rockwell was even trying to make the Command Module reusable, by providing saltwater protection and modularizing its components — so a module could be cannibalized after splashdown, even if the whole thing couldn’t be flown again.

But some things they hadn’t gotten around to fixing, like the plumbing arrangements.

Dana was finding his first flight in space, with its long string of hassles and discomforts, a surprisingly depressing experience. The contrast between the Zenlike emptiness of cislunar space, and the scrambled human attempts to survive in it, struck him powerfully. And the immaturity of the technology compared to his aviation background was striking.

But we really are at the edge of our capabilities out here. Dad’s right. We’re not really up to this. Not yet. We just aren’t smart enough. Clever monkeys, improvising, making it up as we go along, riding our luck, hauling along our plumbing.

Still, it was one hell of an adventure to tell his son Jake about.

Dana took his turn on trash detail. He collected the food bags, spiked them with pills to dissolve the residue, rolled them up tightly, and stuffed them into a plastic garbage bag. He stashed the garbage in a storage compartment. The compartments had been almost full within a few hours of leaving Earth orbit, and the garbage was dumped regularly into space; Enterprise was heading for the Moon surrounded by a little orbiting cloud of food bags and other trash.

The crew settled down to its pre-LOI checklists. It was all done in an uncharacteristic silence, Dana observed. It wasn’t hard to figure out why. Arguably Lunar Orbit Insertion was the key moment of the mission; on it depended the success of their flight — and, of lesser importance to the career astronaut, the success of Moonlab itself.

And they’d have to perform the burn during the loss-of-signal period, while the craft was around the back of the Moon and shielded from the Earth. So there would be no way the men in Mission Control could help them out.

Since his decision to initiate it, Bert Seger had built up the mission, orchestrating the media coverage carefully. Apollo/Moonlab was going to be a feelgood extravaganza, a return to the Moon, a demonstration of competence: a distraction from the collapse of Saigon, the rocketing cost of fuel, the stagnant economy, inflation… He’d even given way to a write-in campaign by Star Trek fans who wanted Enterprise as the call sign for the ship, the first Apollo to the Moon in four years. It didn’t do any good for the Astronaut Office to protest that they didn’t need a call sign for this mission.

It was all fine PR. But the high profile meant that a failure — and a failure caused by some dumb programming fault — would be very embarrassing.

Apollo shuddered slightly, and solenoids rattled. That was the firing of the reaction control clusters, halting the spacecraft’s slow roll. The stack had been rotating since leaving Earth orbit, to even out the sun’s heat; the crew called it “barbecue mode.”

Stone, in the center of the three frame couches, said suddenly, “Hey. I got the Moon. Right below us.”

Dana looked up from his checklist.

It looked as if streams of oil were descending across the glass of the window to Dana’s right. Dana felt a stab of fear; he couldn’t figure what malfunction could have caused that. Then his eyes refocused, and he realized he was looking at mountains. They slid slowly past the window, lit by the slanting rays of the sun, trailing long black shadows.

The mountains of the Moon. “Oh, Jesus. Look out there.”

“It’s only the fucking Moon,” Jones said. “You’re going to be seeing it for a long time. Come on, get back to your lists. Thousand miles out. Six and a half thousand feet per second… We’ve fifteen minutes until LOS, twenty-three minutes from the LOI burn…”

The sun was hidden behind the orb of the Moon, Dana saw, and the Moon was backlit by the corona, the sun’s outer atmosphere. So there was light all around the Moon, as if the far side were on fire. But Dana could see the shadowed side quite clearly; it swam past the window, illuminated by Earthlight, ghost-pale.

The Moon looked like a ball of glass, its surface cracked and complex, as if starred by buckshot. Tinged pale white, the Moon’s center loomed out at Dana, given substance by the Earthlight’s shading: the Moon was surprisingly three-dimensional, no longer the flat yellow disk he had known from Earth.

He picked out a large, deep crater; perhaps it was Tycho.

There was an elusive quality to the Moon’s features, an uncertainty about the shading. Sometimes the craters looked like domes, the mountains like pits. The dead surface of the Moon was like a mask, reversing itself in his vision.

In Earth orbit Dana had been able to see the curve of the horizon, but the Earth was so huge that most of it was out of his view. But the Moon was a small world. The curvature was so tight he could extrapolate the rest of the sphere; he could see that he really was flying around a ball of rock, suspended in space, with darkness stretching to infinity in all directions.

It looks so alien This isn’t our world And yet three Stars and Stripes and three abandoned LM descent stages already stood on those silent hills.

“Thirty seconds to LOS,” Jones said.

“Enterprise, Houston.” Ralph Gershon was the rookie astronaut serving as capcom today. “Coming up on LOS. All your systems are looking good. We’ll see you on the other side.”

“Roger, Ralph, thank you. Everything looks okay up here.”

The hiss of static from the comms units faded suddenly, to be replaced by a low-volume hiss.

“Going around the corner,” Phil Stone said quietly. “Loss of signal.”

Dana stared at the little loudspeaker grille closest to his position. He was startled by his own reaction: he felt abandoned, bewildered. Apollo was out of the line of sight of Earth for the first time since launch; for the first time, Mission Control couldn’t get in touch with the crew, and it was as if a rope had been cut.

Dana quietly suspected that a kind of dependency culture had grown up among the astronauts over the years. Whether it was healthy or not, the knowledge that Mission Control was always there, always staffed with the best and the brightest, took a lot of the responsibility away from the pilots. It was as if Houston was flying your ship for you. By contrast, those few moments when you and your bird would have to function entirely independently of the ground — well, those times brought fear. Not of the inherent danger, but of failure. Don’t let me be the one who screws up.

The stack was barreling toward the Moon. They were falling steeply into the satellite’s gravity well, and the Moon was growing — getting visibly larger by the minute, its features sliding past the windows.

“Look at that old Moon,” Jones said. “Rougher than the surface of my butt. Well, I guess I’m never going to get to land down there, but I’m glad I came along after all. That smart-ass kid Gershon should be here now. Make him feel right at home. It’s just like Cambodia.” He cackled.

Dana tried to grin along with his commander, but he failed. To his left, Phil Stone looked uncomfortable, too.

This jock banter crap just wasn’t appropriate anymore, Dana thought. Maybe it never had been.

The craft fell into lunar shadow and entered total darkness: no sunlight, no Earthlight touched the hidden landscape rushing below.

The radio remained silent.

We’re alone, the three of us All of humanity, imprisoned on the Earth, is hidden by the bulk of the Moon.

Dana felt a sudden surge of conviction. However it was arrived at, we made the right decision, to continue the space program How could we have turned our backs on adventures like this? We have to keep on going out. Experiences like this will change us We’ll become something more something beyond the human.

The broken, complex lands scrolled beneath his window.

“Okay, you assholes, enough rubbernecking,” Jones said. “Let’s get in shape for this fucking burn.”

Enterprise sailed around the limb of the Moon.

Wednesday, May 25, 1977

Mike Conlig hated Washington. As soon as he got off the plane the steamy, oppressive heat closed in around him, and he felt a kind of psychic pressure from all the people crowded into this shabby corner of the Earth.

Now, along with Hans Udet and Bert Seger, he sat in Tim Josephson’s immense, plush office. Conlig felt awkward, out of place, lost in the huge room, in the great, soft armchair. And he wasn’t so keen on wearing a suit either; the knot of his tie seemed to be compressing his throat.

Tim Josephson came bustling into the room, a file under his arm. He slid behind his modest, polished desk. “I’ll come straight to the point,” Josephson said. “I’ve read your status reports. You know the question you have to answer here today. NERVA is a hell of a long way behind schedule. The Critical Design Review is scheduled in three months. And from what I hear you’re not going to be ready.”

Seger shrugged. “You won’t hear any argument about that, Tim.”

Josephson steepled his fingers. “All right. We’re under a lot of pressure on this; we’re having to defend your work against attack in Congress and elsewhere. People are saying that we’ve put our shirts on the wrong horse here. Nuke rockets are a new development; maybe we should be following an incremental process of change, by enhancing our chemical technology. And on top of that you have the nuclear safety lobby, who say we shouldn’t be throwing up tons of radioactive fuel on top of Saturn rockets.” He looked at them, one by one. “I suppose you have read about the Seabrook protest, up in New Hampshire: two thousand people demonstrating, trying to stop the construction of the fission plant there. By using nuclear technology we’re swimming against the tide, gentlemen.

“But it’s clear to me that we can’t let the problems on this one development stop the whole goddamn program. You know that since 1972 Rockwell has been carrying through a parallel chemical-technology development, based on an S-II enhancement. Fred Michaels is thinking of going to Congress to ask for funding to be switched away from NERVA to that development stream…”

Hans Udet shook his head; his blond-gray hair shone in the fluorescents. “No. You must understand—”

Josephson leaned forward. “No. Today, you must listen, and understand, Hans. This isn’t a game we’re playing, here. It takes a hell of a lot of effort to build and sustain a political coalition behind a program like ours. Jim Webb did it for NASA in the 1960s; we’re lucky to have Fred Michaels in the same role now. But he can’t work miracles…”

It was the first time Conlig had met Josephson in the flesh. The assistant administrator gave off the aura of sleek, bureaucratic competence, which came over on TV. Every inch the organization man. In his early forties, and with that small face perched on a long neck, that prematurely high forehead, the thick spectacles, and those rapid, decisive movements, Josephson was like some tall, flightless bird.

But his dry words connected with Conlig; suddenly it was an intense, electric moment for him. My God. He’s serious. We’re in real trouble here, it’s genuinely possible that these bastards could close us down. And you can bet your life that if they do, none of us working on NERVA would be allowed within a thousand miles of whatever new program they turn to. Conlig’s whole career — everything, all his self-belief — funneled through that one moment in time, that decision point. If I say the wrong thing now, my professional life will be over. Because there will never be another NERVA project; not for me.

“Now.” Josephson had finished his preamble. He swiveled his head and stared at each of them. “Sum up. I want you to tell me where you are, and what your prospects for success are. I want the truth as you see it; this isn’t the moment for false pride. The whole program depends on us making the right decision.” He glared at Udet. “How about you first, Hans?”

The old German sat up straight in his chair. “The truth, Tim? The truth, as you can tell from the reports, is that NERVA, at this stage of its development, is in trouble. We haven’t been able to sustain a single worthwhile burn yet…” In his clipped, accented, slightly imprecise English, with its bizarre overlay of Alabama drawl, Udet began to go through NERVA’s myriad problems — pump stresses, nozzle hot spots — and the steps the teams were taking to resolve them.

“So you see,” Udet finished up, “the NERVA is indeed not worth a snap, today. But” — and he leaned forward, fixing Josephson with a glare — “neither was the F-1, the Saturn’s great first-stage engine, at a similar stage in its development, back in ’62 or ’63. If anything, the prospects were worse. There we had combustion instability problems; there the damn things kept exploding on us. But we were allowed to stay on the case, Tim. We got on with our work. And we solved the problems, so much so that the Saturn V has never suffered a single significant engine failure.

“It is the same now. We do not need an alternative program. With NERVA we face problems: yes, of course we do. But they are only engineering issues. We have never let such issues intimidate us before, and we will not now.” As he spoke, Conlig thought, a kind of subliminal message was radiating out of him at Josephson. When you look at me you are looking at von Braun himself. My engines are heroes. We got you to the Moon, we can get you to Mars. Trust my judgment, and allow me to proceed with my work….

Conlig longed to be in Santa Susana — or better still, back in Nevada, at Jackass Flats, in the still emptiness of the desert. He longed to get away from all the politicking, and back to the engineering.

He thought of Natalie.

His relationship with Natalie was a kind of nagging ache on the fringe of his awareness. He knew she wasn’t happy. Damn it, neither was he. But just then there just wasn’t room in his head to think about it. Maybe in a couple of years, when NERVA had dug itself out of the hole, he -

Josephson was looking at him. His cue to perform.

Slowly, haltingly, with none of Udet’s Prussian-aristocrat fluency, Conlig began to speak.

He described the steps being taken to reduce the latest cavitation and hydrogen-graphite corrosion problems, and the difficulties they were having with the way the intense radiation was making capacitance gauges produce erroneous hydrogen tank measurements. And so forth. But, he told Josephson, the team was hopeful nevertheless of getting to the first extended burn and full system test soon, and the rigs were demonstrating that the design would hold up under the vibration and shock to be expected during a flight…

As he spoke, he couldn’t tell how well he was doing.

Josephson listened without comment. Then he turned to Bert Seger.

The program director had been sitting in with the NERVA people over the last week, poking around Santa Susana and the other sites, evidently figuring out for himself what the prospects were. He sat facing Josephson, whiplash-thin, with his trademark carnation glowing on his buttonhole, just above the crucifix pin there.

Briskly, Seger summarized his own view of the various problems. “Tim, I don’t know what the hell shape our schedule for NERVA is going to be in when we get through the current replan. What’s hamstringing us is the safety precautions; we have to drown and dismantle each damn rig after every bitty problem. I’m not saying we should skip the safety stuff; of course not. But we’re going to have to plan realistically for every milestone in the program from now on. More realistically than we have up to now. But—” A pause.

“Yes, Bert?”

“You’ve got some good people out there, Tim. Both ours and the contractor’s; some of our best. And they’re doing their damnedest to make this thing fly. I recommend we stay with this horse, Tim; don’t think about backing another.”

Josephson listened in glassy silence. “All right. Thank you, Bert, gentlemen. You’ve said pretty much what I expected you to say. I think I have to back your judgment, your faith in this balky machine of yours, this NERVA. I’ll keep on going in to bat for you. But I hope you’ve heard what I’ve told you today. Bert, I want you to pull together a coherent status summary I can pass up the line. And I want to see a new schedule out of your people, Hans: a credible schedule. And I want to see you adhering to it, from now on.”

Those tough words, delivered in a flat monotone, seemed at odds with Josephson’s dry, file-clerk appearance. Conlig felt restless, eager to get out of here.

As they were walking out of the door, Josephson called Bert Seger back. Conlig could hear Josephson distinctly. “I want you to ride herd on these assholes, Bert. Don’t take any more bullshit. Ride herd, and make them fix this nuclear skyrocket of theirs…”

We don’t need to be told, Conlig thought, as he followed the others through the carpeted corridors.

When he got out of the building, despite the humid heat outside, Conlig felt a surge of relief; prickles of sweat broke out over his forehead. It was like being let out of school. Fucking bureaucrats.

Now, at any rate, he could get back to work: start expending energy once more, and relieve the huge anxiety that was knotted up inside him. January 1977-January 1978

Her application to NASA took a full year to resolve itself. And yet, once started, the process had a kind of inevitability about it, a grinding logic.

A couple of weeks after her first application, she got a telegram from the National Academy of Sciences. They wanted more information: a fuller rйsumй, reprints of published papers, a five-hundred-word essay on experiments she would like to conduct on the surface of Mars.

She complied. She wrote about her ideas on outflow channels, and on searching for water under the Martian regolith, and what that would mean for the future colonization of the planet.

She shaved her essay to exactly five hundred words; she’d had previous dealings with government agencies, and she knew that breaking the smallest rule might cost her her chance.

She wasn’t taking the application too seriously, in the privacy of her own mind. But she wanted to get as far as she could: maybe put herself in a position where she could give herself a choice of pursuing that crazy option — a career in the space program — or not.

York read in Science that fewer than a thousand scientists sent their names in response to the National Academy of Sciences flyer: far fewer — according to the press — than NASA had been hoping for.

York could understand that. A scientist’s career was brief, in terms of productive years: the peak time was late twenties to early thirties. Right where York was. Losing that time could be very damaging, in terms of a long-term career.

And scientist recruits had been given a rough enough ride by NASA in the past. Not one of the first batch of scientist-astronauts, who’d signed up in 1965, had made it to the Moon with Apollo.

You’d have to be crazy to risk your career, your reputation, on the slim chance of a flight into space someday, with an organization of engineers and pilot jocks like NASA.

Of course you would.

A few weeks after submitting her essay she received a letter from the Academy.

She wasn’t rejected yet.

She had passed their preliminary screening, as regards age, height, and health, and she was scientifically qualified for the program, with proven expertise in a relevant field. She was sent more forms to complete: an application for federal employment, an aeromedical survey form designed for Air Force pilots, several others.

And she was invited to go for medical examinations at Brooks Air Force Base in Texas.

To the lair of the hero test pilots! Jesus. I’m getting close.

Texas, as she descended toward it, struck her as a pancake-flat plain. It was a hot June day; stepping out of the plane to walk the few yards to the terminal building was like walking through a furnace.

She met the other candidates at the Best Western where they’d been lodged. They intimidated the hell out of her. There was a chemistry department chair from Caltech; a Princeton M.D. who was also a Ph.D. candidate in physiology; a physics professor from Cornell; a Ph.D. physiologist who was also a jet pilot; an M.D. who was also a jet pilot. And so on. It was obvious that the “scientists” whom NASA was considering largely had “operational” bents, too; they were mostly pilot-scientist hybrids.

York was the only woman.

Jesus. White male pilots with professorships. What chance do I have?

The candidates congregated at lunch and over dinner. The men organized trips to the Alamo, in downtown San Antonio. York kept away from those macho gatherings and tried not to let herself get depressed.

On the first morning of the tests, she had to start at six o’clock Texas time, which was 4 A.M. Berkeley time. So that was the first of her handicaps. She couldn’t even get a coffee; she was supposed to fast until lunch for the purposes of the tests.

The tests were going to last all week.

The first test was for glucose tolerance. Blood was drained from her arms while she forced down incredibly sweet glucose liquid.

Then she was subjected to eye tests: there was an Ishihara color-blindness test, and a photograph of her retina taken by a flash blazing into her eye. She had to drink a liter of lukewarm water, after which a weight was placed on her eyeball, to measure the fluid excreted.

There were internal medicine tests. She had to lie for an hour inside a Faraday cage, a metal box that excluded electric fields, while a cardiogram was taken. York felt like a chimpanzee in a zoo. Then she was strapped into a device fitted with a parachute harness, designed to hang her while the blood pooled to her feet. She had to hyperventilate until blackout symptoms began to show, little dots darting around her vision.

Then — brutally quickly — she was given a Master heart test, where she climbed and descended stairs while holding electrodes to her chest. At the end of the test she had to fit her lips around a mouthpiece so her exhaled carbon dioxide could be collected for volume measurements.

There were tests of her vestibular system, the balance apparatus of her middle ear. Hot and cold water was poured into her ears to confuse her vestibular canals, making her dizzy. Doctors peered into her eyes, watching how long it took her eyelids to stop flickering.

Later, she was told to walk in a straight line through a darkened room. The idea was to test for vestibular imbalances. When the lights came up she found she’d drifted maybe a yard to the left of the room’s center line.

The tilt chair was another vestibular test. It looked a little like an electric chair, mounted on a rotating platform in the middle of a pitch-dark room. She was strapped into the chair, and electrodes were fixed to track her eye motion. The chair was spun around, once every three seconds, and tipped back and forth. Every so often they would reverse the direction of tilt and rotation. It was like a carousel ride, run by lunatics; every tilt made York feel as if she wanted to upchuck, but she was determined she wasn’t going to give those assholes that satisfaction.

She had to give urine samples at half-hour intervals, for three hours; she had to drink quarts of water to generate the raw material. She had to give blood six times. In the end the veins in both her arms collapsed from repeated pricking.

In the midst of the physicals, she went through psychological tests: playing with blocks, drawing self-portraits, completing a five-hundred-question multiple-choice personality test. There were IQ tests, Rorschach inkblot tests, memory tests, vocabulary tests, tests of math and reading.

She went through a written paper on her “personal values,” which sought to examine the motives she had for going into space. She labored over the fifty questions, covering possible motives like money and fame, the good of mankind, and the thrill of it all, as well as the possibility of scientific discovery.

On her first pass through, York tried to answer honestly. Of course, it’s the scientific discovery They’re selecting mission specialists here! What the hell else do they expect? But then she wondered if she ought to try to be smarter. It would be a bad thing to seem unbalanced, obsessed about the science to all else. Any astronaut, even a specialist, was going to have to help out with the chores. And besides, the Mars crew was going to have to be presentable to the press, projecting the right all-American, NASA-tradition, John Glenn — wholesome image.

She went through her scores again, trying to anticipate what the selectors might be looking for.

Then she figured that all the other candidates would have worked this out as well and would similarly be doctoring their answers.

She went through a third time, trying to take that into account…

An earnest young man took her through a scatter chart rendered by a computer. He sounded puzzled by the results: here she showed herself to be dedicated to a single goal, there flexible and capable of balancing multiple objectives; over here the results said she was strongly self-motivated, but there she was coming up as happiest working with a team… and so forth. It was a complex, meaningless dance.

She gritted her teeth and tried not to say anything to make it worse. She wondered how much all this was costing.

One morning she was given barium sulfate for breakfast, to provide contrast in X-rays of her gall bladder. Another time she was provided with a tritium solution, so her percentage of body fat could be measured. She took pills which gave her diarrhea, and which caused her piss to come out green. In the EEG test, eleven needles were poked half an inch into her scalp.

Even her teeth were checked over. A cheerful, inane dentist tut-tutted over her mouth’s state of disrepair, and he seemed to take a lot of comfort in telling her in great detail how much preventative dental work she’d have to endure. You don’t want toothache or an abscess halfway across the Solar System, ho ho!

In the course of a healthy life, York had had hardly any experience of hospitals. The doctors here were Air Force, specialists in aerospace medicine. In her ignorance, she had expected the tests to be tough. In fact what they hit her with was so far beyond her experience that it scared the hell out of her. The tests struck her as ordeals: barbaric, brutal, often ridiculous, barely scientific.

The final test, on the Friday, was a sigmoidoscopy. She had to give herself an enema. Then she lay on a bench while a woman doctor shoved a rod up her rear, straightening out the intestines, probing farther and farther.

York was exhausted, angry, humiliated, frightened. It took a powerful effort of will to submit herself to this last invasion.

Before San Antonio, she’d treated the whole thing casually. An indulgence for Ben, maybe. An adventure. An amusing battle of wits between herself and NASA, in which she would see how far she could get before they found her out.

Now, all that had changed. She didn’t want the investment in pain and humiliation to be wasted.

Withdrawing her application became unthinkable.

Her test results, when they came, showed her medical history to be “unremarkable.” She was “in no apparent medical or psychological distress.”

Comforting, she thought. Well worth a week in medical hell.

Then she was called to Houston itself for an interview.

The plane landed at Houston Intercontinental. York made her way into the terminal, and, as she’d been instructed, found the Continental Airline Presidents’ Club. She faced a plain glass door with a one-way mirror. When she knocked, the door was opened by a NASA protocol officer, a short, dapper man in a blazer. She identified herself, and he hurried her inside — out of sight of the press? — and offered her a diet soda.

When all the candidates had arrived — it was the San Antonio group — they were to be taken in a limousine to the Nassau Bay Hilton.

When she stepped out of the air-conditioned airport building the August heat hit her in the face, moist and enclosing, as if the ground was steaming. Although the afternoon was well advanced, the sun seemed to be directly overhead.

The limousine worked its way south, toward downtown, on I-59, and then east and south around 610, the Loop. The Nassau Bay Hilton was close to JSC, more than twenty miles from the city center, out on I-45.

Houston was hot and flat, sprawling, evidently very new. The roads were well maintained and modern. Huge, colorful billboards battered at her eyes, lining the interstate. Many of the signs and ads were in Spanish; after all, Texas had nearly been part of Mexico.

There were few indications of the presence of the space program here: inflatable rockets in the used-car lots, a “Tranquillity Plaza” shopping mall, the basketball team called the Rockets.

Beyond the heat haze of the freeway, the downtown skyscrapers thrust out of the plain like a collection of launch gantries, isolated, crowded. There were water towers, big oval tanks, like the Martian fighting machines from The War of the Worlds. They passed roadside neon thermometers, which read high nineties or low hundreds, even so late in the day.

Houston was going to be very different from the older cities she’d grown used to. Do I really want to live here?

All the other candidates were talking about the death of Elvis, a few days earlier. She had nothing to say to that — in fact the endless, obsessive coverage bored her — and she was glad when they got to the hotel.

The Nassau Bay Hilton was a tower block by the shore of Clear Lake, a few minutes from JSC. The receptionist’s voice contained a strong Texas twang, and there was a gift store in the lobby, with ten-gallon hats and cowboy boots. Her room, a single, was plush. It had a view of a marina, and a bright blue swimming pool, which she wouldn’t have time to use.

In the morning she was up at five-thirty. Three-thirty, Berkeley time. The sun was already high.

Her interview was directly after breakfast. And so there she was, with the time not yet seven-thirty, being driven in a limousine west along NASA Road One.

The cow pasture to her right, along the north side of the interstate, had been fenced off. Blocky black-and-white buildings were scattered across the plain, each numbered with big black round figures, like toys from some giant nursery.

The driver — a beefy, sweating man called Dave — took a right into a broad entrance. On the right was a granite sign saying “Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center.” And on the left a Saturn V lay on its side, its stages separated and mounted on wheeled trailers.

Dave grinned when he caught her gawping at the Saturn. “That’s just a test article,” he said. “The first one built. The story is that when it looked as if we might be canning Apollo altogether, there was talk of taking one of the flight articles and putting it on display here, or maybe at the Cape. A man-rated moon rocket as a lawn ornament.” He chuckled and shook his head. “Can you believe it?”

It seemed to take forever for the limousine to drive past the grounded Saturn. The booster was aging. York could see corrosion around its big rivets, cobwebs on the big A-frames which supported it, and some of the fabric parts around the engine bells were stained with lichen. The Stars and Stripes painted on the flank of the fat second stage was washed out, the red of the stripes running down toward the ground.

Beyond the Saturn there was a small rocket garden. York recognized a Redstone, the slim black-and-white pencil which had thrown the first Mercury capsules on their suborbital hops. The Redstone was upright, but held to the ground by wires, like Gulliver. And she saw a Space Shuttle, a wind-tunnel test article, a scale model of a ship which had never been built; it was an airplane shape, upright against the gleaming white of a big external fuel tank.

The Shuttle’s body looked chunky, clumsy. But York was entranced by the curve of the wings, set against the crude cylinders of the throwaway rockets around it; the spaceplane looked elegant, a stranded relic of a lost future.

She was checked into security, in Building 110, and given a photocopied map and directed toward Building 4. She set off on foot.

The buildings were black-and-white blocks. Many of them were clustered around a kind of courtyard, where thick-bladed grass shone in the sunlight, bright green. There were cherry trees, and a duck pond with an attractive stone margin. But no ducks: Ben Priest had told her how they left too much mess, and had been chased away. We’re not here for ducks. There was a flat tropical heat, the air still, suffused by the chirp of crickets. It was hard to move around; she could feel the heat drain energy out of her.

She tried to imagine working here.

Bicycles leaned up against every building, and there were big sand-filled ashtrays by the doorways, with stubs sticking out of them.

There was an air of calm. The blocky buildings didn’t have the feel of most government establishments. It was more like a university, she thought. In fact, Dave, her driver, had called it the “campus.”

JSC had its own Martian water towers. There was an “antenna farm,” a fenced-off field of big white dishes, turned up like flowers. And, here and there, huge tanks of liquid nitrogen gleamed.

Inside Building 4, the air-conditioning was ferocious; it must have been thirty degrees cooler than outside. The building was actually quite gloomy, even cramped; it had small ceiling and floor tiles, and the walls were painted a 1960s corporate yellow-brown. She felt her spirits dip a little. It was like an aging welfare office.

She took the elevator. The interview was in the “astronaut library.”

When she knocked, the door opened, and a man greeted her: tall, wire slim, with gray-blond hair and blue eyes. He wore jeans and a Ban-Lon shirt. He smiled at her easily and shook her hand.

She recognized him. He was Joe Muldoon. A moonwalker was shaking her hand.

It hit her suddenly, a change of perspective, in a surge. It really was the space center. There were astronauts there, for Christ’s sake. Veterans.

She tried to look at Muldoon, but found it impossible to face him directly; her vision seemed to moisten up, and it was as if he was glistening, shining.

But now I’m applying to become one of these people. My God. Will people look at me the same way? How the hell will I cope with that?

Joe Muldoon guided her to her seat, a chair stuck in the middle of the room.

There were hardly any books in the “library.” On the wall behind her chair was a row of photographs: portraits of dead astronauts, Russian and American. Jesus. Put me at my ease, why don’t you. There was a big TV running in the corner, the sound turned down low. It ran a continuous feed from the crew up in orbit in Skylab A; the split screen showed a shot of the Earth, taken from Skylab, and Mission Control ground track displays. Occasionally she heard the controlled murmur of the air-to-ground loop.

The panel was seven people: seven white males behind a long oaken desk. Many of the faces were familiar to her from TV and newspaper coverage of the space program: astronauts, senior NASA science managers, administrators.

And there at the center of the table — she recognized with a sinking heart — was Chuck Jones. He nodded at her, dark and squat, his graying black hair a fine bristle.

Christ. Chuck Jones. She hadn’t seen him since Jorge Romero’s ghastly field trip in the San Gabriel Mountains, all those years ago. She wondered if Jones remembered her.

Jones rapped on the table and called the group to order. “Thanks for coming in, Natalie. We’ve all seen your application, and it’s very impressive.”

“Thank you.”

“So we can skip all of the stuff you’ve covered before. Now we want you to tell us about your scientific studies, and how they are going to help us get to Mars. In your own time.”

Suddenly, her mouth was dry as the sands of Jackass Flats. What a question. It was so loaded.

Slowly, she began her answer.

She summarized the main thrust of her work, the geological surveys based on Mariner data, and how she’d helped formulate a hypothesis that maybe Mars had once had surface water, in liquid form, and maybe that water was still there, under the oxidized soil. And how, if the first crew could find incontrovertible evidence of that water, it would all but assure the continuation of the exploration of Mars. Find water, and there will be lots more flights, guys. Seats for you all. But you need me to find the water.

Chuck Jones was staring at her. She was sure he remembered her from that field trip.

She tried to seem relaxed, to smile, to meet their eyes. All she got back were cold stares. But as she spoke about her work, she grew in confidence; some of her awe rubbed away. The men were just that: men. Even Joe Muldoon. And, looking at them that way, she became aware that three of them, at least, were discreetly checking her out, glancing at her chest, and following the line of her legs.

She was asked follow-up questions. Then Jones asked what criteria she would use to select a Mars landing site. Another loaded question, but she was getting more confident. She smiled at the panel, from one end of the long table to the other.

“My goal, obviously, will be a successful science program on the first mission,” she said. “And the scientific worth of a site will be a key criterion. But it’s also obvious that the first landing is going to be extremely difficult. So we must primarily choose a site which will enable the crew to land in safety.” She rattled through a brief checklist: the site ought to be on a smooth, unbroken plain, with no highlands nearby to interfere with the final landing approach, and the winds should be low, and the season should be chosen to minimize the prospect of dust storms, and so forth.

“We need to get a scientist on Mars. But a dead scientist on Mars wouldn’t do anybody any good.”

That actually got a smile. As well it might; it was a deliberate echo of Deke Slayton’s famous justification of his policy of keeping scientists off the early Apollo missions. It was all part of the message she was cumulating for them, in word, gesture, and subtext. I’m a scientist, and a good one, with very relevant experience. But I’m prepared to help you guys achieve your own dreams. More than that — you need me, in order to achieve those dreams.

Now, tougher questions started to hit her.

“Doctor York, would you submit to a two-year journey to Mars?”

“I… Sure. I’d want a reasonable chance of success. But I would love to go, for scientific reasons. And I feel I could maybe articulate the experience better than—”

“Is that a yes or a no, Doctor?”

“Huh?”

“I asked you a question. Would you take the trip to Mars?”

“I guess so. Yes.”

“Doctor York. Suppose I tell you that the chances of surviving the trip are one in two. Do you go?”

“You can’t know that. The statistics are so uncertain, the analyses—”

“Assume I know it. Do you go?”

“One in two?” Tell the truth, Natalie. “Absolutely not. I might accept, say, one in twenty, if it could be demonstrated.”

“One in ten?”

“If it could be demonstrated.”

“How are you going to balance your two careers, as an astronaut and a scientist? Won’t there be incompatibilities?”

“Sure. But the opportunities are so great.” On Mars, you would only have to look around to make discoveries. You’d be Darwin in the Galapagos… “But I need to keep some momentum in my career. I’d be looking for some kind of split.”

“What kind of split?”

“Maybe one-third to one-half of my time should be spent on my own research.”

Chuck Jones leaned forward. He had black eyes that seemed to peer right into her. “Dr. York. You aren’t married.”

What the hell now? “No, I’m not.”

“What is your view of the forthcoming National Women’s Conference?”

“…What about it? I’m sorry, I don’t follow—”

“You must know it’s coming here to Houston in November. I understand there’s going to be a parade through Houston — the First Lady, Billie Jean King… If you’re here then, working with NASA, will you be attending?”

“Perhaps. I doubt it. I’m a little passive about such things, I’m afraid.”

“Will you be supporting it — passively or not, Dr. York?”

Are you one of these newfangled feminists? Jesus Christ. Do I have to answer this? She let her anger show in her voice. “I support the Equal Credit Act of 1974, and I’d like to see it enforced. I support full employment, flexible child care, other basic provisions. Hell, yes, I’ll support the conference, if you want to know.” She glared at them, challenging. And if that counts against me, to hell with you, you assholes.

“Would you like to tell us about your relationship with Michael Conlig?”

She felt a cold sweat break out across her palms. My God. It gets worse. It was just outrageous. For a half minute, she considered walking right out of there.

Then, slowly, she gave them a brief, factual account of her on-off relationship with Mike.

“And you’re together now?” Jones asked.

She thought of bluffing through. What would be a better answer? Yes or no? She could probably get Mike to back her up later…

Ah, the hell with it. “I don’t know, sir. It’s complicated.”

Jones held her stare for a few seconds. Then he leaned back in his chair. “Okay, Doctor. Michael Conlig works for one of our main contractors, on the NERVA 2 project. As you know. You could well find yourself working together.”

“I guess.”

“Do you feel your complicated relationship would cause you any problems?”

Her anger flared, and she let them see it. “No, I don’t. Frankly I resent the implication, sir. Mike is dedicated to his work. In fact he has tunnel vision about it. As I do about mine.”

Jones’s eyebrows went up. “Is that the source of the complications?”

Screw you. “We both have goals to pursue. We would both do our jobs, to the best of our ability, whether we worked together or not.” She glared around at the panel defiantly, as if daring them to ask more follow-ups.

But that seemed to be an end of it. The next question was for more detail about water on Mars.

When they were done, she felt a cold satisfaction.

She had no idea whether she’d won through or not. There were too many factors beyond her control, including the culture and politics of NASA; too many things over which she, with all her qualifications and experience and persuasiveness, could exert not the slightest influence. But she felt, at least, that she’d done her best.

She felt kind of soiled, though. Those damn questions about Mike. She wished she’d found some way of not answering.

But the only choice had been, answer or quit right out. She’d chosen to answer. As the adrenaline rush faded, she felt as if she’d somehow let herself down. She’d made the first of many compromises she’d have to accept, she suspected, if she got into NASA, and she was to survive there.

As she got up to leave, the moonwalker winked at her, long and slow.

The response from NASA arrived — at last — just after Christmas.

She stood in the hall of her Berkeley apartment, looking at the crisp white envelope, with its blue NASA logo.

It was suddenly one hell of a moment in her life. A real branch, a fork in her destiny. One way lay the space program. Maybe even Mars. The other -

Somehow she couldn’t visualize what might lie down the other track, what might follow if that letter, that slim, high-quality white envelope, turned out to contain a rejection.

She put it down on her desk, unopened.

She went to make coffee, to open her other mail. Somehow it didn’t seem right to open The Letter just like that.

Mike was out at Santa Susana, buried in the latest test runs. York hadn’t even heard from him for a couple of weeks.

His absences seemed to matter less and less to her. They’d never finished the conversation they’d started, that night in the L.A. motel. Christ, it was January. Nearly a year ago. She didn’t know where her life was going. York hadn’t even told Mike about her application to join the corps, her visit to Houston, her ordeal at the Air Force base. Ben Priest knew, of course, but she’d asked him not to mention it to Mike. Ben had been puzzled — in fact, she was a little puzzled at herself — but she’d insisted.

She didn’t expect her application to succeed. Not really. But she wanted to see how far she could get. And in the meantime she wanted it to be something she achieved for herself, without the approval, or otherwise, of Mike or anyone else.

She’d tell Mike all about it, when she failed.

If she failed.

And if she succeeded? How would she raise the subject with him then?

Oh, hi, honey, it’s me. Oh, nothing special. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Yeah. I miss you, too. Oh, by the way. I’ve had a complete career reversal, I’ve joined NASA, and I’m going to Mars, and my ovaries will be zapped by cosmic rays in outer space. Why didn’t I tell you about it? Oh, you know how it is. We’re both so busy busy busy!… Mike? Mike?…

She opened the envelope.

She’d failed. She wasn’t going to be selected. In the end, she’d failed the damn NASA physical.

She groped her way to a chair, and sat down. Something melted inside her, softening and guttering and flowing away.

It’s not going to happen. Maybe I’ll get to look at a couple of pounds of samples, under glass, in some sterile receiving laboratory in Houston. But someone else is going to walk on Mars, to run his hands through the rusty dirt. Not me.

Now that it had happened, it was remarkable how much she cared. Looking back, she saw that the dream of Mars had been like a beam of ruby red laser light lancing through her life, linking everything she’d done. She’d clung to her cynicism about the space program: its culture, its impact on the society of her country. Well, hell, she did disapprove of it. The whole thing was crass and wrong and a waste of money, and there were much more effective ways of achieving the scientific goals without sending up ill-trained human beings, in overweight craft riddled with leaky plumbing…

But as long as it existed, that precarious ladder off the Earth, she’d wanted to climb it. Yes! I admit it! I wanted this! I wanted it more than anything!

She crumpled up the letter and threw it to the floor.

She was glad Mike wasn’t there.

Ben Priest phoned a couple of times, leaving messages on the answering machine. He was sympathetic.

She didn’t return his calls.

Jorge Romero called. He was boiling mad.

“Do you realize that not one geologist made it through the final cut? Can you believe that? Jesus Christ. How can you go to Mars and not take a single geologist? I’m telling you, Natalie, I’m going to fight this.”

York didn’t really want to hear it.

It had been a week, and she’d been trying to put the whole thing behind her. Mostly she preferred her own company, but this was one time she’d have kind of liked someone to talk to. Even her mother might have served.

Well, maybe not.

She suspected she was in a mild state of shock: it was as if she had gambled everything, invested all her emotional energy, in planning for a future which contained Mars.

But the dream of Mars was a kind of adolescent fantasy, she was starting to tell herself, something she was going to have to grow out of at last. She felt vaguely ashamed of playing the crass games of the selection panel. And it was surely true that she could achieve far more — even in terms of Mars studies — on Earth, rather than waste a decade of her life on the vain hope of getting a spaceflight.

It was time to be mature.

The last thing she needed was a siren voice like Romero.

But he was still talking. “Of the geologists, you came closest to passing, Natalie. There were no women in the final cut either. My God, what do those guys in Houston think they’re doing? It isn’t a goddamn boys’ flying club. I don’t want to give up. I want to appeal this decision, challenge them.”

“I don’t know, Jorge…”

On and on. But she didn’t hang up.

And, eventually, she agreed that Jorge could put her name forward again.

Romero pulled in a lot of favors. She suspected he’d even spoken to Ben Priest.

She had to fly back to San Antonio, and undergo some of the tests again. Romero brought in senior aerospace physicians, the best in the country, to look over her case. This time the tests were even harder to bear, so tense did she feel about the whole situation.

She went along with it all. She went through the motions of the tests and reviews, as if numb; she figured she must be in some kind of state of denial.

In the meantime she tried to make plans for the rest of her life, on Earth. And she tried, unsuccessfully, to figure out some way to talk to Mike.

A month after the revised medical reviews, the phone rang. When York picked it up, she recognized Chuck Jones’s voice.

“Natalie?”

Her breath caught in her throat.

It had been an ordinary day, one among thousands, soon to recede from her short-term memory and become lost in the blur of time; she realized that whatever Jones said, she would remember that day as long as she lived.

“Yes. York.”

Jones said bluntly: “The new medico stuff is fine. How would you like to come fly for us?”

My God.

“Natalie? Are you there?”

“Uh, yes, I’m here.”

“Are you going to accept?”

…Is that it? But what about all the normal things that come with a job offer? Salary, reporting date, duties? What about the pension plan, for Christ’s sake? Am I just supposed to leap in gratefully, blindfolded?

“Well, I guess there’s a 99 percent chance I’ll accept.”

There was a long silence. When Jones came back his voice was stern. “We need a yes or no, Natalie. What’s with these shades of gray?”

She took a breath. What the hell. Geronimo. “You got a yes.” Mission Elapsed Time [Day/Hr:Min:Sec] Plus 066/06:34:51

Phil Stone hadn’t slept well. It was almost a relief when his intercom started piping out some kind of music, gentle elevator stuff with guitars.

He closed his eyes and buried his head in his sleeping bag; perhaps he could grab a couple of minutes more…

He heard thumps, bangs, and suppressed curses from the sleep locker next to his. A fist slammed into an intercom control panel. Shut the fuck up.

Ralph was awake, then.

He could hear Natalie sneezing. That would be the dust. It was a problem; dust didn’t settle under microgravity, and, despite the circulation and filtering of the air, there was a lot of it in the atmosphere: from the food, from hair and whiskers being shaved off, from epidermal flaking.

The music cut off.

Fred Haise, working as capcom, came on the line. “When you’re ready, Ares, I’ve got a couple of flight plan updates and an update on your consumables, and the morning news, I guess.”

“Give us the news, Houston,” Gershon growled.

“Surely. What have we got… The Lakers have beaten the Boston Celtics four to two for the NBA title. Natalie might be glad to hear that. Or she might not. The TWA hijack continues. It looks as if the passengers have been moved out and dispersed around the Beirut slums… Here’s something for you, Ralph; I know you’re a sci-fi buff. Gene Roddenberry has said he’s scrapping the treatment he’d prepared for a new Star Trek series. It was going to be like the first, with the huge space cruiser Enterprise with massive phaser banks, bigger and more powerful than anything they’re likely to encounter. But he’s changed his mind; he’s been inspired by you guys, apparently. Now, Roddenberry says he’s aiming for something called Star Trek Explorer, about a small, pioneering band of humans and aliens in their fragile craft, going much farther than anyone has gone before… How about that, guys. Science fact changing the face of science fiction. It says here.”

Gershon laughed. “Who’s playing me? And which one of us is the alien?”

Haise, good-hearted but no public speaker, read on. After a couple of minutes, Stone found he was able to tune out the halting voice from his awareness.

The news was important, though, he figured. It reminded them all that there was still a whole world back home, something more to go back to than the confines of these cans they were stuck inside.

Stone took a leak, washed, and pulled on a T-shirt and shorts. He suspended a pair of reading glasses around his neck on a string.

Actually today should be a good day. The mission plan said that Stone had some optical tracking work to complete in advance of the TCM-2, tomorrow’s course correction maneuver. It was a mission highlight he’d been looking forward to since the flight plan had been drawn up.

But he had a lot of crap to get through first. [Hr:Min:Sec] 08:15:31

After the usual slow, messy breakfast, the crew’s first task of the day was to swab down the walls of the Mission Module with disinfectant wipes.

This had to be done every couple of weeks — more often sometimes, if the boffins on the ground told them that bacterial activity in the Mission Module was becoming unacceptably high. It was a microgravity problem. Microorganisms tended to flourish on free-floating water droplets, and they collected in odd corners of the module. On top of that, microgravity lowered the crew’s immune response: something to do with reduced numbers of lymphocytes in the blood.

After that, the three crew drifted to the Space Ark.

The ark was a collection of cute-animal experiments, some suggested by high-school kids. There were plastic cages of varying sizes, bearing minnows, six mice, a few hundred fly pupae, and a spider called Arabella. There was even a box of worms. Stone tapped a Perspex wall; he could see that the minnows were swimming about in tight circles, evidently disoriented by the lack of gravity.

During mission planning York had been earnestly skeptical about the validity of the ark’s science, and Gershon had flatly refused to have anything to do with such crap. But Stone noticed that both of them were drawn to the little kit.

Stone found the worms interesting. They were called palolo, from Samoa. They lived in tunnels gnawed deep into coral reefs, and they timed their emergence, to mate, by the last quarter of the October Moon. Every year. But nobody knew how the worms did this. At Samoa, the tides, linked to the Moon, were too small to be noticed by the worms. And moonlight could hardly penetrate more than an inch or two into the worms’ rocky burrows.

So this experiment was to find out what would happen to the worms when they were no longer in Earth’s gravity field.

Meanwhile, the spider was contained in a shallow box, labeled Araneus diadematus A healthy web, at least a foot across, spanned the box, with the spider plucking at its heart.

“Okay, Arabella,” Stone murmured, “so you’re an astronaut now, eh? Let’s see how smart you really are.” He moved the front of the box, and the web’s longerons were ripped; the web rapidly imploded, leaving the spider drifting. He felt obscurely cruel in wrecking the web. But the point of the experiment was to record fresh web-building. There were acoustic transducers which set up a high-frequency sound field in the cage; any movement of the spider would disturb the sound and trigger lights and a still camera.

The three crew clustered around the little box, making wisecracks about the spider and poking at the cage and its equipment.

Stone moved over to a small experimental garden. It was more like a window box, a tray of soil the size of a suitcase. There were peas, wheat, cucumbers, parsley, onions, dill, fennel, and garlic. Some of the plants were growing in pure microgravity and some in a small botanic centrifuge, simulating lunar and Martian conditions.

Stone tended the rows of little plants. The peas had grown well for the first four or five weeks, but now they looked as if they were dying, and he fed them water and nutrient carefully. The plants wouldn’t consistently go to seed, but tests had shown that the food value of the plants was high; microgravity didn’t impair protein synthesis. Their roots straggled, though, unable to orient themselves without gravity.

Stone was struck by the contrast of the warm, green, fertile little plants and the cold blackness a few inches away, beyond the wall of the Mission Module. He breathed on the little pea plants, hoping to provide a richer mix of carbon dioxide for them. [Hr:Min:Sec] 09:57:57

Stone hauled at the isokinetic exerciser. The machine was bolted to a bracket in the middle of the Mission Module, and it had a two-handled lever, with shoulder pads and handgrips, linked by a sprocket chain to an air turbine. The exerciser was a newfangled gadget, to replace the treadmills and rowers that had been carried on earlier flights. By bracing himself on a foot platform, Stone could do squats, toe raises, shoulder presses, high pulls, bench presses, tricep presses.

Every so often he would glance at the machine’s timer and get newly depressed at how much more time he had to spend exercising. He was uncomfortable, his vest soaked, pools of sweat clinging to his chest and between his shoulder blades. His only distraction was a small round observation port, set in the pressure hull near him, and he stared into its darkness.

After a couple of months — the way Stone understood it — the various functions of the body adapted to microgravity, settling down to a new equilibrium, different from that on Earth. The neurovestibular system, the balance mechanism within the ear, was the first to fall apart — hence, space sickness — but also the first to recover, after a few days. The body’s fluid balance would adjust then, and next the cardiovascular system, the heart and blood vessels.

But things didn’t go back to Earth-normal.

Stone’s brain, which didn’t know about microgravity, thought that all that extra blood was pooling in his head because there was too much fluid in his body, and it told his kidneys to release more urine. And that way lay dehydration. So Stone had to drink an extra five pints of fluid a day, laced with water-salt imbalance counteragents. That was something NASA had learned from the Russians.

But all the extra pissing flushed the calcium and potassium out of his bones. The calcium deficit could make his bones brittle, or give him kidney stones, and the potassium could leave him prone to heart problems; so he had to take dietary supplements, and there were anabolic steroids in case any of them suffered severe bone loss.

His muscles didn’t do any work they didn’t have to, and — if he left them alone — they would atrophy. So he had to go through all the exercise on the isokinetic device. There were other measures, too, like the penguin suit — so-called because it made you waddle around on the ground during training — a set of elastic straps that tried to pull you into a fetal position all the time, so your muscles were constantly working, as if against gravity. And there was the chibis, a Russian word for lapwing bird, another idea borrowed from the Soviets: reinforced leggings that reduced the air pressure over the legs, to make the heart work harder to pull blood up from the lower body.

The isokinetic exercises ought to help with reducing bone mineral loss, too; bones always kept themselves just strong enough to resist the maximum loads imposed by the muscles.

The crew had to submit, every two or three days, to electrocardiograms, seismocardiograms, measurements of their breathing rates and volume. All of it was fed back to the surgeons on Earth. All the biomed stuff added up to a whole day lost out of every week.

None of it was popular. Stone realized, though, that it was up to him to set an example to the others. If he skimped, so would they. So he made sure he did at least his regulation hour’s exercise, every day.

Despite all the precautions, though, Stone was developing a classic case of chicken legs, as astronauts called them, as his leg muscles atrophied. The soles of his feet were as soft as an infant’s. And the parts of his body which got most tired, every day, were his hands. His hands worked constantly, in ways they didn’t have to on Earth, hauling him around the module, braking his mass. [Hr:Min:Sec] 11:43:24

Today was Stone’s shower day. Each of them was allowed one shower a week.

He stripped off his vest and shorts and swung his legs over into the collapsible shower. It was a cylinder of white cloth, like a big concertina. He pulled the curtain up around him and hooked it to a metal lid fixed to the ceiling. He soaped up and rinsed himself with a spray; airflow, rather than gravity, drained away the water.

He felt as if layers of skin were coming off as he worked; the sponge baths that were all that was possible between showers just weren’t sufficient. And the shower seemed to be getting some of the stiffness out of his muscles.

Actually, with the way the water hung suspended in the air, it was more like a sauna than a shower.

He thought about his crew.

They had all been trained by NASA psychologists on how people behave during long periods of isolation. Stone saw himself, after his several flights, as pretty level-headed and robust. But he could recognize, at one time or another, most of the signs of isolation in his crew: sleep disturbance, boredom, restlessness, anxiety, anger, depression, headaches, irritability, reduced concentration, a loss of the sense of time and space.

Ares was bombarded daily with messages from well-wishers, families and friends, but the time lag was so great that it was impossible to conduct a meaningful conversation. And, somehow, hearing those familiar voices calling from behind a lightspeed barrier made the crew’s isolation that much more poignant.

All of that was telling on the crew.

Gershon seemed the less affected, on the surface. He was still the bullshitting jock, always there with the jokes. But there was an increasingly jagged edge. Gershon was basically a pilot, used to short, sharp bursts of adrenaline-pumping action.

Still, in Stone’s judgment Ralph would be fine. Gershon knew he would get his chance when he took the lander down to the surface. Stone saw his job as being to keep the guy together until they reached Mars.

York was different, though.

York was uptight, a stickler, a little reclusive. A lot arrogant and patronizing. And a civilian at that. Gershon’s jokes and gotchas irritated the hell out of her, clearly, but she wouldn’t say a word about it; instead she kept it to herself and just kind of smoldered. Which didn’t do anyone any good.

York was like a lot of professional women Stone had met before, he thought. That is, she had one hell of a chip on her shoulder.

But he envied and admired her inner resources.

To him, Stone was ready to admit, the mission was everything: flying the craft, doing his job when they eventually hit the Martian dirt, getting home again.

York, by contrast, had an awareness of the grandeur of it all: that remarkable experience, the interplanetary flight. There were depths inside her which York was able to tap, and — as she’d come out of her shell during the mission — to articulate to others.

She was almost poetic, at times.

Stone felt he understood how important that was. He’d hoped it would work out that way. And according to Houston, even the ratings for their weekly TV briefings — which had dipped pretty fast after the excitement of the launch — were reviving again, mainly thanks to York.

He dried himself off with a towel, and then he had to suck up stray drops inside the shower with a vacuum hose. It was fiddly and time-consuming.

In the end, as usual, by the time he was able to dismantle the shower and fold it away he felt frustrated and tense once more, the benefits of the shower lost. [Hr:Min:Sec] 13:12:51

Stone set himself at the Mission Module’s control station. He ran quickly through the parameters of the cluster’s operation: consumables usage, attitude control propellant usage, cryogenic store boiloff…

Most of it looked nominal.

But the big solar panels, sticking out like wings from the sides of the S-IVB booster, were getting too hot. The panels could tilt through twenty-five degrees, so that the sun’s radiation would come in on them at a slant, reducing their temperature. Stone put together a recommendation that Mission Control should think about performing the tilt a few days ahead of schedule; minutes later, Houston replied that they would evaluate the proposal.

Then there was a problem with the feed system of one of the steerable dish antennae, which was targeted back at Earth. There was a three-decibel loss in downlink signal strength: maybe some part of the system had cracked under thermal stress. That was a potentially serious problem; it would reduce the bit rate at which high-quality images could be sent back to Earth. The ground said they wouldn’t take any action on that one at this time, but would do some simulations and analysis first.

And he found a problem with some of the module’s seventeen chargeable battery regulator modules. One of them, number fifteen, had malfunctioned days before, and then number three went off-line. All that cut the power available in the module by around two hundred watts. Houston thought there might be a low-voltage trip occurring somewhere, which was switching out the regulators too often, and Stone had to go around the module firing up systems and calling out power consumption numbers to the specialists in the back rooms behind the MOCR.

It was slow, dull, almost mindless work. The routine stuff really ground you down; it was a hazard of long-duration missions. But all of it was essential to keep this handcrafted bucket of bolts flying. [Hr:Min:Sec] 15:49:01

At last he could get to his interplanetary navigation.

He headed down to the wardroom, to the picture window there, and dug out his optical kit.

The kit contained a one-power telescope and a twenty-eight-power sextant. The sextant was a chunky little gadget with an eyepiece and a calibrated semicircular dial, to measure angles between stars. They were nice devices, compact, heavy things of brass, which Stone enjoyed handling. If he was going to take away any one souvenir of the flight, then to hell with a Mars rock; it would be this little kit.

Stone set to work by the picture window.

First he measured the apparent size of the sun’s disk, which would give him a good measure of how far the craft was from the sun, and then he measured the angles between Venus and a fixed star, and the Earth and a fixed star. Those three basic measurements would fix him in three-dimensional space. He would finish up with a few more redundant measurements.

He’d found he couldn’t hold the optical equipment steady in the microgravity. But the way around that was to set the gadgets floating in the air, as well aligned as possible; then he could bring his eye up to the eyepiece and make an accurate reading.

The first TCM — Trajectory Correction Maneuver — had taken place ten days after leaving Earth. At that time the flight path had been pretty badly misaligned. The trajectory planners back in Houston had sent corrective burn parameters chattering up the line to Ares, and the MS-II stage’s maneuvering propulsion system — two modified Lunar Module engines — had applied a hefty velocity change of twenty-five feet per second. But, according to the latest data, the craft was still on a slightly divergent trajectory. Today Stone would check the craft’s position and velocity, and the track would be recomputed; and tomorrow, if they could get it right, the second TCM burn would fix the trajectory’s small remaining anomaly.

There was a whole slew of ways for the ground to keep track of a spacecraft. The faster the craft was receding from Earth, the more its radio carrier frequency was shifted, like a whistle on a speeding train. Or, to fix distance, an uplink modulation pattern — a brief digital code — could be transmitted to the spacecraft and sent straight back. The delay in receiving the copied signal would tell the specialists how far away the craft was from Earth. And on Ares another radio method was being run, an experiment involving the change in angle between Ares and a quasar, a radio source in the background sky.

But even all those techniques in combination weren’t accurate enough to position Ares; the combined accuracy was only maybe half the precision required.

The answer was to use equipment on board the spacecraft itself.

In fact Ares had its own automated optical sensors. There were two sun sensors — little cadmium sulfide photoresistors — placed on the solar cell array. And there was a star tracker, a lens with an image dissector tube. But the automatic system just wasn’t too smart. Every few days, the star tracker got fooled by bright particles, bits of junk floating along with the spacecraft in its orbit around the sun.

So — just as had sailors on Earth’s oceans for millennia — Phil Stone had to navigate his ship by the stars.

He found himself humming as he worked. He knew he was good at this. He’d practiced the techniques in planetariums on the ground, and in Moonlab; he could get a measurement true within a few thousandths of a degree, and he took a lot of satisfaction from the basic craft of it.

When he’d finished he packed away the instruments and drifted back up to his control station. He ran the numbers through the computer, to figure out the position for himself. He would feed the raw data down to Houston, of course, but it kind of satisfied him to know that he could do this independently.

Stone liked to visualize the mission trajectory, to figure out where he was.

The energy expended by the injection booster — although monumental in human terms, the result of five years’ fuel haulage to orbit — was so low on the cosmic scale that the craft’s trajectory barely diverged from Earth’s. The Ares stack, having pushed itself away from Earth, was scooting alongside the home planet in its orbit like a dog beside its master.

The first results looked good; the spacecraft was pretty much where it was supposed to be, and he figured that the TCM-2 burn would only have to be a few feet per second.

When he was done he indulged himself. He doused the wardroom’s lights and sat in the warm darkness close to the picture window, surrounded by the hum of fans.

Ares was alone in space: Earth and Moon were reduced to starlike points of light, side by side. In all the universe, only the sun showed a disk.

The sense of isolation was extraordinary: far deeper than he’d known in space before, even during his time in Moonlab. Unless you were around the back of the Moon, Earth was always in view. And in Skylab A, the Earth itself dominated every waking moment, and you took your reference from that huge quilt of light, from the continents and oceans sliding under you.

Out here, it was different. There was no “up” or “down”: there were just little islands of rock, floating around in the sky. For interplanetary flight humans would need to develop a new kind of perception, he thought, a three-dimensional awareness.

As his eyes dark-adapted, the stars came out: millions of them, far more than were visible through Earth’s murky atmosphere. He could see the galaxy, a great speckled river of stars; he made out the edge of the disk in the direction of the galactic core, in Sagittarius, with its ragged edge caused by black swirls of obscuring dust clouds and the nearby stars sparkling in the dark scars. And he could see the moons of Jupiter, four of them, in a line alongside the planet’s bright spark.

Ralph came floating out of the brightness of the wardroom area to bring him a meal, a couple of packets of warmed-up rehydrated stew. With a pencil light in his mouth Stone mashed in the water until the food was moist through. [Hr:Min:Sec] 19:37:20

After thirteen hours awake, the crew had finished up their duties for the day. York was feeling queasy again, so she took a scopolamine and went to bed. Stone wanted to spend some time alone, maybe writing letters.

But Gershon, still full of nervous energy, wanted to play darts.

The dartboard was the Mission Module’s great recreation, along with magnetic cards. The darts were tipped with Velcro, and they flew straight and level.

It was quite different from playing under gravity. To get accuracy, the best technique was rather to push the dart comparatively slowly through the air, maybe with a little spin for stability. But if the dart was too slow, currents in the air would knock it off track.

Gershon set up the dartboard in the science platform, and he and Stone threw the darts so that they arced easily the length of the workshop. [Hr:Min:Sec] 21:01:32

Gershon called him out of his sleep locker and over to the Space Ark.

Arabella’s cage hadn’t been closed properly, and the spider had gotten out. Gershon pointed out a huge, sweeping web, which spanned yards of space, crossing from side to side of the Mission Module.

Stone just hoped enough insects of some sort had survived the various sterilization checks to make it into the module to sustain Arabella. Gershon was all for shaking out the fruit fly pupae for her.

Flying to Mars, bound up in spiderweb. It was a beautiful image, Stone thought. [Hr:Min:Sec] 23:32:37

When he slept, Stone had his usual space dream.

Oddly, he was vaguely aware of the causes of the dream, even while he slept: the breeze from the wall fan, the falling sensations of microgravity, maybe a subconscious realization of the speed with which he was traveling.

All of it merged into a dream of flying.

He was surrounded by woods and rivers and blue skies, and he was flying, low like a bird of prey.

June 1978

Sometimes the prospect of starting at Houston seemed attractive to York, compared to the clique-ridden, insulated world of the universities. She was moving to a place where people were doing great things: working on stuff of more substance than the next grant application, a place where achievement was measured by more than just the number of journal citations per year.

At other times, though, she couldn’t believe she was doing it.

She was offered plenty of advice against NASA, from senior staff on down. For example, she was told, the center of gravity of space science was not at Houston, but at the universities: like Cornell, where Sagan was based. Would her own work on Martian outflow channels have been improved if she’d pulled up stakes and moved to Texas?

In fact NASA seemed to be actively antiscience. In the wake of the Apollo 11 landing a shoal of scientists had abruptly quit: Bill Hess, Houston chief scientist; Elbert King, lunar samples curator; and Eugene Shoemaker, Apollo field geology principal investigator. Shoemaker talked about his concern for the direction of the space program, and what a poor system Apollo was for exploring the Moon: nothing but a rope and pulley, for instance, to haul surface samples into the LM’s cabin! And what evidence was there that things had gotten any better? Was the Mars program going to be any different?

It was depressing. If those eminent men couldn’t cut it inside NASA, what chance did she have?

Earnest friends shoved newspaper stories under her nose. The Tennessee Valley vs Hill case had just concluded, with the Supreme Court ruling that the new Tellico Dam couldn’t be built, because it would drown the only known habitat of a three-inch fish called a snail darter… People were dead against big, mindless technological stunts — hell, she was herself — and what could be bigger, more mindless, than NASA?

Then, it was said, she’d end up serving as a nonscientific grunt on training trips. Making sandwiches for astronauts. And if she came back into the mainstream of academic science later, she’d have a hell of a gap in her bibliography. She could be blowing a promising career.

Besides, you only have to watch Dallas to see what kind of a cultural desert you’re walking into. And the climate down there in Texas, my dear. Oh, my!

She got stubborn. She even started defending the space program. As an application of government technology, space was somewhere between true science and the opposite. At least it didn’t actively kill people. By contrast she cited Ben Priest as an example of an intelligent, thoughtful adult who was able to survive, precariously maybe, in the dumb-fighter-jock snake pit of NASA.

Anyway, the only way she was going to get to Mars was via Houston. So that settled the argument, as far as she was concerned.

She didn’t see Mike Conlig.

When she’d finally gotten up the nerve to tell him about her application, he didn’t seem surprised. He didn’t even seem to take it seriously, she thought.

He called a few times, from Marshall or Santa Susana. But he wouldn’t come to Berkeley, to talk, or help her close out her life.

Maybe he was being patronizing — maybe he thought she was following a whim, that she wasn’t serious, she wouldn’t see it through. If that was true, he didn’t know her too well after all.

Or — she wondered — perhaps he suspected something about her and Ben Priest. She’d fallen into bed with Ben only once more since that time at Pasadena all of two years ago. But she was no actress; she knew she couldn’t help showing what had happened, in her voice, her eyes, her body language… that is, if Mike was perceptive enough to see, caring enough to devote the attention.

Which, she figured sadly, he wasn’t.

But their conversation was too stiff, too many things left unspoken, for her to tell for sure.

There were a lot of details.

She got another letter. It said she was to report to Houston to start her ground training in just six weeks, which was a ludicrously short period of time for any working scientist to disengage herself from her commitments. She entered into a regime of eighteen-hour days. She tried to close out her research work with final papers and draft contributions to joint work, and she reassigned the graduate students who were working with her, and she disengaged herself from her teaching commitments.

Her salary offer was on a government grade equivalent to what she would have received as a civil service scientist. She hadn’t expected riches as an astronaut, but the pay seemed lousy, actually, considering the dislocation to her life, the hours she would have to put in, the risks, for Christ’s sake.

She was concerned enough to call Ben Priest about it.

“Am I being picked on?”

“It’s nothing personal. You’ve got to remember that you’re at the bottom of an immense pecking order, Natalie. You can’t make more money than the senior military astronauts. I guess you can see that. And their salaries are rigid, because they are locked into a military pay scale.”

“Yeah, but civil service salary scales are rigid, too, once you’re inside. Promotion is slow, and—”

He cut her off. “You have to ask yourself, Natalie. Is this really an issue for you? Is the salary a genuine factor in your decision to join NASA? If it isn’t, quit beefing and move on.”

She thought about that.

She signed the forms.

She had to sort out her pension contributions. She sold her car and gave up her rented apartment. She made out a new will: her mother was the main beneficiary, and, after some thought, she made Ben Priest her executor. She bought herself a new wardrobe: slacks and light shirts, suitable for Houston. She spoke to her savings and loan and her bank, and made arrangements for her mail to be forwarded.

She even got chased by the press, local paper and radio crews looking to run comic pieces on the new lady astronaut. After the first embarrassing result appeared — “Space Beauty Is Over the Moon” — she chased the reporters away, and they soon seemed to forget about her.

There was a round of farewells, which she hated.

She took a final drive around Berkeley. She headed up Dwight Way and across Telegraph Street, passing the little shingle houses there, and then into and above Strawberry Canyon. The hills were a lush summer green. Farther off, beyond the flats of Berkeley, she could see the misty blur of San Francisco and Marin County, linked together by the rust-colored Golden Gate Bridge. The air was fine, laced with eucalyptus.

How the hell could she give up all this for the humid smog of Houston?

She hadn’t anticipated how difficult this aspect of her odyssey would be. Her workplace, the apartment she’d rented for years, Berkeley itself: all of it, she realized, maybe belatedly, made up the fabric of her life. Pursuing Martian geology, flying into space, was one thing! — but she hadn’t bargained for how hard it would be to clean out her apartment, and to accept the cards and small presents and exchanged addresses, and continually, constantly, say good-bye.

Wednesday, July 5, 1978

Gershon walked around the parking lot, working the stiffness out of his legs after his drive out from the city. It was colder than he’d come to expect for California.

The L.A. division of Rockwell was strung out around the southern border of Los Angeles International Airport. Beyond the fence, the airport was a plain of concrete, with aircraft rolling between distant buildings like little painted toys. There was a distant rumble of jets ramping up, and a remote, evocative whiff of kerosene. If he squinted, he could see a line of big airliners stacked up in the sky.

The Rockwell headquarters building was an uncompromising cube of brick, four stories high, without a single window. Ralph Gershon had never seen anything like it; it was like the kind of dumb, baffling modern sculptures that earned their creators thousands of dollars. No natural daylight at all. Christ. He was here for a regular meeting of the MEM Technical Liaison Group, and liaison group meetings were meetings from hell anyway. The thought of spending all day inside that goddamn box of bricks was depressing.

Beyond the clutter of Rockwell buildings, he could see all the way down Imperial Boulevard to Santa Monica Bay. He liked the way the morning light was coming off the water, steely gray and flat.

“Here.”

There was a small, wiry man at his side, with a balding head and rimless glasses and big, ugly freckles; he was holding up a cigarette packet.

“Thanks,” Gershon said. “I don’t.”

“Uh-huh.” The guy took a cigarette himself, tamped it against the box, and lit up. His arms were disproportionately long and bony, and they stuck out of his sleeves. Just behind him in the parking lot, there was a T-bird, gleaming black. “You looked like it was a good moment for a smoke.” He had a broad, bold New York accent. He was maybe fifty, and he looked familiar to Gershon.

“You here for the MEM thing?” Gershon asked.

“Yeah. And you? You from NASA? A pilot, maybe?”

“How do you know?”

The guy tapped his own small paunch. “Because you look fit.”

“I’m the Astronaut Office rep.” Gershon hesitated when he used the word “astronaut.” As he always did. Look at me, the great astronaut. When I haven’t flown anything for NASA except a T-38 trainer. But then that little guy had used the word “pilot.” Maybe he understood.

The stranger stuck out his hand. “My name’s Lee. John K. My friends call me JK.”

The handshake was firm, the palms callused. It wasn’t the grip of a pencil-pusher.

“You from one of the MEM bidders?”

“Nope,” Lee said. “I’m from CA. Columbia Aviation. Tell me you’ve heard of us.”

Gershon grinned.

Lee shrugged. “We do a lot of subcontracting work for Rockwell, and others, and we’re doing some experimental stuff for NASA. Lifting body shapes and such. We’re small, but we’re growing, and we’re smarter than the rest. When it comes to Request For Proposals time, we’ll throw in our lot with one of the big guys and hustle for a piece of the pie.” He stared up at the HQ building, the big brick cube. “You know, I worked here, for a while. Under Dutch Kindelberger.”

Gershon looked at Lee with new interest. He knew that name, of course. Any kid like Gershon, who had grown up steeped in planes and the men who built them, would know about Dutch Kindelberger. Dutch had built up Rockwell — then called North American Aviation — in the war years by delivering perhaps the finest American flying machine of that conflict, the P-51 Mustang.

“Dutch designed this building himself,” Lee said. “We used to call it the Brickyard.”

“I didn’t know Kindelberger was an architect.”

“He wasn’t.” Lee grinned. “You don’t think it shows?” He looked around, at the airport, the boulevard, the sprawl of Rockwell buildings. “There used to be a sign, on top of the main building over there” — he pointed — “You could see it from miles away. ‘Home of the X-15.’ ”

Something clicked in Gershon’s mind. “I thought I knew your face.” He had a vague memory of an old photograph, from the scrapbooks and cutting files he’d kept as a kid: an experimental airplane, up at Edwards, with a line of grinning young engineers, all spectacles and buck teeth and uncontrolled hair. “You worked on the X-15?”

Lee said, “No. But I bet I know what you’re thinking of.”

“The B-70. You worked on the B-70, didn’t you? With Harrison Storms.”

“Yeah. With Stormy.”

Harrison Storms was the man who had built the Apollo spacecraft for Rockwell. And before that, there had been the B-70, a supersonic bomber. Gershon remembered old photographs: that stainless steel surface painted white to reflect Mach 3 heat, the huge delta wing two stories off the ground…

“Congress canceled the project on us,” Lee said. “We only made two of the damn things. And I know one of them crashed with an F-104. I guess the other was scrapped.”

“No. It survived. It’s in a museum.”

Lee eyed Gershon and smiled. “How about that? I never knew.”

Gershon glanced at his watch. “Come on. It’s after nine. We have to go in.”

“Sure. We don’t want to miss the read-through of the minutes, do we?”

Side by side, they walked into the Brickyard.

Two portly, shirt-sleeved aerospace executives were struggling with a balky Vu-graph machine. One said, “You sure you know how to fly this thing, Al?”

Al laughed.

Gershon tried to settle himself in the small, hard-framed chair, with his briefcase tucked under the table. It was already hot, airless, and his collar chafed at his throat.

That word, “fly,” tugged at him. Flying a projector. Flying a desk. Jesus. Words misused by people who knew no more about flying than how to order a drink from a stewardess.

The chairman called them to order. He was NASA Assistant Administrator Tim Josephson, a tall, thin, bookish man. He sat on a swivel chair behind a desk at the head of the table, and rattled through the minutes and agenda.

Lee leaned over to Gershon. “How do you like that? This is Dutch’s old office. That’s Dutch’s chair, for God’s sake. Rockwell must really, really, want this contract.”

Behind Josephson the whole wall was covered with a mural. It showed a P-51 Mustang coming right out at you.

Gershon wanted to be out of here, doing something.

But life in the Astronaut Office wasn’t like that. You had to pay your dues.

“Listen to me,” Chuck Jones had said, in his role as chief astronaut. “We gotta have someone from the Office assigned to the Mars Excursion Module.”

Gershon had thought he was being dumped on. “But there is no MEM.”

“Even better.” And Jones had spun Gershon a story about how Pete Conrad had helped to design the controls and instrument displays for the Lunar Module. “Conrad spent fucking months in plywood mock-ups of that lander, surrounded by painted switches and dials, trying to imagine himself coming down onto the Moon.” Jones held his thumb and forefinger up, a hairbreadth apart. “And he came that close to being the first man to land there. Now. You want to tell me you know more about how things work around here than old Pete Conrad?”

So maybe it wasn’t such a bad assignment after all, Gershon had concluded.

The trouble was, though, it still didn’t look as if the MEM was ever going to fly, except in the glossy promotional brochures of the aerospace companies.

Landing a spacecraft on Mars wasn’t an easy thing to do. And that was just about the only thing everybody was agreed on. Even after you’d hauled ass all the way out there, you found yourself facing a planet that was an awkward combination of Earth and Moon: the worst features of each, Gershon supposed. That smear of air was thick enough that you couldn’t fly a tinfoil buggy on rockets right down to the surface, like the Lunar Module landing on the Moon; you were going to have to take a heat shield along. On the other hand, the air was too thin to allow you simply to fly your way down to the surface in a glider with wings, the way the Space Shuttle would have flown to Earth. You had to have some compromise, a bastard cross between a flying machine and a rocket ship.

So disagreement was inevitable. After all, nobody had done it before, tried to build a machine to land people on Mars.

But there was a lot of money and politics involved, so, of course, the arguments went far beyond the technical.

The liaison group was a relatively new initiative, and it came from Fred Michaels himself, as an attempt to cut through the mess of arguments holding up the MEM design. The group got all the warring factions together — the aerospace people from Rockwell and McDonnell and Grumman and Boeing, and the NASA groups from Marshall and Ames and Langley and Houston — to thrash out the issues.

The formal presentations started.

First up was a delegation from Grumman, to present its current thinking.

The Grumman MEM would come in from Martian orbit as a half cone, like an Apollo Command Module split down the center. With the aid of a lot of electronics, the crew could actually steer the thing. Then, inside the atmosphere, the MEM would tip downward, so that it was falling to the ground nose first. The heat-shield shell would fall away, revealing something that looked like a fat Lunar Module with landing legs that would spring out. The whole thing would come down on rockets mounted in the nose. On the ground, the MEM would unfold, with crew quarters swiveling out from the sides toward the ground.

Grumman had built the Apollo Lunar Module. Gershon happened to know that Grumman had the tacit backing of Marshall, with Hans Udet and all the other old Germans. And so what you got was a kind of beefed-up Lunar Module, coupled with some typical brute-force heavy engineering from the Germans.

The Grumman people had a model, a little Revell-kit version of the thing, which was all unfolding legs and rotating compartments and bits of plastic heat shield. Parts of it kept falling off in the hands of the nervous presenter. The thing looked ludicrously overcomplicated. When that upside-down cone came apart, revealing all the plumbing inside, Gershon was reminded of an ice-cream cone.

JK Lee leaned over and laughed quietly. “Christ, that thing is ugly. And you’d waste a lot of development effort.”

“How so?”

“The thing’s a bastard. Too many smart-ass ideas. You’d have to develop a new heat-shield material to cover that huge flat surface. And you’d have to figure out how to build a lifting body to fly in the Martian atmosphere. And you’ve got a whole new Lunar Module to build as well. And for what?”

“So what would you do?”

“Me? If I was Grumman? I’d tell my designers to cut out the ice cream and focus on the meat and potatoes. Pick one approach and stick to it. If you’re building a lifting body, fine. Don’t give me damn Moon-bug legs as well.”

The delegation led by Boeing wasn’t too specific about the details of its landing craft itself; instead it concentrated on how it would get down through the atmosphere. Its MEM would descend from orbit and go through reentry, and then, about six miles up and still traveling faster than sound, it would sprout a ballute — a cross between a balloon and a parachute, a huge, inflatable sail that would grab at the thin air. Then, a complex sequence of parachutes would bring the craft close enough to the surface for hover rockets to take over for the landing.

The problem was that nobody had yet made a ballute, or even tested one in a wind tunnel. And it would be all but impossible to test in the thicker atmosphere of Earth.

A lot of the Boeing presentation had to do with the technicalities of packing parachutes. It was deadly dull. Gershon made himself take notes on his jotting pad; but sometimes, when he glanced down at the pad, he didn’t recognize what he’d written.

The third presentation was from Rockwell itself, backed by a combination of Langley and JPL. And this was the most advanced option of all. It was another lifting-body shape, but more advanced than Grumman’s crude half cone: it was a biconic, a segment of a fat cone topped by a thin nose. This MEM would be able to enter the Martian atmosphere direct from Earth, without the need to stop over in a parking orbit around Mars first. The biconic would be controlled one hundred percent by the pilot, with a joystick and rudder pedals. The ship would follow a complicated entry path, dipping and swooping and swirling, losing heat gradually and bleeding off speed. And then, approaching the surface, the biconic would tip up and land on its tail, ready for an ascent back to orbit.

But there were drawbacks. The electronics would be so complex there was no way an astronaut could land the thing in the case of computer failure. And all those curved surfaces would take a lot of buffeting from the air; the biconic would need heavy heat shielding over most of its surface.

The biconic looked to Gershon like a hybrid of Langley’s traditional love of aircraft and JPL’s expertise in robotics and computer control, all mixed up together with Rockwell’s immense appetite for fat and ambitious development budgets.

Looking at the presentation, Gershon felt an odd itch in the palm of his hands and his feet.

Lee was grinning at him. “I can see that look in your eye. You’d like to fly that thing down through the Martian air, maybe do a couple of banks over Olympus Mons.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

Lee waved his hand. “I’m not mocking you. But you need to understand that you’re looking at a twenty-year development effort there, minimum, in my judgment. Christ, nobody’s flown a biconic ever. Not even a fucking wooden mock-up. Unless the Russians are up to something, which I doubt.

“And then you’re talking about building a biconic to land on Mars. What do we know about the atmosphere of Mars? Buddy, if you want to see your grandson flying down onto all that red dust, then you put your money on a biconic. But you and I sure ain’t going to see it…”

The three presentations took them right through the day and on into the evening. Then, in a long final session, the meeting argued out the merits of the comparative designs: possible crew sizes, surface stay capabilities, gross weight in Earth orbit, required delta-vee, aerodynamic characteristics like lift-over-drag ratio. It all got bogged down in picky detail, and it became clear to Gershon after a while that all sides were more intent on filibustering than reaching any kind of decision.

Gershon stared at Dutch Kindelberger’s mural of the Mustang and wondered what it had been like to fly.

As the meeting broke up, around 9 P.M., the delegates began to make plans to rendezvous in various bars.

JK Lee approached Gershon. “You’re looking kind of strained.”

Gershon grinned at him. “I like the idea of a couple of pitchers of cold beer. But not in some shitty bar with these corporate suits, frankly.”

“Yeah. Listen. You want to get out of here? It’s a clear night. We could take a drive, maybe up toward Edwards.”

Edwards Air Force Base. Up on the high desert. “Let’s go.”

They got out of the Brickyard. Lee pulled his little black T-bird out of the parking lot, and they stopped to pick up a couple of six-packs. Then Lee headed north, out of the city.

The night was crisp and cool and cloudless, but the horizon was ringed with the conurbation’s sulfur orange glow. Gershon had to tilt his head back and stare straight up to see any stars, in a little clear circle of sky directly above him. He thought he recognized the big square of Pegasus up there, the winged horse.

He had a sense of confinement, as if the city and all its smog was a great big box he was stuck inside.

Lee drove one-handed, hanging on to the T-bird’s wheel with one finger. “I remember coming up here. I mean, 1955 or earlier. The days of the B-70. The road out of the city was just a two-lane blacktop, winding up out of the Newhall Pass and through Mint Canyon, until it gave onto the high desert. And Palmdale was just a gas station, with a whole bunch of Joshua trees… All changed now, huh.”

“I guess.”

“So. You had a good day?”

Gershon grunted. “Not one of my best.”

“You’re not a lover of engineering debate.”

“That wasn’t a debate about engineering. And most of those guys sure weren’t engineers.”

Lee hooted. “You’re right there. But you have to understand the politics, my friend. Look at it this way. When Nixon canned the Space Shuttle, back in 1972 — well, that wasn’t the most popular decision with the big aerospace boys. They would have loved the Shuttle because the whole damn thing would have been new. They would have been able to throw away all their old Saturn tooling facilities and start afresh, at great public expense. But with the incremental program we’ve got now, everything is a derivative of something else. And it’s all pretty much owned by the companies who designed those pieces.

“So you’ve got Boeing working on the new MS-IC, for example, the enhanced Saturn first stage, which was what it had originally built. And McDonnell Douglas, over at Huntington Beach, has built the Skylabs and Moonlabs — space stations lashed up from disused Saturn third stages — which McDonnell built in the first place. And so on.

“But the plum contract — the most advanced technology, the real glamour work for the next decade — is going to be the MEM. A whole new spacecraft, to take a few guys to the surface of Mars. Making a lot of other guys very rich in the process…”

“But NASA hasn’t even issued a Request For Proposals yet.”

“Of course not. What do you expect? NASA’s taking too much heat from its contractors. And then on top of that you have all the usual bullshit infighting between the NASA centers.”

“Maybe so,” Gershon said gloomily. “But we’ve already pissed away six years, since ’72.”

“You want to fly something before you retire.”

“You got it.”

“Hell, I understand that. Listen, you want to break open that six-pack?”

“You want one?”

“Sure.”

Gershon’s can was still dewed from the store’s refrigerator. The beer was crisp in his mouth; he felt some of the tension of the day unwind.

The San Gabriel Mountains were behind them, and Lee pushed the T-bird hard through the blackness. The road was vacant, laser-straight, fore and back, in the lights of the T-bird.

Now, there were stars all the way down to the horizon. JK Lee propped the wheel between his bony knees and, holding his beer in one hand, extracted a cigarette and lit it up with the other. The light of the tip combined with the dashboard’s glow to cast soft, diffuse light over his face.

Gershon asked, “So what would you do?”

“Huh?”

“If you were going to build a MEM.”

“Me? Oh, we aren’t going to bid. We’d ruffle too many feathers. And the big boys would crowd us out anyhow. Rockwell is going to get the contract. Everybody knows that. It’ll pull strings, just like it did to get Apollo. I understand the MEM was part of the deal, kind of, when Nixon canceled the Shuttle. That and its Saturn second-stage injection-booster project. You’ve got to balance your constituencies.” His Bronx accent came out comically on that last word.

Gershon grunted and pulled at his beer. “But if you were bidding,” he pressed.

“If we were?” Lee thought for a moment, balancing his beer on his lap. “Well, you have to adjust your philosophy to accommodate the situation. You might get just one shot at this, a trip to Mars. So you want something that you know you can build quickly, and cheaply, that’s gonna work first time. And we don’t know if lifting bodies and biconics are going to work, and we could spend a lot of time and money finding out they don’t.”

“So what?”

“So you use what’s worked before. Start with a low L-over-D shape, say of zero point five.”

L-over-D: lift over drag, the key aerodynamic measure of shape. “Point five. That’s an Apollo Command Module shape.”

“Exactly. Build a big, fat Command Module. All you’d need to figure is how to build a wider heat shield. We know it’s a design that works. Apollos flew eight manned Moon program flights, and since then three missions a year to Skylab, and one a year to the Moonlab since ’75… what’s that, twenty-five flights? And the Apollo 13 CM even survived its Service Module exploding under it.”

“You’d have no maneuverability in the Martian atmosphere.”

“Not as much as a biconic, but you’d have some. Just like with Apollo. If you offset the center of gravity, you get a certain amount of control, with lift coming from the shape. And here’s the thing. The aerodynamics would be simple enough for you to fly the fucking thing down by hand if you had to, even if the electronics failed. You couldn’t do that with a biconic.”

“What about after the atmosphere entry? Parachutes?”

Lee thought about it. “Nope. Air’s too thin. You’d have to have some system of busting out of the heat shield and landing on a descent engine, like the Lunar Module. Like the Grumman bid, I guess. And then you’d have an ascent stage, the top half of the cone, to get you back to orbit. You’d leave behind the heavy heat shield, and all the surface gear.”

It all made sense to Gershon. It would be low cost, low development risk, low operational risk. It’s all I need, to land on Mars. And you could have the thing flying in a few years.

“JK, you ought to put in a bid. I’m serious.”

Lee just laughed.

He waved ahead, gesturing with his can. “Look out there.”

Gershon saw that the desert there was a flat, pale white crust in the starlight. Salt flats. And, on the horizon, a row of lights appeared out of nowhere, like a city in the desert.

“Edwards,” Lee said. “Where I came with Stormy Storms to watch the X-15 fly. Christ, they were the good days.” He took another pull of his beer, then threw the can out of the car.

Gershon handed him another can, and the T-bird sped on, as the giant hangars of the Air Force base loomed out of the darkness around them.

Monday, August 7, 1978

She was held up for an hour at Building 110, the security office of the JSC campus.

How are you supposed to present yourself, if you’re a rookie astronaut reporting for your first morning’s work? You have no identification badge on your shirt pocket, because on that first day, you have to enter the space center grounds to have the badge issued…

Strictly speaking, of course, York thought, it was an infinite regress, a paradox. It was logically impossible ever to enter JSC. She tried to explain it to the receptionist.

The receptionist, her broad, fleshy face a puddle of sweat, just looked at her and turned to deal with the press people queuing behind her. After a while York shut up and sat in the poky little building, trying to stop her hands folding over themselves.

Finally a secretary, tottering on heels, came out to collect her.

The secretary led her across the spiky grass of the campus. The woman was around thirty. She trailed a cloud of cosmetic fumes — perfumes and face powder and hair spray — that made York’s eyes sting. She looked oddly at York, and York could see the woman considering giving her girl-to-girl tips about where to get something done about that hair.

York clutched her empty briefcase and wondered what the hell she was doing there.

The secretary took her to Building 4, and told her she was expected to attend the regular pilots’ meeting straightaway. Every second Monday morning, at eight: she was already late.

She slipped into the meeting room, at the back.

There were maybe fifty people sitting around in the room: all men, clean-cut, close-shaven, crew-cut, wearing sport shirts and slacks. There was a lot of wisecracking, and deep, throaty laughter that rumbled around the room.

Chuck Jones, chief astronaut, stood at the front of the room, hands on hips. Jones was talking about some technical detail of the T-38 training aircraft.

York spotted an empty seat, not far from the door, and with muttered apologies she squeezed past a few sets of knees toward it. The astronauts made way for her politely enough, but she was aware of their gaze on her, curious, speculative, checking out her figure, studying her un-made-up face. What the hell’s this? Is it female? Are you here to take notes, baby? Make mine decaffeinated…

She spotted Ben Priest, sitting up front with his arms folded, looking the part.

“Now,” Jones said from the front of the room, “I’ve had reports from Ellington that some of you guys aren’t checking out your equipment before flying the T-38.”

There were groans. “Christ, Chuck, do we have to go through all this again?”

“We want to keep the privilege of flying the T-38s. But it’s a privilege that can be rescinded any time. You may be astronauts, but you aren’t free from the routine responsibilities of checking out what you fly. All I’m asking for is a little more effort, to keep those guys at Ellington sweet…”

Jones started going through assignments for the next two weeks. “Okay, we have Bleeker, Dana, and Stone to the Cape Tuesday to Friday. Gershon to Downey, all week. Curval and Priest to Los Angeles.”

Someone spoke up from the floor. “Hey, Chuck. I thought you were coming with us to L.A.”

“No, I changed my mind. I’m going to the Cape. I want to go through the new CM sim they’re building out there.”

“Don’t you like us anymore, Chuck?”

“You guys go west and I’ll go east anytime…”

That kind of bullshit went on for half an hour. By the end of it, York was feeling restless, baffled by the barrage of jargon, bemused by the slowness and apparent waste of time. It was like, she imagined, being inside an unusually clean men’s locker room.

She felt intimidated and out of place. How can I make a mark in an environment like this?

She met the rest of the cadre she’d been recruited into: eight others, all men, mostly with flying experience. They looked bright, eager, young, alert. Christ, three of them are already wearing astronaut-issue sport shirts! How had they known?

Chuck Jones took the new rookies on a tour of the Center.

She peered through doorways into the empty offices of senior astronauts. All the rooms looked the same, neat and spruce and barely lived-in, with pictures of spacecraft and airplanes on the walls. On the desks were boys’ toys: aircraft and lunar modules, and models of the new Saturn VB, with solid rocket boosters you could snap on and off.

She half expected to see spare sport shirts hanging behind the veneered doors.

Everywhere they walked, people deferred to Jones, as if he was some kind of king. He didn’t seem to notice. My God, York thought. There are going to be some monumental egos around here.

Jones led the nine of them into his big office in Building 30 and gave them coffee. He walked them through their induction program. For her first year York would be an “ascan” — an astronaut candidate. She’d go through six months of classroom lectures on astronomy, aerodynamics, physiology, spacecraft systems, interplanetary navigation, upper atmosphere physics… Back to school. There would be visits to Kennedy, Marshall, Langley, and other NASA centers.

They’d be “smoothed,” as Jones put it; the instructors would try to ensure that they all emerged with a certain base level of skills in every discipline, regardless of their background. That was partly for PR purposes, York gathered, so they could talk intelligently on every aspect of their future missions.

There would be some physical training, in simulators and centrifuges and the like. There would be some compulsory flight experience, in the back of a T-38, but, unlike previous cadres of scientist-astronauts, this group would not have to attend flight school.

It was a break from tradition. They’re letting in astronauts who aren’t pilots! Chuck Jones looked as if he were chewing nails as he forced the news out, and some of the more bushy-tailed guys looked disappointed; one even asked if he could volunteer for flight school.

After their ascan year, the candidates would be put on the active roster and would be considered for assignment to flights. Then, maybe two years before a flight, mission-specific training would begin…

“In theory,” Jones said.

Someone spoke up. “In theory, sir?”

Jones said bluntly, “I might as well just tell you guys straight out. You’re not going to be seeing any action for a while. None of you is dumb, so you know what the funding situation is like up on the Hill.

“Even if we get to Mars, and even if — if — a scientist is selected,” and Jones’s tone of voice made his feelings about that clear enough, “there are too many people in line ahead of you new guys. Including previous batches of scientists, some of whom have been here for years and haven’t gotten to fly yet. It’s even worse than with Apollo. At least with Apollo several Moon flights were planned. For Mars only a single flight has been inked in, and competition for places on that flight is going to be ferocious.”

Jones swiveled his cold black eyes, and York found it difficult to withstand the pressure of that gaze, as if his vision had contained some sizzling, hostile radar energy. “You’re looking at long delays, and maybe no flights, ever. We don’t need you around here. I’m saying this just so you’ll understand.”

Ben Priest took her out to lunch at the Nassau Bay Hilton.

She surveyed the menu. “Steak. Seafood. Salad. Potato. More steak. Jesus, Ben.”

He grinned as he sipped at a Coke. “Welcome to Houston.”

“How does a civilized man like you stand it here, Ben?”

“Now, don’t be a snob, Natalie.”

York ordered chicken-fried steak. When it arrived, it was a great plate-sized slab of meat, heavily fried and coated in batter. The first few mouthfuls tasted good, but the meat was tough, and her jaws soon started to ache.

Oh, how I am going to love Houston. A home away from home.

“So tell me,” Priest said. “What do you think of the astronauts, now that you’ve seen them en masse?”

“Oh, God. Football captains and class presidents. Straight out of Smallville.”

He laughed. “Maybe. Well, that describes me, too. Round here I’m just a ‘bug-eye’ from Ohio.”

“Look, I’m serious, Ben. Maybe this is what’s wrong with NASA. These guys have had it easy.”

“Easy?”

“Sure. For all their great achievements. Every day of their lives the astronauts are handed single, easily visualized objectives; all they have to do is go ahead and achieve. Unlike the rest of mankind.”

He grunted and cut into his steak, a big T-bone. “Well, one thing’s for sure,” he said.

“What?”

“Whether you’re right about this colony of Eagle Scouts, or whether it’s just your perception we’re talking about here, you’re going to have one hell of a job trying to find a niche.”

He was right, she felt. Flying to Mars could turn out to be the easy part.

After lunch, Priest took her sight-seeing and apartment hunting.

Sitting in the familiar comfort of Ben’s Corvette, she felt a great relief when they got away from the JSC area. And it was a relief to be with Ben.

She turned to him. He drove steadily, not speaking. If he reached out to her -

But he didn’t. He sat stiffly, as if unaware of her. Hell, he probably doesn’t know how to handle this any better than I do.

Her relationship with Ben was an odd thing, she thought. Almost as odd as her long-running relationship with Mike Conlig. Sure. So what’s the common factor, York?

When she and Ben came closer, physically, they talked a lot less. And when they did it was about superficials. Ben didn’t seem able even to contemplate leaving Karen, and as for York, her on-off relationship with Mike Conlig continued its stuttering course, accreting a kind of emotional mass the longer it lasted. Are Ben and I having an affair, then? Just the occasional jump in the sack?

It was as if their two bipolar relationships drew the two of them, Ben and York, apart every time they got close.

She was sure of one thing, though. If her first morning at JSC was anything to go by, she was going to need Ben’s patient company just to keep her sane.

Houston dismayed her. The place sweltered under a layer of air that was hot, laden with humidity, and thick with smog. The land was flat and at sea level, without a hill for a hundred miles, and crisscrossed by muddy rivers and swamps. Out of town, the soil was a gluey mixture the locals called “gumbo,” a mess of mud, clay, and oyster shells; pines and snarled oaks thrust reluctantly out of fields of stiff, bristly grass.

Ben drove her out to the San Jacinto monument, a grandiose 1930s obelisk topped by a Texas star, celebrating the victory of General Sam Houston over the Mexicans. They rode to the observation deck at the top. Around the monument’s landscaped park, square miles of oil refineries stretched away. From here, JSC might not have existed; the oil-price fluctuations of the 1970s had been good to Houston, and to York, looking down at the great spaghetti bowl of pipelines below, it was obvious that Houston was built on oil money, and the space program was no more than just another local employer.

Around the base of the monument, there was a faint reek of petrochemicals.

To find an apartment, Ben drove her back to the NASA-Clear Lake area, southeast of downtown. Clear Lake, as Ben pointed out in what was evidently a standard JSC joke, was neither clear nor a lake, but actually a sluggish inlet of Galveston Bay. NASA Road One, the road from JSC, ran parallel to the coast of the lake, and there were big communities of modern housing developments — Nassau Bay, El Lago — set between aging coastal resorts. The resort areas were old-fashioned, strange to find so close to the space center: faded, shabby, a little sinister, eroded by the sea and sun. York thought it must have been a hell of a shock to the locals when NASA had landed here, by Presidential decree, twenty years earlier.

The developments were all ranch houses, cute little bungalows with tiny private docks. Everything was green, prosperous, well maintained.

York grunted. “My God. The American dream, vintage 1962. The little home, the mom and two kids, the barbecues and the sailing. We’re in The Dick Van Dyke Show.”

“No.” Priest smiled behind his sunglasses. “This is astronaut country, remember. You’re thinking of I Dream of Jeannie. Anyhow, you’re not giving the place much of a chance, Natalie.”

“No?”

“No. Clear Lake is a kind of academic community. That’s because of JSC, and also the chemical industry in the area. It’s got more Ph.D.s per square yard than most places outside of the university towns. I figure you might feel at home here.”

“Stop trying to cheer me up, damn it, Ben.”

“I’m not! Believe me. Anyhow things could be a hell of a lot worse. Starry Town in Moscow, where the cosmonauts have to live, is more like a military barracks…”

The apartment complexes Ben showed her were called The Cove and El Dorado and Lakeshire Place and The Leeward. A lot of them looked good, and the more expensive had access to the water. But they were all depressingly similar within: boxy, with inefficient air-conditioning, plainly furnished, and with unimaginative prints hanging on the walls.

She settled on a place called The Portofпno. The architecture was as dull as everywhere else, but it did have a large, clean-looking swimming pool which she was anxious to try out.

When she’d settled terms, the landlady — a compact, knowing woman with an incomprehensibly thick Texas accent, and wearing a T-shirt saying “Kiss Me, I Don’t Smoke” — left the two of them alone in the apartment.

York sensed Ben move away from her, subtly.

She went to the window. The air was so thick it was hard to breathe. There were thick gray clouds overhead, threatening rain and trapping even more of the heat.

She felt a dumb misery envelop her, as dense as the air. What am I doing here, in this lousy apartment, working in this goddamn Boys’ Town?

Out back of the apartment building, she spotted a car that had gotten mildewed from the moisture in the air.

Friday, December 8, 1978

As he flew into Salt Lake City Gregory Dana got a spectacular view of the lake. Feeder streams glistened like snail tracks, and human settlements were misty gray patches spread along ribbons of road. The morning was bright and clear, the sky huge and transparent and appearing to reach all the way down to the desert surface far below the plane.

Dana allowed himself briefly to imagine that he was landing on some foreign planet, a world of parched desert and high, isolated inland seas.

To most people, he reflected, the complex world of human society was the entire universe, somehow disengaged from the physical underpinning of things. Most people never formed any sense of perspective: the understanding that the whole of their lives was contained in a thin slice of air coating a small, spinning ball of rock, that their awareness was confined to a thin flashbulb slice of geological time, that they inhabited a universe which had emerged from, and was inexorably descending into, conditions unimaginably different from those with which they were familiar.

Even the view of the air traveler gave a perspective that hadn’t been available to any of the generations who went before. If spaceflight gives us nothing else than an awareness of our true nature, he thought, then that alone will justify its cost.

He glanced back into the cabin. Most of his fellow passengers — even those attached to NASA and the space program, as he was — had their faces buried in documents, or books, or newspapers.

Morton Thiokol sent a car to meet him at the airport. The driver — young, breezy, anonymous behind mirrored sunglasses — introduced himself as Jack, and loaded Dana’s bags into the trunk, although Dana kept his briefcase with him.

Jack drove onto the freeway heading north, toward Brigham City. The driver told him that he was to be taken straight to the first test firing of the SRB, the new Saturn VB-class Solid Rocket Booster.

Dana grumbled, but saw no option but to submit.

Dana had been asked by Bert Seger to participate in the Critical Design Review of the new SRB, the formal checkpoint that marked the end of that phase of the rocket’s development. The use of solid rockets in a man-rated booster stack was one of the most controversial elements of the whole Saturn upgrade program, and it was one on which NASA was determined to be seen to be absolutely clean.

But Dana had been uncertain about working with Udet, about his own ability to get the Marshall people to listen to him. And anyway, such an assignment was well outside his own area of competence.

Seger had insisted: “You can inspect what you like, and recommend what you like, and I’ll make sure you get a hearing. We have to get this right, Dr. Dana…”

But what was he to learn from viewing a test firing? It was a stunt, obviously, designed to impress and overwhelm him. It was typical of Hans Udet; Dana felt immediately irritated at the waste of time.

He opened up his briefcase with a snap; as if in revenge he turned away from the landscape unrolling beyond the car windows and buried his attention in technical documentation.

The car delivered him to the Wasatch Division of Morton Thiokol, a few miles outside Brigham City. With a touch of Dana’s elbow, Jack led the way to a small prefabricated office module set on trestles a little way from the dusty road.

The test site was a bleak, isolated clutter of buildings, cupped by a broad crater-shaped depression in the desert. Low hills peppered with green-black vegetation rimmed the site. To the east, blue mountains shouldered over the horizon.

Jack pointed to a test rig a couple of miles away. Dana squinted to see in the brilliant light; he made out a slim white cylinder laid flat against the ground.

The office module, surprisingly enough, was air-conditioned, equipped with a refrigerator and some coffee-making equipment, and Dana breathed in its warm, moist air with relief. Inside, Hans Udet was waiting for him.

“Dr. Dana. I’m delighted to see you here today.”

Really? Quite a contrast to the last time we were up against each other, Hans, at the Mars mission mode presentations in Huntsville…

Dana shook the German’s hand, warily, and glanced around the office module. There was a cutaway model of the SRB, and artists’ impressions executed in the compelling, visionary style which had, Dana thought, become so much of a clichй from NASA in recent years. A loudspeaker taped high on one wall carried muted commentary on the progress of the test.

Obviously the office was a honey trap, designed to impress visiting decision makers. Like me. I suppose I should be flattered.

“We’re alone here?”

“Dr. Dana, this is a big day for us — the first integrated test firing — and I particularly wanted you to be here to see it. As my guest. Come; sit down. Let me take your briefcase. Would you like some coffee? — or perhaps cold beer—”

Dana accepted a glass of orange juice — chilled, it felt like, almost to freezing — and sat on a stackable chair.

Udet was already moving into what appeared to be a standard sales pitch. “I want you to be aware of the full background of our SRB project,” Udet said smoothly. He pointed to a chart showing the intended launch profile. “The Solid Rocket Boosters will stand 150 feet tall from engine bell to nose, and will be twelve feet in diameter; in the Saturn VB’s launch configuration four of them will be strapped to the core MS-IC first stage. The SRBs will supplement the MS-IC’s thrust with more than five million pounds of thrust combined, making the VB capable of raising more than four hundred thousand pounds of payload to low Earth orbit: that is, twice as much as the base Saturn V. The MS-IC itself features many upgraded features, including the new F-1A main engines, manufactured with new techniques and materials. The SRBs will be the largest solid-fueled rockets in the world — and, for economy, the first designed for reuse…”

“And the first used on a manned booster.”

“Yes, that is so.”

Dana opened his briefcase and spread a briefing document across his lap. “Dr. Udet, our time is limited. Can we get to specifics? It is the launch sequence which particularly concerns me.”

Udet’s eyes were pale blue behind his glasses. The German studied Dana, analytically, as if computing the way forward. Then, every movement evidently calculated, he sat down beside Dana; he sat easily, with his arms open, in a friendly and welcoming posture. “I understand your concerns, Dr. Dana; I have read the memoranda you have prepared for Bert Seger. My purpose today is to alleviate those concerns — to assure you that they are groundless.”

Despite himself, Dana felt disoriented by Udet’s control, his Prussian-aristocratic command. Dana’s glasses had slipped; he pushed them back and tried to speak forcefully. “And my concern is that no compromise in safety be made, for the sake of subsidiary goals such as reusability, or schedule, or economy.”

“Of course. And if I—”

“Can we return to the question of the launch?” Fumbling in his case, he extracted a brief, handwritten note. “I have completed a preliminary analysis of some failure modes during launch. I will, of course, document this formally.”

“I’m sure we have considered every failure mode, Dr. Dana.”

“I’m sure you have, too,” Dana murmured. “But perhaps we could review this. As an example: it appears that just before launch the Solid Rocket Boosters, and the rest of the stack, will be subject to what my son calls a ‘stretch’ — when the MS-IC’s engine fires up a few seconds before the release of the stack’s hold-down posts.”

Udet’s smile was thin. “I am familiar with the astronauts’ term.”

“The structural loads stored in the assembly by this ‘stretch’ will cause the whole stick to vibrate on release, shivering back and forth for the first few moments of flight, with a period of three or four seconds.” Dana prodded at a part of the page he had underlined heavily. “According to this rough outline, you will see that the greatest stresses on the joints of your segmented rockets are likely to occur during the ‘stretch’ and the subsequent bounce; I believe the stresses at that time might even exceed those of the period of maximum dynamic pressure during the flight.”

“The joints are designed to resist such pressures. All of this is under consideration,” Udet said, sounding a little testy.

“I’m sure it is. But I will want to see documentary evidence of tests before I could consider signing off the Critical Design Review. I have further recommendations.” He dug out more pieces of paper. “I would like to see the rubber of the segment seals replaced with a composite, temperature-resistant material. The field joints should be redesigned. All of this will reduce the possible flexing of the joints during the ‘stretch’ by many orders of magnitude. In addition, viewing ports for launch-site testing and electrical heating for the joints should be installed…”

As he went through his points, Udet listened politely, imperturbable.

A new announcement, incomprehensible to Dana, came over the sound system, and Udet turned his head to listen. When he turned back to Dana his smile was restored, creasing his papery cheeks. “We will talk further,” Udet said. “But the test fire will begin in a few minutes. If you will accompany me — you may bring your drink if you wish…”

Dana followed. Oddly, he felt as if he had acted without manners — as if it had been crass to raise all those niggling objections on a day of such visionary significance.

Udet drove Dana out to the test range in an open vehicle like a golf cart.

They stopped perhaps a mile from the booster. Udet, with an outstretched hand, helped Dana from the cart, and then to climb down a short metal ladder into an open trench. The trench was maybe four feet deep, a crude affair lined with rough-finished concrete. A technician handed Dana a set of goggles and a white hard hat.

The test booster was a cylinder of slim white, lying flat against the orange ground. The booster was strapped to the Earth by huge rectangular frames, and its nose was capped by an immense, open half sphere. As if it is a fallen god, pinned down, which might otherwise escape. The field joints between the casing segments gleamed gold in the sun, which was climbing toward noon. The big engine bell flared toward a low hill.

Men walked around the booster, dwarfed by its white flanks; instruments and cameras, mounted on delicate-looking tripods, clustered about the rig, and there were probes inserted into the black mouth of the engine bell itself.

Udet tapped Dana’s shoulder and leaned toward him. “We still have a couple of minutes. Let us speak freely, you and I.”

Dana studied him suspiciously.

Udet said, “I want to talk about risk. I think this lies at the heart of the debate we are engaged in. We have accumulated, in this country, the best part of two decades’ experience in designing and operating manned spacecraft systems. And in that time, the concept of risk has—” Uncharacteristically Udet hesitated, evidently searching for the right word.

“ ‘Evolved’?” Dana suggested drily.

Udet arched an eyebrow. “Very well. ‘Evolved.’ We have found it necessary to develop principles more sophisticated than simple admonitions to ‘protect the crew at all costs,’ and so forth.”

“ ‘We’?”

“Yes,” Udet snapped. “We who are responsible, ultimately, for the safety of the young men we loft into orbit, as opposed to those — with all respect — who merely stand to one side. Such as yourself.

“The evaluation of ‘risk’ itself evolves during the progress of a mission. Consider this. The Apollo 12 booster was hit by lightning during launch. The spacecraft reached orbit safely, but Apollo’s electrical systems had been severely battered, and it was impossible to check if the parachutes in the Command Module would function correctly. On balance, it was decided to continue the mission; once we have survived a launch, however problematic, if we do not proceed we must subject another crew to the greater risks of a further launch to reach the same point. And as for the parachutes, if a return to Earth would kill Conrad and his crew, it may as well be after a lunar landing as before.”

“I know the story, Dr. Udet. What is your point?”

“Simply that this whole business” — Udet waved a hand — “is just the realization, the fabrication in metal and rubber and cryogenic liquids, of a dream. A dream which you and I share. But it is not a dream which can be achieved without risk. Our mission, therefore, is not to eliminate risk but to manage it. And it is this perspective which must inform your review of the project…”

Dana felt uncertain, once more, in the face of Udet’s calm competence and assurance. Could he really oppose this man’s powerful convictions?

Over a remote PA, a countdown began. Udet stood upright in the trench, his silver hair shining in the sunlight. It is for moments like this that Udet is alive, Dana thought.

“Later,” Udet murmured to Dana, “I would like to show you the manufacture of the propellant, here at Wasatch; the compound is mixed in great bowls and then poured straight into the casing segments. It has the look and feel of rubber…”

Thirteen. Twelve. The rocket was clear of personnel; it lay alone and shining on the desert floor.

“…The final compound will ignite only under extreme heat, and is not sensitive to static, friction, or impact. It is very safe, you see.”

Six. Five.

“Indeed, a small rocket motor is required to fire inside the casing to ignite the propellant. And once ignited there is no need for pumps, or cryogenic storage; a solid rocket simply burns…”

Yes. And, once lit, it can’t be doused.

Two. One.

White flame lanced from the engine bell in an instant of eerie silence. The flame reached out toward the bland hillside behind the tethered rocket, and to Dana, dazzled, it was as if the desert sunlight had been dimmed, the blue and orange of the landscape leached to gray by comparison with that fire — rocket light, hotter than the surface of stars — which humans had brought to Earth.

And the noise reached him.

At first there was a deep rumbling which seemed to emerge from the depths of the Earth. And then came a fierce crackling, a pulse of high-frequency sound that was like the tearing of an immense sheet of canvas, a sound that flapped his clothes and blew at his hair. He felt the ground shake, as if suffering repeated blows from a great invisible hammer.

Udet leaned over toward him and shouted. “This is the dream, Dr. Dana.” He stared at Dana, his hair mussed and coated with orange dust. “Zero to twenty million horsepower, in less than a second! This is what I wanted you to see; this is what we are working for, you and I; this is what you must always bear in mind, as you make your studies, and file your reports.”

Dana felt overwhelmed by the man’s intensity. Of course, Udet was right. It was indeed a dream, a dream of rocket light, made real in the deserts of the western United States, before the eyes of two battered old men from Europe. The dream of the Mittelwerk.

The flames from the captive rocket continued to plume, and smoke billowed against the hillside, stained orange and gray by desert dust.

February 1979

The room was dark and warm. Several of the trainees around York had their feet up on their desks. One — Bob Gold, a big-eared Texan, a few feet ahead of York — had his head resting on the fold of fat at the back of his shaven neck, and he was snoring in a thin, birdlike cackle.

The instructor at the front fumbled another Vu-graph slide onto the projector. The focus of the projector was out, so the image was blurred at the center. The instructor, an astronaut called Ralph Gershon, picked up his extensible pointer and tapped at the projection screen, making it oscillate and blurring the image further.

Gershon didn’t fumble like that because he was nervous, York perceived wearily, but because he didn’t care enough to concentrate hard on what he was doing.

“This here is the ECLSS of your basic MEM configuration,” Gershon said. “Take a good look at it. Maybe your life is going to depend on knowing your way around this baby someday.”

The new slide was a block diagram of bewildering complexity, covered with spidery arrows and puzzling acronyms. The new picture showed no resemblance, as far as York could see, to anything she’d been shown before.

The snoozer ahead of York gulped and chewed on a loose piece of phlegm.

“Now,” said Gershon, tapping the diagram again, “here you have your basic ECLSS concept, which is likely to fly whatever choices we make about the rest of the MEM’s engineering. You have your standard two-bed molecular sieve here for CO2 scrubbing. And the H2O management is by means of this multifiltration unit here.” He pronounced the prefix mult-eye. “That supplements the output of your fuel cells. And your atmospheric gases are cryogenically stored, of course. As opposed to being stored under pressure.” Gershon blinked around the room. “Anybody figure out why that is? Because it’s a better weight-to-volume ratio. And we don’t operate any kind of O2 recovery system here. We take all our breathing air along with us, and just vent the waste. You want to tell me why? Because the MEM is a short-duration craft, and the weight of the recovery systems wouldn’t be justified…”

York realized that this trick of Gershon’s — of asking a question of his class and carelessly answering it before anyone got a chance to speak — was slowly driving her crazy.

Gershon told the class they should complete the copy of the diagram in their books, and he wandered out of the room in the direction of the coffee machine.

Although Gershon clearly knew his way around MEM designs, he was not a trained educator. He was a short, wiry, black man in his mid-thirties. Apparently he hailed from Iowa, but he’d been hanging around Houston long enough for a Texas drawl to color the way he pronounced his vowels, making the acronyms even tougher to cut through; ECLSS came out like “Aye she ale esh esh…” And after so many years here Ralph Gershon was just another rookie astronaut, still waiting for his first flight, plowing through another lousy assignment, lecturing to a new class of bright-eyed hopefuls.

For York, Gershon was a depressing role model.

She flicked desultorily through her coloring book. That was what the students called the volumes that were passed out at the start of each lecture; they were fat books containing diagrams, no text. The diagrams on the Vu-graph charts were supposed to be identical to the diagrams in the books, except for the colors, and the rookies — all of them highly qualified specialists — had to work like grade school students, coloring in their copies of the diagrams with pens. They were supposed to memorize every transistor and valve and duct and pipe and wiring conduit in every goddamn spaceship, planned or actual.

Coloring books were a fantastically dumb way to teach anybody anything, she’d quickly decided. And besides, all the systems knowledge in the world wouldn’t have helped Jim Lovell’s Apollo 13 crew when that oxygen tank blew.

And you also had the problem that the MEM design in particular was a moving target. The MEM was being built in a different, more leisurely manner from previous generations of spacecraft, with the basic research — into biconic shapes, ballutes, plug-nozzle rocket engines — being proved before the first ships were assembled. It was all a marked contrast to Apollo, and, she supposed, a lot more logical; but because of that the ECLSS diagram in her book didn’t match in all its detail the diagram on the screen, which in turn, probably, didn’t match the reality of what anybody would build, one day. So why did she need to fill her head with all this crap?

It was all part of their ascan syllabus, a document that was, incredibly, set out like a flowchart. You followed the flow, doing a one-hour module on subsystems here, a couple of hours of reading on space medicine there, until you passed barriers in the flowchart which proved you’d reached another level of skill. It was formulaic, an education system designed by an engineer, not a teacher.

It was typical NASA, really. Not that she could get anyone to listen to that kind of complaint.

The rookies got to bring in their own pens, though, and York derived some ignoble pleasure in producing books full of Day-Glo orange engine bells, puce oxygen tanks, and electric blue reaction control solenoids.

After the class broke up she ran into Ben Priest. Ben was heavily caught up in the training for his own first flight: Apollo-N, the NERVA 2 orbital proving mission, planned for the end of next year.

Today he was frustrated, too, hot as hell and irritated after spending all day in a niggling integrated sim.

For some reason, the usual silent barrier between the two of them wasn’t working today. They just stood in the corridor, close together, facing each other, Ben’s shirt crumpled and open at the neck. Maybe it was their shared frustration. Anyhow, today she just knew.

They got in Ben’s car and went back to her apartment.

It was their third time, in as many years.

“Those damn coloring books. It’s like learning to drive a car in a classroom,” she growled. She took another mouthful of Coke and rested the chilled, dew-coated can against her chest.

Ben, lying back in her bed, laughed and lifted his own drink, a Budweiser. “Well, if you’re sick of the classroom, grab time in the simulators.”

“Christ, Ben, we can’t get near the sims. That’s another problem. They’re too damn full of astronauts. I mean real astronauts,” she said bitterly. “Dumb fighter jocks like you, who are really getting to fly.”

“Never mind that. Find time anyway.”

“The sims are booked until 3 A.M!”

He looked impatient. He pulled a sheet up over his flat stomach. “Then come in at 3 A.M. What do you want, Natalie? Nobody said it was going to be easy. You’ve got to get ahead by getting ahead around here. Put yourself out. Make them notice you. Bang on Chuck Jones’s door, demanding assignments.”

She grunted. “It’s a damn stupid way to run a space program.”

“Maybe so, but it’s our way.”

Lying there, he looked oddly restless, though she wasn’t sure how she could tell. She knew he was going to have to go back to JSC later that evening. But she felt a need to keep him here, to keep talking. She was imposing on him, but Ben was the only intimate York had out there.

In fact, since the Three Mile Island thing a few weeks ago, she’d even lost touch with some of her friends back at Berkeley; they’d decided it was immoral of her to keep on working in a “big technology” program that was going to fly nuclear materials into orbit, for God’s sake.

Without Ben to beat up about all the problems she was having inside the program, she suspected she’d go quickly crazy.

“Anyway,” he said, “how’s Mike?”

She looked away. “I don’t know. Busy. Wound up like a watch spring.” She hesitated. “Now you tell me how Karen is.”

He winced. “I didn’t deserve that.”

“…I guess not. I’m sorry.”

He grunted. “Me, too.”

She gripped her Coke can, trying to force herself to focus on the issue. We can talk about Mars and culture clashes at NASA, but we always skirt around us. “I don’t know whether Mike wants me to follow my career here or not.”

“Would it make a difference?”

No. Not anymore. She couldn’t bring herself to say it.

Priest drained his beer. “I think you’re kind of making your choice, Natalie. And maybe Mike is, too. It’s a pity. I love you both. But I guess we’re not all cut out to bake bread and raise kids.”

“Probably not. You neither, huh.”

He looked defensive. “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing. I’m sorry, Ben.”

He cradled his beer can, avoiding her eyes. “I’ve thought of leaving home.”

“What for?”

He looked irritated. “What do you think? To come here, for Christ’s sake. To be with you.”

“Oh.” That took her aback. “So,” she said gently. “What’s stopping you?”

“…I don’t think I can leave Karen.”

“Why not? Do you still love her?”

He turned to her and ruffled her hair. “Come on, Natalie, you’re a scientist. What kind of question is that? What does ‘love’ mean when you’ve been married to someone for more years than you can count, when you’ve raised a son… You go beyond love. Love’s for teenagers.”

“So, why don’t you leave?”

“Because I owe her.” He shook his head, irritated. “No, that’s not right. Because we have a kind of deal, going right back to the start. Karen has had to — invest in me. Every time I fly—”

“Oh, I get it,” she said. “She’s a Navy wife.”

“Don’t you dismiss it, Natalie. It might seem odd to you, but it’s a stable system. Karen has bought all my risk, over the years, and I’m asking her to buy even more when I go up on Apollo-N. I owe her. Maybe we’ll split up; but if we do, it ought to be her decision.”

She grunted. “Well, that’s as clear as gumbo.”

He laughed. “So what are you telling me? That if I turned up here with a suitcase, you’d have me?”

She thought about it. “I don’t know,” she said honestly. “I could never be a Navy wife.”

“I know it.” He cupped her cheek. “You’re something new, Natalie.”

She sipped her Coke. Her thoughts drifted back to NASA. “You know, in the Office, the Old Heads don’t even want us around…”

“Old Heads?”

“Ben, don’t pretend you haven’t heard that before. Old Heads It’s what we call you guys, the senior cadres.”

“Even me?”

“Even you, asshole. And the worst of the Old Heads are the oldest. Chuck Jones and the rest of the Mercury generation.”

“Oh, come on,” Ben said. “Those guys are straight enough. I mean, these are the good guys. The ones who’ve stuck with the program, trying to get another flight; the ones who didn’t take early retirement to make Amex commercials or take worthless corporate directorships, or appear on talk shows, or sell off bits of their space suits. Guys like Joe Muldoon and John Young and Fred Haise and Chuck Jones…”

“Maybe so.” It was hard for her to remember the reverence she’d brought there for those guys. But it was remarkable what a deep change of attitude could be induced by a couple of months of being snubbed by a person. “All they talk about is flying,” she said, peevish. “And goose hunting, and racing their Corvettes in from their cute little houses in El Lago.”

“Well, how do you expect them to behave? Those guys are basically test pilots.”

“But I’m not going to be taught how to fly! Anyway, it’s more than that. Even the science activities we want to do are frowned on.”

“By Chuck Jones, too?”

“By Jones especially. Like, do you know Bob Gold, in my group?”

“Sure.”

“Bob wanted a leave-of-absence faculty appointment at the University of Texas, to start next year. Ben, when we were inducted we were all promised the chance of appointments like that — back at our home universities, keeping our careers alive. Well, Jones wouldn’t do it. He said he needed Bob here! For what, for Christ’s sake? To make up the numbers in the Crew Compartment Fit and Function tests? Ben, for some of this work all they need is a warm body. You don’t even have to be conscious Anyhow, now Bob is thinking of quitting.”

“Then let him.” That restlessness she’d perceived in him seemed to be getting closer to the surface. “Look, I hear what you say. But you’ve got to work this out for yourself, Natalie—”

York wasn’t done yet. “And there’s more. Maybe you’re sitting in the office trying to catch up with your reading. Then some grinning asshole walks in and says, ‘Hey, Natalie, there’s a meeting over in Building 4 on EVA overshoes, or S-band antenna mounts, or some other damn thing, that I think you ought to attend.’ So what do you do?”

“You attend,” said Priest firmly. He set his beer can on the bedside table with a kind of finality. “Listen to me, now, Natalie, for once in your life. You need to come to a decision. All this damn griping… If you want to go back to academic life, back to your old work, then just pick up and go.”

“Plenty have.”

“Sure. And plenty more will. But if you want to stick around, you have to play the game. By their rules, the Old Heads, or whatever you want to call them. Jack Schmitt was the most successful scientist-astronaut in the sixties. How come?”

“Because he was the best geologist?”

“He was a fine geologist. But there were plenty of fine geologists who left the program, leaving Schmitt standing there. Schmitt made himself useful, and in ways the other guys — the decision makers — could recognize. He was asked to be the astronaut representative on the Apollo lunar surface gear, and he did it. And without waiting around to be asked he went on to cover the whole of the Lunar Module’s descent stage. He worked on lunar exploration strategies. He helped to get the other guys to take the geology seriously.”

“But, Ben — Schmitt never walked on the Moon.”

Priest shook his head. “You aren’t listening. Because Schmitt was around at the time, the geology we did on the Moon was a hell of a lot better than it might otherwise have been. You ought to think about that. The late landings got canceled out from under him, and that was that. But if any scientist was ever going to walk on the Moon, it would have been Schmitt. He gave himself the best possible chance.” He eyed her. “Anyhow, Schmitt has had a tour in Moonlab. He’s gotten as close to the Moon as sixty miles, at least. And you know Ralph Gershon, don’t you?”

“Sure. One Grade-A asshole.”

“No,” Ben snapped. “You’re being the asshole, Natalie. I’m sorry, but that’s the truth. Listen: Gershon is having just as hard a time as you, but from a different angle. He’s the best pilot in the Agency, and most of us know it. But he doesn’t fit in. He’s a different generation from these other guys. He’s fought in a dirtier war, and maybe they think that’s left him a little dirty.

“But,” Priest went on, “Ralph hasn’t given up. He’s doing his damnedest to get a seat. Here he is, for instance, making himself useful by nursemaiding you guys.”

“But he’s a lousy instructor!”

Priest shook his head. “Wise up. That’s not the measure. Taking the assignment, completing it, being a team player: that’s what counts. And on top of that Ralph spends half his life out at Langley, and Rockwell, wherever the hell they are trying out bits of MEM concepts. And you know why? Because he figures that when push comes to shove, he doesn’t want there to be anybody around here who knows more about flying the MEM than he does. Just like Schmitt, he’s giving himself the best shot he can.”

“And that’s what I should do?”

“That’s what you should do. More. Stop griping, for Christ’s sake. You have a great opportunity here. Get on the sims. Grab all the training you can, no matter how obscure and irrelevant it seems. Go to the meetings about the damn EVA gloves, or whatever. And try to find ways to leverage your own skills. Get on the Mars landing site selection board, for instance…”

“I didn’t know there was one.”

“Well, there you are,” he said heavily.

“Goddamn it, Ben, I hate it when you give me advice.”

He laughed. “Only because I’m right.” He checked the time on his Rolex, which he’d put on her bedside table. “Shit. I’ll have to go. Classroom work for me, too, now. The latest modifications to the NERVA control systems.”

“So,” she said. She stroked his back. “We’ve still got unfinished business, huh?”

“Yeah. Unfinished business. We’ll talk.”

He swung his legs out of the bed.

A couple of weeks later, life got more interesting.

York’s cadre was moved on to systems training. York worked her way up through the hierarchy of training systems, at first paper-based, later electronic and computer-driven, heading toward a more complete representation of the spacecraft she would fly.

There were single-systems trainers — fragments of Apollo control consoles — set up in offices scattered through Building 5, with computers running simple simulations behind them; and there were integrated trainers for each of the three crew stations in an Apollo Command Module.

Finally she was taken into Building 9, the Mock-up and Integration Lab. Full-size training mock-ups of spacecraft littered the floor of the hangar-sized building. The equipment was for generic training, to develop skills applicable to any flight; the more elaborate simulators were assigned to specific missions.

This was a low-tech place, the trainers scuffed and scarred, visibly aged. There were chalked graffiti on the wall, and the workbenches scattered around the place were littered with mundane items: paper towels, a big pail full of empty Coke cans. No astronaut on the active roster came down here. If she came in on a weekend, the place was generally deserted; after so many years of routine, long-duration missions, there was pretty much a nine-to-five atmosphere about much of JSC.

Building 9 made her feel her place, she thought; as an ascan she was a long way down the food chain.

She tried out the air-bearing facility, an office chair suspended by a hovercraft-like cushion of downward air jets. She floated over the epoxy-resin floor like an ice-hockey puck, pulling her way around a mocked-up Skylab workstation, learning about action and reaction in an environment that simulated zero G, if only in two dimensions.

At last she clambered into the Crew Compartment Trainer, a full-scale mock-up of an Apollo Command Module, which sat like a metal teepee in the middle of the floor of Building 9. The hatch was incredibly small, and she had to swing herself in feetfirst. The three couches were just metal frames slung with canvas slings, constricting, jammed against each other. Under the couches, in the fat base of the cone, was a storage area called the lower equipment bay.

York sat in the center couch, the Command Module Pilot’s. She was looking up toward the apex of the cone. The windows seemed small and far away; even though the hatch was open, she felt enclosed in there. Directly in front of her there was a big, battleship-gray, 180-degree instrument panel. There were five hundred controls: toggle switches, thumbwheels, push buttons, and rotary switches with click stops. The readouts were mainly meters, lights, and little rectangular windows containing either “gray flags” or “barber poles”; the barber pole was a stripy piece of metal that would fill the window when the setting had to be changed. There were a tiny computer keypad, a small cathode-ray tube, and eight-balls — artificial horizons. There were small joysticks and push buttons: translational controllers, to work the Command Module’s clusters of attitude rockets.

The panel seemed complex, almost ludicrously so. How the hell was she going to find her way around all this?

She experimented with the switches. They were mostly of two types: little silver three-way tabs, or — for more critical functions — cylindrical levers, two-way, that you had to pull out before they would move. These would be awkward in pressure-suit gloves, she thought. The switches were protected by little metal gates on either side, to save them being kicked by a free-fall boot. She worked her way across the panel, practicing flipping the dead switches, getting used to the feel of them.

There were little diagrams etched into the panel, she saw, circuit and flowcharts. She consulted her manuals. For example, there was one diagram which connected a set of switches that controlled water output from the fuel cells. The little gray lines mirrored the way the water flowed, either to controls for the storage tanks, or for the dumps.

All the switches were contained by one diagram or another. Once she started to see the system behind the diagrams, she began to figure the logic in the panel, how the switches clustered and related to each other.

Sitting alone inside the quiet Apollo, she worked her way through her manuals, learning how the spaceship was flown.

Monday, June 11, 1979

The convoy of buses skirted around Moscow, following the freeways. They were heading northeast, toward Kaliningrad. There was a lot of traffic, most of it freight, and the road was lined with apartment blocks, huge, drab monoliths.

Joe Muldoon stared out of a grimy window. It was the most depressing sight he had ever seen.

Here they were, hauling ass direct from the airport, straight out of the city to Starry Town. This was Muldoon’s second visit. Their first trip out had been better. Then, the American crew — Muldoon, Bleeker, and Stone, with the NASA technical people and program managers — had stayed in an Intourist hotel. It was no palace, but it was right in the middle of downtown Moscow, with Red Square and the Kremlin a walk away. Every morning the Soviets had arrived with buses to take the Americans out to Starry Town, and every evening they’d brought them back.

And the hotel had had a bar in the basement.

That bar had proved to be a magnet for foreign nationals, one of the few congenial places in the city. There were other Americans to be found there, and Germans, Cubans, Czechs. Muldoon and the NASA guys had made that bar their own.

There’d been no harm done, save for a few late nights and bleary mornings. But in retrospect, he could see the problem for the program managers. Not to mention the Soviets. In that bar, they are out of control, those Americanskis!

So this time out, things were arranged differently.

At Kaliningrad the convoy turned east toward Shchelkovo. The architecture changed. There were wooden houses, along both sides of the road; unlike the Soviet-style apartments closer to Moscow, these were painted brightly and decorated with ornate wood carvings. Muldoon could smell woodsmoke. And every few hundred yards there were hand pumps.

It was all kind of cute and rural, but desperately primitive. Wooden houses and hand pumps, next door to a cosmonaut training center.

The convoy turned right on an unmarked road, into a pine forest. Just around the bend there was a guard post. After a couple of minutes’ checking with the drivers, the convoy went on into a large clearing in the forest. There were several tall apartment buildings there, a few low office buildings, some stores. At one end of the clearing there were small lakes, at the other a dozen large, blocky structures.

Shawled babushkas pushed baby carriages along the sidewalks, while the noise of jet aircraft ripped down constantly from the air.

This was Starry Town, purpose-built to house and train the cosmonaut corps. It struck Muldoon as a cross between a university campus and a military training camp.

The driver pointed out the hydro pool, a neutral buoyancy trainer, the Cosmonaut Museum. At the center of the clearing, facing the convoy, was a statue of Gagarin: larger than life, heroic, inspirational.

Muldoon grimaced. There were no statues to him, anywhere, even though he’d gone so much farther than Gagarin. But then, he wasn’t safely dead.

His apartment was huge. More like a suite. He wandered through the rooms. The place was crammed with furniture, all of it heavy and old-fashioned: sofas, overstuffed chairs, heavy tables. There was a thick shag pile on the floor, and flocked paper on every inch of wall. He found the bathroom, and there he had to laugh. There was no soap, and there were no plugs for the bath or sink, and only one towel.

And probably a bug in every damn light fixture.

He glanced out of the window. He saw white pines, barbed wire. A black limousine cruised along one of the central access roads: probably KGB, Muldoon thought. Home away from home. Like a fucking prison camp.

He jammed a washcloth in the plug hole and ran a bath.

He dressed in his dinner suit and went down to the bar.

It wasn’t much like the Intourist place in Moscow. But there was a barman, polishing glasses; he had a thin, Asiatic face. Muldoon asked for a beer. It proved to be cold; it was a Czech brand, and it tasted good. There was nobody else there. Some kind of god-awful piano music tinkled over a PA.

There was going to be a reception tonight, before a dinner in the place’s dining room, all to celebrate the progress of Moonlab-Soyuz. Fred Michaels himself was supposed to attend, and God alone knew how many Soviet big fish. You’ll have to take it easy, Muldoon Watch what you say. No more hostages to fortune. He knew what to expect at the dinner, though: meat, lots of it, with piles of cream and butter. Deliciously bad for him.

He was clapped on the back. “My friend Joe. I thought I might find you the first here. Welcome back to Zvezdnoy Gorodok, to Starry Town. You are still drinking that warmed-over piss you prefer, I see. Barman!” Vladimir Viktorenko snapped his fingers.

The barman delivered a bottle of vodka, two glasses, and a small bowl of salt. “Here. Drink. Mother’s milk,” Viktorenko ordered. He poured out a glass for Muldoon.

Muldoon took a lick of salt, then threw back the liquid; it was tasteless, harsh, clawing at his throat. “Thank you, my friend,” he said in his hesitant Russian. “Immediately you appear a much more handsome fellow.” The idea was that in lunar orbit, the Americans would speak Russian and the Soviets English. Muldoon was finding the language training the hardest part of the whole damn program.

Viktorenko bellowed out a laugh. He took a drink himself. “Tonight, all five of us will drink from this bottle, and we will sign the label. When we have returned from the Moon we will meet again, and toast our success from the very same bottle.” He poured Muldoon another glass.

“To the mission,” Muldoon said.

“Oh, no.” Viktorenko threw up his hands in mock horror. “One must not say such things. In Russia, this is bad luck. Seven hundred hours of Russian lessons, and they did not teach you this? Tsk. We should toast our preparations. That is enough.”

“Our preparations, then.” Muldoon drank again.

Vladimir Pavlovich Viktorenko was something of a legend among the cosmonauts — among the astronauts, too, come to that. He was stocky, jovial, full of energy; his broad head with its graying crew cut, looked as if it had been bolted to his shoulders, and his ruddy cheeks were puffed up. All that borscht and potatoes. He was of the same vintage as Muldoon, roughly: he had applied to join the cosmonaut program in its first recruitment sweep, in 1960. He had copiloted the Voskhod 3 mission in 1966, a flight in which an adapted one-man Vostok capsule had taken two men, precariously, into orbit, and Viktorenko had watched as his copilot had taken a space walk out of a flimsy blow-up airlock.

There had been a rumor that Viktorenko had been the Soviets’ prime candidate for their abandoned lunar landing program. Muldoon had tried probing about that, but Viktorenko wouldn’t open up.

And here was Viktorenko as Muldoon’s counterpart, the commander of the Soviet crew for Moonlab-Soyuz.

Viktorenko asked after Jill, Muldoon’s wife, whom he’d met, and charmed the pants off, in Houston.

Muldoon just shrugged.

Jill hadn’t been too ecstatic about his being back on the active roster and returning to the Moon, for God’s sake. And, truth to tell, he wasn’t sure if she’d even be there for him when he got back from this jaunt.

There wasn’t anything he could do about it. He had to fly; for him that was a parameter, a fact he had to live with. Even to the exclusion of Jill. He didn’t express any of this, but he sensed Viktorenko understood, and the cosmonaut didn’t press him.

Muldoon felt himself mellowing as the vodka went to work; he washed it down with a little Czech beer.

The bar was beginning to fill up, mostly with NASA engineering staff, and a few Soviets. Adam Bleeker walked in, nodded to Muldoon, and made for the bar.

It was encouraging to see the American and Soviet teams working together properly, Muldoon thought. It had taken a long time. The idea of joint flights had been opposed by the Soviets because of a distrust of Americans — and from within the U.S., for suspicion that the Soviets’ true motives for cooperating were all about getting their hands on American technology.

But that was a lot of crap, Muldoon thought. After all both Soyuz and Moonlab/Apollo technologies were ten years old; what the hell was there to steal? Besides, Carter and Ted Kennedy were putting a lot of muscle behind this trip; for Carter, the Moonlab stunt — originally a scheme of Nixon’s — had become a way of symbolizing his achievement in getting the Soviets to sign up for the SALT II treaty.

Sometimes, Muldoon felt bewildered by the pace of change; it seemed to accelerate as he got older.

“You know, Vladimir, we’ve been working on this program for a couple of years now, but it still seems odd to me sometimes that here we are, you and I, drinking vodka together in a Moscow bar. Even one run by the KGB.”

“How so?”

“If things had turned out differently, I might have found myself flying solo into Moscow with two nukes strapped under my wings, instead of my pajamas and toothbrush.”

“Nukes,” Viktorenko said. “Indeed. And now we are comrades again. But that is what makes us unique, men like you and I, Joe. We are aviators. We rise to our mission, whatever it may be. To the edge of the envelope, and beyond. Once our mission was to ferry nukes. And now our mission is to shake hands in space. And that we will do, as well as we can. These others — the paper-pushers, even the engineers: these others can never understand such things. It has always been so.

“Why, I remember my induction into the Vostok program,” he said. “I was put into an isolation chamber. A box. For several weeks. And then a thermal chamber, and then a decompression chamber. And then, straightaway, I was taken to the airport, put on a plane, and ordered to parachute back to Earth. The doctors, the quacks, justified such treatment by saying they needed to know how I would react on the abrupt change from an enclosed cabin to the boundlessness of infinite space. Ha.”

“Colonel Muldoon. Lieutenant Colonel Viktorenko. Good to see you here…”

It was Fred Michaels. The NASA Administrator stood not two feet away from Muldoon, his jowls peppered lightly with sweat; behind him Muldoon recognized the assistant administrator, Josephson, the quintessential paper-pusher.

Viktorenko made Michaels effusively welcome and insisted on pouring him and Josephson slugs of vodka.

Tim Josephson drew Muldoon away from the others. “I’m sorry to bother you with this now, Joe. But we need a decision from your crew tonight.”

“On what?”

Josephson opened up a folder. “The call sign for your Apollo on the Moonlab/Soyuz flight. As you know, at the instigation of Congress, we’ve been holding a competition for elementary and high-school students to come up with a name.” He began shuffling pieces of paper in the folder. “We had seven thousand entries, submitted by teams totaling seventy-one thousand schoolchildren. Each name had to be backed up by a classroom project. The judging criteria were 80 percent for the quality and creativity of the project, and 20 percent on the name’s clarity during transmission and its ability to convey the American spirit. And—”

“Oh, give me a break, Josephson. For Christ’s sake.”

“I have a short list of the twenty-nine finalists here. We’re behind schedule with this already. I thought if you and the crew could get together tonight on this, and—”

Muldoon threw back another vodka. “Fuck off,” he said.

Josephson, behind his glasses, looked shocked. He opened his mouth, then closed it again. He looked down for a minute, as if composing himself.

Then, when he looked up, his face was hard.

“Colonel Muldoon. Perhaps we could discuss this elsewhere. Your room?”

Michaels looked furious, thunderous. Vladimir Viktorenko winked at him.

Ah, hell. “Sure. Let’s go.”

Muldoon drained his vodka.

“Listen, Josephson. I—”

“You listen to me.”

Josephson was still just a skinny streak of piss, but he was in absolute control of himself, Muldoon realized; and, in the confines of Muldoon’s room, he had suddenly become genuinely intimidating. “I’m tired of your drama-queen incompetence, Colonel, the way you’re prepared to embarrass yourself, the Agency, and the government, even here. You and those other space cadets of yours are damn lucky to have gotten this flight at all. We’ve heard your public pronouncements. We know you were pissed at the cancellation of the last Moon landings. We know you think the joint flight is just a PR stunt. We know you think you’re stuck here working on creaky Soviet technology.”

Muldoon had a deepening sense of danger. “Look—”

“I had to go in front of Congress because of the way you mouthed off against the Agency. You, Muldoon. The astronauts go in there and they’re treated like heroes I went in and I was totally humiliated. That is never going to happen to me again. Is that clear? Now take this list.”

Staring into Josephson’s narrow, calculating eyes, Muldoon saw everything — his whole life, all his aspirations — narrow into that one moment. The road to Mars lies through this bottleneck, this piece of paper, the seventy thousand high-school kids and their seven thousand fucking names, in this shitty room on the wrong side of the planet. I really have to do this.

And the lightness of the Moon was, after all, a long time ago.

He took the list from Josephson. He looked at the names on it. Adventure. Blake. Eagle. Endurance.

Josephson said, “Do you want me to go find Phil and—”

“No. I’m the commander. Here.” He stabbed at a name. “This one.”

Josephson looked at the paper. “Grissom”

“The commander of Apollo 1.”

Josephson studied Muldoon’s face for a moment; then he nodded. He turned and left the room.

Muldoon splashed water in his face. Then he went back to the bar and started working on getting seriously drunk.

Thursday, April 10, 1980

It took her an hour to get suited up, in the personal gear room.

The safety instructions alone were intimidating enough. Hundreds of facts were thrown at her, about D-rings and lanyards and oxygen bottles and hypoxia and survival procedures… My God. And I’m only going to be a passenger in the damn thing.

But here she was, trussed up in a flight suit, with an oxygen mask, straps everywhere, a parachute, emergency oxygen, intercoms, survival kits for several unlikely environments tucked into her pockets. There was a sick bag in a pouch on her leg. She even had her own flight helmet, a World War I-style Snoopy hat. Look at me, the newest fighter jock hero.

She walked out to the field. There was Phil Stone, the senior astronaut, who was going to take her up today. Stone was tall, proudly bald, the best part of fifty. He grinned and shook her hand with a big gloved mitt. “Welcome to the carny ride,” he said.

She smiled back uncertainly.

Beyond him, a gleaming toy on the tarmac, was the T-38 itself. The trainer was an intimidating white dart. The wings were just little stubs, incredibly short, and the sleek white shape had more of the feel of a rocket about it. It seemed incredible, against intuition, that such a small, compact machine could support itself in the air and fly.

You’re getting down to the wire, Natalie. You say you want to be an astronaut. You mock the hero-pilot tendency. That’s fine.

But it means you have to cope with experiences like this.

Two techs helped her climb up and lower herself into the cockpit. The T-38’s white-painted walls were only just far enough apart for her to squeeze in. She would actually be in a separate cockpit behind Stone’s, under her own little bubble of glass.

Stone clambered aboard, in front of her, and spoke over the intercom. “Natalie, can you hear me?”

“Sure, Phil. Loud and clear. And I—”

He cut her off. “Final safety instructions,” he said. “I’ll tell you when to close your canopy bubble. Do it slowly, Natalie. Now, your parachute is set to open as soon as you eject. That’s appropriate for low altitude. Later I’ll tell you when to change the setting to high altitude, when you need to have a delay between ejection and the chute opening; you do that by fastening the hook to that ring on your chute, and…”

And the noise of the jets rose to a roar, drowning out his words.

The plane started to taxi.

Stone, sitting in his bubble ahead of her, looked out calmly, his motions deft and precise. The controls before her moved in sympathy with Stone’s, working themselves like a high-tech pianola.

She felt her pulse rate rising, her breathing deepening, and the rubber stink of her oxygen mask grew sharper; she felt sweat pool under her goggles, on her squeezed-up cheeks.

She consoled herself that she was going on a ride which few people would experience: high, fast, probably extraordinarily beautiful. Even if she left the corps tomorrow, she would have that to take away from there.

Yes, but I’m pretty sure I could get by without it…

Without warning, the plane threw itself down the runway, pressing her back into her seat. Within a few seconds she could feel the wheels leaving the ground.

The plane pitched upward steeply, and she lost sight of the ground.

There was a layer of cloud above, lumpy cumulus. The clouds seemed to explode at her, and she shot into white mist. She was through it in a second, emerging into bright, clear sunshine.

She glanced down: the land was already lost, remote, a patchwork of faded brown with the gray shadows of clouds scattered over it.

The T-38 rose almost vertically, like a rocket. In a few seconds, the sky faded down to a deep purple.

The surface of Earth was remote, small, the works of humanity already reduced to two-dimensional splashes of color. It astonished her to think, given the facility with which she had leapt from the ground, that just a century ago no human on the planet had undergone such an experience.

Scientist-astronauts no longer had to slog through the hell of flight school. But they still needed to go through dynamic situations: to gain experience of microgravity and acceleration, to recognize the symptoms of airsickness and hypoxia. So, the price the scientist-astronauts had to pay was regular hours of flying backseat in a Northrop T-38, the most advanced jet trainer.

Experienced astronauts were encouraged to take up the rookie scientists. And once you were up there, they could do whatever the hell they liked with you.

But she trusted Stone. She appreciated the fact that he was taking time out of his own Moonlab/Soyuz training for this piece of nursemaiding.

“How about that,” Stone said. “Forty-eight thousand feet. Higher than you’ve ever flown before, Natalie.”

So high she was already in the stratosphere, higher than the tallest mountain, so high she couldn’t breathe unaided. The edge of space, right? Welcome to your new home, spacegirl.

“Okay,” Stone said. “Let’s start gently. We’ll slow her down. Can you read the airspeed?”

“Sure.”

“Follow what I do.”

When the jet got to under two hundred miles an hour, it bucked and juddered, as if the air had become a medium of invisible lumps.

“She doesn’t like being reined in,” Stone said. “So—”

He opened up the throttle and the plane surged forward. Sunlight gleamed from the carapace around York, and the Earth curved away beneath her, brilliantly lit.

“Slow roll,” Stone said.

The Earth started to tilt, sideways. It wasn’t as if she was rolling at all; York felt only a slight increase in the acceleration pushing her into her seat.

The horizon arced around her, tipping up, and the bruised purple of the stratosphere slid beneath the belly of the plane.

Then the plane righted itself, sharply. The roll had taken maybe fifteen seconds.

“Snap roll,” Stone said.

This time the plane twisted over in a second, land and sky and sun rolling around, the light strobing across her lap and hands. Her stomach resisted the roll as if she were suddenly filled with mercury.

After one and a half turns the plane finished upside down. When she looked up, she could see the Gulf of Mexico, set out like a huge map painted across a misty ceiling. Gravity plucked at her — one negative G — and her shoulders strained against the seat harnesses, and her helmeted head bumped against the canopy. The blood pooled in her head, making her feel stuffy, as if she were developing a cold.

“Just like the tilt table, huh, Natalie,” Stone said drily.

He snapped the plane through a fast half roll, righting it; the plane settled onto the level, rocking slightly in the air.

For a second they were still. Stone’s precision and control were remarkable, York thought -

And then Stone threw the plane down on a dipping curve, diving down toward the remote ground; the noise of the jets increased.

“Parabolic curve,” Stone called over the jet noise.

So I should be weightless. She relaxed her arm, and watched her hand drift upward. “My God.” She felt the weightlessness in her gut; it was as if her organs were climbing upward, inside her chest cavity.

“You feeling queasy?”

“A little.” She reached down, checking that she could reach the bag in the pocket on her flight suit leg.

Stone made no signs of taking the plane out of its dive. “Ah, you’ll be fine. If it gets too bad, just watch the instrument panel; don’t look out of the window.”

“Okay, but—”

Her sentence fell apart as Stone threw the plane into a ferocious S-shaped curve. She was turned every which way, and the glowing landscape wheeled around the canopy.

And then he took the plane into a straight dive, accelerating at the Gulf of Mexico. The ocean shone like a steel plate, far in front of her face.

At twenty thousand feet Stone hauled the nose of the plane upward. The jets howled, and the Gs shoved her hard into her seat; her head was pushed into her shoulders, and her vision tunneled, walled by darkness.

The T-38 leapt back up to the sky, and the light reverted to its deep purple.

She tasted saliva at the back of her throat, sharp, like rusty iron. “Phil, I don’t feel so good.”

“If you have to barf, take off your oxygen mask.”

I would if I knew how.

“And turn the mix in your mask to a hundred percent 02,” he said. “Turn on your cold air blower.”

When she tried that, taking deep breaths of the oxygen, the pressure on her throat lessened.

“Anyhow,” he said, “you wouldn’t want to miss this next part.”

“Huh?”

At forty-five thousand feet, Stone lit the afterburner. Over her shoulder York could see white condensate blossoming behind the T-38. She watched the airspeed climb up toward six hundred miles an hour, higher, higher.

And through Mach 1. Jesus.

There was the mildest of vibrations, and then the ride got a lot smoother. The noise of the jets died to a whisper; the plane was traveling so fast, York realized, it was outrunning its own sound.

The cockpit was a little bubble of serenity, of cool, easy flying; meanwhile, she knew, sonic thunder was washing down on the ground below. A few feet ahead of her there was Stone inside his own canopy, the only living thing within miles of her, and around them the plane was a little isolated island of reality, gleaming paint and warm air and hard surfaces, up here in the mouth of the sky. She felt somehow closer to Stone, as if bonded to him.

“How you doing now?” Stone asked, his intercom voice loud in the stillness.

“Oh, good, Phil,” she said. “I’m good. This is—”

“I know.” He glanced over his shoulder at her, his eyes concealed by his sunglasses. “And in orbit, you’ll fly twenty times as fast, many times higher. Maybe now you’ll understand better why some of us get so hooked on this stuff.”

She grimaced. “Is my disapproval that obvious?”

“To me it is. I don’t blame you. But you’ve got to learn to understand the other guy’s point of view.”

Suddenly she felt defensive. “What do you care?”

He laughed, evidently not taking offense. “More than you think, maybe. Natalie, I’ve seen you work around the Office. I think you have potential. I think we need people like you in the program. But you have to learn to work in a team.”

He threw the plane suddenly into a new series of dives and barrel rolls.

York pulled out her bag and sat in misery, staring at her knees, while the world wheeled around her.

The T-38 approached the runway like a falling rock. The landing, when it came, was soft and quick.

The techs helped York out of the cockpit. Her queasiness had gone already, but she felt disoriented, as if she had grown smaller, lighter; she felt oppressed by the heavy sky above her, the hot, moisture-laden air.

Stone slapped her on the shoulder. “You did good,” he said.

“I nearly threw up.”

“But you didn’t. I told you you got potential, York.”

“Yeah. Maybe.”

Standing there on the mundane tarmac of Ellington, she looked up at the lidded clouds, remembered how it had been, in those few seconds, to be weightless. She let her hands drift up from her sides.

Stone was watching her, observing, evaluating.

Embarrassed, she tucked her helmet under her arm, nodded curtly to Stone, and headed for the personal gear room.

Thursday, November 27, 1980

The sky was empty, a harsh blue. Beyond the launch facilities, the wind whipped sand across the nude, flat steppe. Bert Seger was glad he was safely tucked away behind the glass of that observation room, three miles from the pad.

Behind him there was a murmur of conversation from the other guests — program managers, minor politicians, academicians, celebrities — who seemed more intent on the food and drink, which was lavish enough, and on pursuing whatever low-level political and diplomatic gains were still to be wrung out of this joint mission.

Seger had binoculars around his neck; he raised them and fixed them on the launch complex itself.

The N-1 booster stood tall on its pad. N for Nosityel — the Carrier. It sat on a porchlike structure at the lip of a flame pit. The mobile service structure had already been lowered; at three-quarters of an hour before liftoff the towers had been swung down through ninety degrees to the ground, leaving the booster exposed. The booster was a vertical line, out of place in the huge, horizontal landscape.

Seger saw propellants vent from the N-1’s multiple stages, and flags of vapor smeared across the still, layered air. The lower three stages made up a slim, truncated cone, flaring at the base, and the upper stages and the spacecraft itself were an upright cylinder stacked on top of that. The upper stages alone were about the size and shape of a Saturn IB. And somewhere inside that complex, Seger knew, the Soyuz T-3 spacecraft was buried; and somewhere within that were two cosmonauts, sitting out the final minutes of their countdown.

The whole thing looked like a piece of the Kremlin. Nobody could mistake an N-1 for an American design. But the N-1 was nevertheless the stepbrother of the Saturn, fathered by a group of postwar German exiles who’d built on the same Nazi technology taken to White Sands by von Braun and his people. Another child of the V-2.

“Here.” Fred Michaels stood at his elbow; he held out a glass of vodka. “You look like you could use this.”

Seger eyed the drink doubtfully. “Thanks, but I don’t encourage drinking on launch days, Fred.”

“Drink. That’s an order. Bert, it’s their launch, not ours.”

Seger forced himself to laugh and took the drink. “You’re right. I suppose I’m a control nut.”

“I know the feeling. But you have to learn to relax, when there really isn’t a damn thing you can do to change the course of events.”

Michaels was right, of course. The Soviets and Americans had exchanged mission control staff for this flight, with some American controllers being stationed at Kaliningrad. And there at Tyuratam the Americans had been let into the cosmodrome as far as this observation bunker. But that was the extent of it. There was no way Seger, or any of the American staff, could exert any influence over the way this launch developed.

“I’m just glad they aren’t two of our boys up there,” he said. “I wouldn’t let this damn thing fly. Fred, we wouldn’t even man-rate the N-1.”

Michaels, sleek, in control, dug his antique watch out of his vest pocket and checked the time. “So the Soviet space program is all hat and no horse, eh, Bert?”

Seger sipped his drink. It was sour vodka, but the alcohol seemed to have no effect on him. “It’s not so funny when you know as much as we do, now, about the Soviets’ preparations for launch. They do a lot of checkout in their assembly building. But then there’s very little checkout once the thing gets to the pad. Hell, there’s hardly even any electronic monitoring gear there, and only a limited computer interface. It lets them get to a launch point faster, but at the cost of a hell of a lot of reliability. No wonder they suffered so many failures with this booster.

“And did you know they’ve got a roll axis with pitch and yaw control only? That damn thing can’t control its own flight azimuth, and they have to swivel the whole support structure to align—”

“Give me that in English, Bert.”

“The Saturn V can steer itself into orbit, with its onboard computer. The N-1 can’t. Depending on where they want to head, they have to point the thing…”

This was the Soviets’ main cosmodrome, their nearest equivalent to Kennedy. It was lost in Soviet central Asia, a couple of hundred miles east of the Aral Sea;, where the Americans used the Atlantic as their firing range, the Soviets used the huge, empty heart of their country. The nearest town was Tyuratam, a small railway junction fifteen miles away, which had remained poor, shabby, and backward, despite the spectacular cosmonaut hotel planted in the middle of it.

The launch facility in use today was isolated even from the rest of the cosmodrome, situated maybe twenty miles farther to the east. They’re taking no chances. And I don’t blame them.

Seger felt cut off there, isolated, impotent. I’m nearer to the Chinese border than I am to Moscow, even.

Well, he’d done what he could to make the joint mission work. He’d pushed through a lot of steps to try to make sure his American charges and their Soviet counterparts could work together effectively, and safely. For instance he’d soon realized that the language barrier went far beyond just the Russian-English gap, and he’d assigned “Russian Interface Officers,” to translate NASA jargon into plain English, which could then be translated by the Russian interpreters. And then there was the daily schedule. His mission-planning guy had come along to Russia last year loaded down with documents. His Soviet counterpart had shown up with a pencil. There just wasn’t any paper in these offices, for instance, there was only one copy of the Soyuz mission plan for the joint project, handwritten on long rolls of paper and taped up on the walls of the Soviet Mission Control in Kaliningrad. Seger couldn’t figure if it was some sinister Soviet thing about controlling information, or just a dearth of photocopiers.

Now, showing on a TV monitor, there was a film of the two cosmonauts — Vladimir Viktorenko and Aleksandr Solovyov — taken earlier in the day. In their pressure suits, they were leaving their quarters and climbing aboard a bus. The bus looked like a tourist coach.

Seger felt a pull inside him, a protective urge. He offered up a brief prayer for the safety of the cosmonauts, and he touched his crucifix lapel pin.

Michaels observed that and raised an eyebrow.

“You do need to take it easy, Bert. I figure you’re just going through — what do they call it? — culture shock. Hell, Bert, these aren’t our boys. We’re just going to have to accept the Soviets know what they’re doing, in their own sweet way. After all the N-1 seems to be getting there as a launch system. They’ve fired off two unmanned circumlunar Soyuz shots and brought them back to Earth. And we’ve got Muldoon, Bleeker, and Stone up there in lunar orbit waiting for their bird; the Soviets really, really don’t want to screw up with this shot.”

“Maybe. I just wish they’d let some of our guys redesign their launch facilities a little bit.”

Michaels guffawed. “That would have gone down very well. Anyway, we need some success, too, Bert. As you know well enough.”

That was true, Seger realized.

The TV played a snatch of music; it was bland, slow stuff, and a PR announcer said in clipped English that this was being played simultaneously to the Soyuz, as a relaxant for the cosmonauts. Good grief, Seger thought. It would be like being stuck in an elevator.

And then, Seger saw from the timers, there was just a minute to go. He raised his binoculars.

The electrical and propellant umbilicals fell away from the walls of the ship, and the N-1 stood alone: huge, clumsy, fragile. My God. It looks like boilerplate.

Ignition came at four seconds.

Smoke and light flooded from the broad base of the N-1, across the steppe, and fire billowed into the trenches beneath the ship.

Seger watched as the glare built up. That broad first stage contained no less than thirty rocket engines, compared to five on a Saturn.

The first few moments of launch were critical. Unlike Saturn, the N-1 was not held back for a controlled release while its thrust built up. Rather, it simply lifted from the pad once its thrust exceeded its weight. And there was no provision for engine shutdown.

The huge stack lifted, impossibly, on its pillar of fire. It was like watching a cathedral raise itself off the ground.

Once the stack was more than its own length from the ground, the N-1 accelerated quickly. Following its flight path it tipped over, its base an explosion of light.

Then the sound reached the observation bunker, and the window before Seger rattled; the light blazed into the room, as if a small sun had arisen from the steppe. He felt the throb of the rockets deep in his gut.

Michaels leaned over to Seger. “It seems to be going okay.”

“Max-Q,” Seger shouted back over the noise. “It has to get through max-Q.” The point of maximum aerodynamic pressure was the point at which problems had occurred on previous flights. It was the early failure of the N-1 which had, essentially, lost the race to the Moon for the Soviets. For example the last N-1 trial before Apollo 11, in 1969, had suffered such violent vibration that an internal line had come loose. Liquid oxygen had sprayed through the body of the rocket. Engines exploded; turbopumps tore themselves apart… The explosion was equivalent to a tactical atomic bomb, so powerful it had been detected by American reconnaissance satellites.

The timers on the wall said sixty-six seconds.

“I think that’s it,” Seger breathed. “The engines will be throttling back up to full power.”

“So they’re through the worst of it?”

“Oh, no. No, with this bird it isn’t over until the fat lady sings, Fred.”

Michaels clapped him on the shoulder and went to talk to the other guests.

Seger stayed at the window long after the others had moved away, and the rattling of the launch had dispersed. He watched the dwindling light in the sky, and counted through the launch events in his head. Mission Elapsed Time [Day/Hr:Min:Sec] Plus 121/12:23:34

Gershon floated out of the docking adapter and into the Command Module’s forward access tunnel. He emerged headfirst at the top of Apollo’s conical cabin. He did a neat somersault in the air, translating from the “up” of the Mission Module to the “down” of the Apollo.

To Gershon, this inversion was one of the strangest aspects of the whole trip.

He closed the hatch behind him, dogging it loosely.

He settled into Stone’s seat, at the left-hand side of the cabin, and stuck his checklist to a Velcro square on the control panel in front of him. He had a little foil tube of orange juice in the top pocket of his Beta-cloth coveralls, and he dug that out, pulled out the straw, and took a sip. He adjusted his headset and made sure he had a working comms link to the rest of the Ares cluster — both York and Stone responded from intercoms in the Mission Module — and he fired off a call to Fred Haise, who was the capcom on the ground. He didn’t wait for his signal to crawl across the Solar System to bring him a reply before beginning work, however.

He began to power up Apollo’s systems.

During the transfer to Mars and back, all but essential systems were quiescent on Apollo. There were umbilical connections through the docking system which hooked up Apollo to the main solar panel arrays, so Apollo didn’t have to run on its own power. Every fifty days or so, Gershon was supposed to go through this routine of checking Apollo’s systems. He was making sure they would be working when it came time for the crew to ride Apollo home, back down through the air of Earth.

The chore took maybe 40 percent of his attention.

He dug a cassette tape out of his pocket and slid it into the deck forward of Stone’s flight station. The sound of violins — a light, delicate phrase — came drifting out into the cabin’s thin air. Gershon closed his eyes, and let the music wash over him. Mozart: Symphony Number 40. Exquisite. He felt himself relax, and even the cabin around him started to feel bigger.

Nam vets were supposed to live up to the image of spaced-out Jimi Hendrix fans. And in Houston, image was an important thing: when you had ten guys, with equally good qualifications, competing for one seat, intangibles like image could win you a flight, or lose you one.

So Gershon kept his Mozart to himself.

He was alone in the cabin as he worked through his checklist. Closing the hatch was strictly against regs, and he had to clear it with Stone every time he went in there. But Apollo was one of the few places in the whole cluster where you could get a little genuine privacy. Stone understood. You had to have a little space, a little time to yourself.

It was strange to think that there were only three human beings within tens of millions of miles of this point, and yet here they were cooped up together, for months on end, in this collection of tin cans. The only solid interior partitions in the Mission Module were those around the crapper.

And the truth was, the three of them didn’t really get along. York never said much to anyone, Stone was too much the USAF goddamn straight-arrow commander to get involved, and Gershon himself said far too much, all the time.

But it didn’t bother Gershon. Or his crewmates, he suspected. All the psychiatric team-building stuff was so much horseshit, to Gershon. They weren’t on this mission to make friends with each other; they were there to fly to Mars. And to achieve that they would overcome a little interpersonal friction.

As long as a man got a little time to himself, it was no big deal.

He worked steadily through the gauges and dials and computer screens in front of him, and compared them with the expected readings printed out on his teletyped checklist. His headset was voice-activated; he’d fixed it so that the Mozart stopped playing when he spoke.

Gershon liked working with Apollo hardware.

The basic design was antiquated, but it was fifteen years since its last major failure, on Apollo 13. Anyway, there wasn’t necessarily anything wrong with “antiquated.” To a pilot, it was the difference between a development vehicle and an operational bird; for “antiquated” read “proven.” In Gershon’s view it would have been a crying shame to have abandoned the Apollo line back in the early 1970s and try to build a newfangled spaceplane. Nice as the shuttle would have been to fly.

The enhancements Rockwell had applied over the years had turned the basic configuration into a flexible, robust space truck. Outwardly the ship stuck nose first to the front of the Mission Module Docking Adapter looked much the same as every other Apollo which had ever flown: it was made up of the classic configuration, the cylindrical Service Module, with its big propulsion system engine bell stuck on the back, and the squat cone of the Command Module on top. But this Apollo — called a “Block V” design by the Rockwell engineers who had built her — was put together very differently from the early models, the old Block IIs, which had flown to the Moon in the 1960s, and even from the later Block III and IV Earth-orbital ferries.

The first lunar missions had been only two weeks in length. But the Ares Apollo was going to have to survive eighteen months of soak in deep space. And the temperature extremes Apollo would endure, as Ares flew across the Solar System, were much greater than on any lunar flight. So most of Apollo’s main systems had been redesigned from the floor up.

The Service Module had more reaction control gas and less main engine propellant. The old Service Modules had vented excess water, produced by the onboard batteries; the Ares model stored its water in tanks, to avoid having frozen ice particles drifting around near the cluster. The whole configuration had more batteries, and there was more stowage area and locker space in the Command Module. There was an atmosphere interchange duct in the upper docking assembly, to cycle air from the Mission Module into the Command Module. And so on.

Reliability was essential on long-duration missions. Many of Apollo’s systems had redundant backups — straightforward copies, to be substituted in case of a failure — but the old triple-redundancy design paradigm they’d used to get to the Moon wouldn’t work, it had been found, on long-duration missions. Enough redundancy to achieve an acceptably low level of risk over such a span of time would have resulted in a spacecraft of immense weight and complexity.

So the designers had gotten smarter. In addition to simple redundancy, some functions could be performed by dissimilar components, or by components from different subsystems, to reduce the chance of a single failure mode knocking out many functions altogether — as had happened in Apollo 13. And the maintenance capabilities of the crew weren’t ignored, either. The whole ship was more modular and accessible than in its first design, so that components could be reached, and repaired or replaced comparatively easily. There were also isolation valves, switches, test equipment, and fault diagnosis tools. Some of the components contained their own BITEs, microelectronic built-in self-test units.

Hauling an Apollo all the way to Mars also provided some abort options. On return to Earth the Apollo, with the Mission Module, was due to be inserted into a highly elliptical orbit around the planet: two hundred by a hundred thousand miles, a swooping curve that would take the stack halfway out to the Moon and back, an orbit accessible to Ares at a relatively low expenditure of fuel. The Command Module would be able to take them down to the surface of Earth from such a trajectory; the reentry heating would be less than a return from the Moon. And if Apollo were to fail, the crew could survive in its high orbit until rescue came, in the form of another five-man stretched Apollo.

If they couldn’t make Earth orbit at all — for instance if the J-2S, the single engine of the final MS-IVB booster stage, were to fail — they could attempt a direct entry from the interplanetary coast. The heat shield on the Command Module’s underside had been thickened and toughened up, so that it would at least give them a fighting chance of surviving a direct reentry into Earth’s atmosphere. The velocity would only be around 15 percent faster than a lunar return.

And, if the Mission Module’s life support were to fail in-flight, it would even be possible for the crew to retreat to the Command Module and use it as a shelter. A lifeboat. Just then, with Gershon alone in it, the Command Module seemed pretty roomy; it wasn’t like that with three of them aboard, and things would be pretty tough if they had to spend weeks, or even months, cooped up in there.

But it was better than dying.

Every aspect of the mission had been designed with failures in mind, to give options at every point, to leave no “dead zones” where there was no abort capability. The designers had almost succeeded.

Gershon hummed along with Mozart as he worked.

This fifty-day checkup was a chore, of course, but everything on the fucking flight was a chore for Gershon. And it was the same on every long-duration spaceflight.

Gershon’s moment was going to come when he took that MEM down through the thin air of Mars itself. But he’d basically be working at peak effectiveness for, what? — forty, fifty minutes? — out of a flight that was going to last a year and a half. Not much of a payload ratio, Ralph. But that was okay. It was a bargain that Gershon was prepared to accept. Because there he was, on an odyssey to Mars.

The first time he’d come across the name “Ares” had been in a battered old book he’d picked up from a dime store in Mason. It was a collection of science-fiction stories, by someone called Stanley Weinbaum. The title story was “A Martian Odyssey,” and it featured a ship called Ares and four men exploring the surface of an exotic, mysterious Mars. Weinbaum’s magical words were alive in his memory, still, after all those years; it was as if he could feel the stiff, yellowing pages of that battered old paperback in his hands.

When he’d heard they were going to use Weinbaum’s name for the mission, Gershon had whooped.

He’d worked his way through the science-fiction canon as he grew older, and he’d ridden many other ships to Mars. Bradbury had been elusive, with his hinting descriptions of silver locusts — pulsing with fire, swarming with men — falling to the surface of a beautiful, inhabited planet. Clarke’s Ares, on the other hand, had been described in great detail. It was a dumbbell shape of two huge spheres, separated by a hundred yards of tubeway. The rear contained atomic motors — serviced by AEC robots — and the leading sphere was living quarters, with cabins and a huge dining room and an observation gallery…

Sitting in the canvas frame couch, Gershon sucked some more juice out of his tube and ran his hand over the surface of the grimy instrument panel before him. He grinned. Dining rooms, huh.

Gershon thought of Apollo technology the way, he supposed, other guys might think of classic cars. Like a Corvette, maybe. Apollo was a beautiful machine, and it worked, and it had achieved great things. And even after all those years it was still better than anything the Russians could put up…

And it seemed entirely appropriate to him that the first mission to Mars — for real — should be conducted not in some lost von Braun-type dream of the 1950s, but in a handful of strung-together Apollo-application cans.

Still, he knew that this voyage was a fulfillment of more dreams than just his own. As Ares followed its long, spiraling trajectory to Mars, he felt that it wasn’t alone: it was accompanied by a fleet of ghostly ships, huge silver forms, from the pages of Clarke and Heinlein and Asimov and Bradbury and Burroughs…

The Mozart floated around the cabin, and Gershon worked patiently through his checklist.