“I’ll remember that.”

Michaels stared into his drink. “You know, sometimes I think we’ve lost something along the way in all this. I mean, the people furthest from the decision making have been the guys whose idea it was in the first place — the engineers of Langley and Goddard and Marshall — people who have given their whole lives to dreams of spaceflight. People like Gregory Dana. We take their studies and reports and use them as ammunition for our games of politics. But all that visionary stuff about exploration and destiny, all their efforts to stretch our hearts and minds — it’s gotten lost somewhere.”

Josephson sipped his drink. “But could it be any other way, Fred? It was the same with Apollo. Once spaceflight becomes the religion of the empire, it becomes immensely powerful; but it can’t stir us to dream in the same old way. And all of us involved — NASA, the White House, the DoD — just figure out ways in which the space program can serve our own interests. It’s the way things are.”

“Maybe. And I know those guys at Langley are going to hate this one-shot business. Who the hell knows when we’ll be back again? I remember LBJ saying to me once that Americans are a lot better at breaking new ground than caring for the ground already broken. He was sure right. Anyway, the hell with it. We can forget all the political crap now, Tim, and start dreaming about Mars.” He studied Josephson again. “Tell you what I’ve been thinking,” he said. “Now that we have this nice tight goal, our new Apollo, this one-shot trip to Mars, we’re going to need a new name. Something to sum the whole thing up.”

“I guess you’re right,” Josephson said. “In fact, maybe we should have done that before issuing the press briefings.”

“Well, you’re in the hot seat now,” Michaels said. “What are you going to choose, Tim?”

Josephson pulled his lip. “Hmm. How did the name ‘Apollo’ come about? That was before my time—”

Michaels said, “It was picked out by Abe Silverstein in 1960. Now Abe was the head of the Office of Manned Spaceflight at the time — or rather, its predecessor. Silverstein kind of dabbled in the classical myths. He’d picked the name ‘Mercury’ a year earlier, because he liked the idea of a messenger in the sky. And then von Braun’s people called their new launch vehicle ‘Saturn,’ and so another classical god seemed a natural choice to Silverstein.”

“Maybe so,” Josephson said with half smile, “but that’s rather muddled. Isn’t it true that von Braun was actually naming his rockets after planets? There was the ‘Jupiter,’ and then the ‘Saturn’—”

“Give me a break,” Michaels said good-humoredly. “Silverstein was a research engineer; what did he know? Anyhow, Silverstein remembered from his schooldays the story of the god who rode the chariot of the sun drawn by four winged horses: Apollo, the son of Zeus. So Silverstein did a bit of checking to make sure Apollo hadn’t done anything that would be too inappropriate for the American public, such as screwing his mother, and found he hadn’t — and so Apollo it was.”

Josephson studied his drink and thought about it. “Well, maybe we ought to follow the same tradition. I know a little mythology too. Apollo had a half brother. Another great Olympian god. He had his own mythology; it was only later that he was identified with the Romans’ war-god… Only battle and bloodshed gave him any pleasure; his twin children Phobos and Deimos — Panic and Fear — accompanied him onto the battlefield…”

Michaels grunted. “Panic and Fear. Sounds like the kind of guy who’d prosper up on the Hill.”

Josephson smiled. No other name was possible.

And the press would love it.

“Sixty minutes to pericenter,” Stone said.

All three members of the crew were in the Mission Module’s science platform. At the heart of this little octagonal chamber, lined with its banks of switches and displays, they were strapped into harnesses and had their feet hooked into stirrups.

Above York’s head there was a small science viewport. A brilliant, shifting white light beat down over her face, flooding the fluorescents.

She could see the upper half of a fat, pale, gibbous disc.

My God. That’s Venus.

To her naked eye, the dayside of the planet was glaring white — much brighter than Earth, from a similar distance — and it washed out the stars. Of the thin slice of nightside she could see nothing at all.

The trajectory of Ares had taken it arcing inside the orbit of Venus. Ares was barreling out of the sun toward Venus, tumbling along a hyperbola into Venus’s gravity well. Ares was already moving toward the planet at more than five miles a second, and, as York watched, that gibbous disc was narrowing, and the reflected sunlight cast shifting shadows across her lap.

There was a Hasselblad Velcroed to the work surface near her; she ripped it loose, jammed her face up against the port, and began taking pictures.

Venus was about the size of the Earth, but this was nothing like her experience of Earth orbit. There was no detail: the surface of Venus was permanently hidden, baked under its huge layers of carbon-dioxide cloud. From this close, the cloud tops looked utterly smooth, featureless, as if the planet was a huge pearl: perfect, entire…

Although, when she looked more closely, she thought she could see a little structure in the clouds, right at the limb: a fine shell, surrounding the main cloud decks, outlined against the darkness of the sky.

She snapped the camera furiously.

“You have a problem, Natalie?” Stone asked drily.

“I think I see the haze layer,” she said. A shell of sulfuric acid clouds, swathing Venus, outlined against the darkness of the sky.

“Yeah. And that picture’s not on the schedule,” Stone said.

Christ. “Okay, damn it.” She slammed the Hasselblad back on its surface. “I just saw something no other human being had even seen before, that’s all. I thought it was worth investing in a snapshot.”

“If we don’t get through this encounter on the right trajectory,” Stone murmured, his eyes on the flickering CRT displays before him, “you won’t be going home to get that roll of film developed. Let’s concentrate, guys.”

Yeah, yeah. We’re in operational mode here. Stick to the goddamn mission plan.

York returned her attention to her displays.

Gershon was grinning over his shoulder at her.

The plan was for Ares to skim around behind the dark side of the planet. The slingshot would twist the ship’s trajectory through thirty degrees, and Ares would be hugely accelerated. As Ares had crawled, unpowered, around the sun, it had drawn only a little way ahead of Earth; so Ares was passing between Venus and Earth. The cluster would pass into the shadow of Venus, but it would never be out of Earth’s line of sight.

The members of the crew had their assignments for the Venus encounter phase: Stone was monitoring the cluster’s trajectory, Gershon was to follow the atmospheric-entry subprobe Ares had released, and York was operating the Mission Module’s sensor pallet.

In one of the video monitors she had an image of the cloud tops in ultraviolet light. It showed a wealth of blue-gray detail invisible to the naked eye: cloud structures that swept around the planet, complex bows and cells that distorted and stretched out along the planet’s lines of latitude. The whole thing, in its computer-generated false colors, looked almost Earthlike.

The sensor pallet on its rearview-mirror extensor arm was a collection of fat, awkward-looking tubes and antennae and lenses, all wrapped in foil. There was a TV camera to study the clouds, an airglow experiment to look for ultraviolet echoes of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen, an infrared radiometer studying cloud temperatures, a magnetometer, charged-particle telescopes. Four horn-shaped radar antennae would be able to penetrate the cloud layer and map the strip of Venus over which Ares passed. The sensors were already working, peering forward from the rearview mirror, the pallet which angled out from the Mission Module’s pressure hull.