And besides, Gershon had been happy to bury himself in the mission, to get away from the attention his assignment to the Mars crew had brought him. The first black man in space: the first brother on Mars. He was learning to deal with it, but it was relentless, distracting. And nothing to do with him.

As far as he was concerned he was Ralph Gershon, complete and entire, and not a symbol of anyone else’s agenda.

However, the mission had been snake-bit: nothing but problems from the beginning.

It started even before the launch, in fact. Gershon had seen JK Lee’s people at Columbia tearing their hair out as they tried to coax Spacecraft 009 through its final prelaunch checkout in the Vehicle Assembly Building at the Cape. There had been times when Gershon had become convinced that it wouldn’t come together at all.

Then, once they had reached orbit and opened up the docking tunnel between Apollo and MEM, Gershon found himself floating in a snowstorm of white fiberglass. It had blown out of an insulation blanket in the tunnel wall. Gershon and Bleeker had spent their first couple of hours in the MEM just vacuuming all that crap out of the air, and they had finished up with white stuff clinging to their hair, their eyelashes, their mouths, until they’d looked like nothing so much as a pair of plucked chickens.

After that Bleeker and Gershon had crawled all over the MEM, putting the subsystems through comprehensive tests. And every damn one of those tests had given them problems which had needed diagnosis and repeated testing.

There had been that odd, sour smell coming from the environment control system in the surface shelter, for instance, which they had finally traced to a piece of scuffed insulation slowly scorching behind a panel. The electrical power system had shown some severe faults, with whole panels of instruments just cutting out. Meanwhile the inertial guidance system was a pig, wallowing inside its big metal sphere, constantly losing its lock. And the MEM’s big antennae complex had gotten stuck, and for a while it couldn’t talk to the Apollo or the ground…

Relationships between the crew and the ground had gotten strained in all of this. As they wrestled with the craft, Bleeker, as commander, had become concerned that Houston was reluctant to make any compromises in the scientific and PR elements of the flight plan — which, as far as Bleeker and Gershon were concerned, came a long way down the list in comparison to the engineering objectives of the mission. So Bleeker, showing an unexpected assertiveness, got into battles with the flight controllers. He canceled TV broadcasts, and he blue-penciled whole sections out of the flight plan.

At one point the capcom told the crew that the controllers were plotting to bring the Command Module down in a typhoon, and Gershon suspected it was only half a joke.

Finally Gershon had gotten so sick of the problems that he’d taken a little plastic juice-dispensing lemon from the food lockers, and hung it up between the MEM’s triangular windows, in full view of the onboard TV, to show what the crew thought of their new ship.

All Gershon could hear was the rattling thump-thump of the ascent engine’s ball valves opening and closing. The noise was oddly comforting, giving him a feeling of security, that the mission was unfolding as it should.

The Earth slid away from Gershon, as the ascent stage climbed smoothly up toward its rendezvous with New Jersey, the waiting Apollo; it was so smooth it was a ride in a glass-walled elevator.

There wasn’t much for Gershon to do. Because the ascent-stage engine had no backup — it had to work — it had been made as simple as possible, with just two moving parts: ball valves, to release propellant and oxidant into the combustion chamber. The engine, fueled with oxygen and methane, had no throttle or choke; all you could do was throw the master arm and turn the engine on, and it would just burn steadily for ten minutes or so, just as it was designed, to lift its crew off Mars and back to a parking orbit.

Gershon leaned forward, resting against his restraints. Through his window he could see the descent stage falling away; it was a truncated cone, with a great gouge dug out of its center. Cables and hoses, cut by the guillotines, dangled. Foil insulation had been blown off the stage by the ascent engine’s blast, and Gershon could see sheets of the stuff floating away, spreading outward in rings.

JK Lee was standing in the Viewing Room in back of the MOCR, chain-smoking. Whenever TV pictures had come down from the orbiting MEM over the last couple of days, you could clearly see the little plastic lemon, floating about under the alignment telescope. He could decode that symbol: it was a little message from the crew, from Ralph probably, meant for him.

But it didn’t faze him, or dilute his elation. No, sir! Sure the crew members were having problems, but they had to expect that; working out the problems was what this proving flight was for, after all. He was a little disappointed Ralph Gershon didn’t understand that, in fact. The important thing for Lee was that he was watching his ship, up there in orbit, glitches or not — his ship, delivered on time and against all the odds.

Lee felt a huge glow of triumph. It was as if, to achieve this day, he’d had to fight everybody — NASA management, the suppliers, the astronauts, half of Columbia, even his own treacherous body. But he’d made it, and the monument to his achievement was up there in orbit, larger than life in the big screens at the front of the MOCR, and on TV sets all around the world. What a victory! Lee had the feeling that nothing in his career from then on would mean as much to him as this triumph, right here, right now. Not even the moment when another of his babies, hatched from the Clean Room at Newport, set down its pads on Mars itself.

He could care less about Ralph’s fucking lemon.

He laughed out loud, uncaring who stared at him, and hauled out another cigarette.

Bleeker said, “Twenty-six seconds. We’re going to pitch over a little. Very smooth, very quiet ride.”

Gershon prepared for the MEM to pitch over. Thinking that it had reached five thousand feet above the surface of Mars, the MEM should tip up, programmed to head for a Mars-orbital rendezvous with the rest of the Ares cluster.

The horizon tilted to his right.

Gershon, already feeling heavy, was thrown against his restraints.

The pitch had been right on cue. But the tipping had felt sharper, more of a rattle, than he’d expected.

And the pitch continued; beyond his window, the cloudscape of Earth was rolling upward, turning from a floor to a wall.

Bleeker said, “What the fuck?”

“Hot mike, Adam,” Ted Curval called up.

They don’t know what’s going on, Gershon realized.

The shining landscape passed over his head, and shadows shifted across the banks of circuit breakers. Vapor, squirting from the reaction control system clusters, sparkled past the window.

But the automatics couldn’t regain control. The spinning sped up.

“Jesus,” Bleeker said wryly. “It’s a real whifferdill. I need to cage my eyeballs.”

An orbital tailspin: Bleeker was right, Gershon realized.

Soon the MEM was twisting through a full turn every second, and Earth flashed past the windows. Sunlight strobed across the cabin, dazzling, disorienting.

Gershon’s vision started to blur as he searched the instrument panel. Time to earn your flight pay, boy.

He started throwing switches, methodically trying to isolate the problem. Maybe an attitude thruster was stuck on; he looked at that first. Whatever it was, he had to get the spin killed quickly. The guidance systems were in danger of locking up altogether; he needed to get manual control before that happened.

He grasped his hand controller and started squirting the RCS clusters, using the Earth as a reference, trying to push against the tumble of the ascent stage and stabilize Iowa.