“If you like. You don’t have to. I’m fine, Vladimir.”

“Of course you are.”

Viktorenko hung up, swept up six of the miniatures from the minibar, and ran out of the room.

In her apartment York was sitting on the couch, alone, with the TV running in the background. She wore a sports shirt and slacks. On the living-room walls she had pinned up her old Mariner pictures, and there was work scattered over the small desk, half-finished: a new paper, evidently, on the surface properties of some obscure region of the planet Mars.

Viktorenko bustled in. “I bring you a present.” He dug the six miniatures out of his pocket, and set them up in a row along the top of the TV set.

“What’s that for?”

“For when you get the right call. Or, perhaps, in case you get the wrong one.”

He sat beside her, then, and held her hand, and they watched the TV together, without speaking. At first her hand was stiff in his, but after a couple of minutes she clung to him, and he could feel the cold dampness of her palm.

The phone rang, startling Viktorenko.

York let it ring a couple of times. Then she unwound her hand from Viktorenko’s and walked to the phone. Her steps were slow and deliberate, as if she were wearing some invisible pressure suit.

“York.”

He heard her exhale, softly.

“Oh, hi, Mom. No. It’s not true. Well, maybe. I’ve only seen the TV news, like you. NASA hasn’t called me. Until then I… No, I don’t think I should call them. They know where I am. I’ll just wait here until — yes, maybe you should get off the line, Mom. I’ll call as soon as I know. Bye. Yes, me, too. Bye.”

She hung up. She turned to Viktorenko and shrugged.

On the TV a rerun of some awful dated sitcom was showing; Viktorenko could barely follow the quick-fire accents, and he found the visual business of the show cheap and unfunny.

York sat silently, trembling a little. He doubted that she could even see the TV images.

The phone rang. York got up again.

“York.

“Yes, sir.”

She fell silent, then, for long seconds.

“Yes, sir. Thank you. I’ll do the best I can. Sure. Good-bye.”

She hung up the phone. Viktorenko did not dare to speak.

York walked to the TV, where the canned laughter was still rattling from the inane sitcom. She picked up one of Viktorenko’s miniatures, twisted it open, threw the cap across the room, and downed the draught in one gulp.

Viktorenko couldn’t contain himself. He got off the sofa and crossed the room in one great stride; he got hold of York by the elbows. “Well? Well, Marushka?”

She looked up at him, her eyes small and vulnerable under those peculiar big eyebrows. “It’s true,” she said. “Vlad, it’s true. That was Joe Muldoon.”

Viktorenko wanted to dance, shout, pick her up and whirl her around!… But she just stood there, looking up at him, fiddling with the empty bottle; he told himself to be calm, and wait on her needs.

She picked up the phone, and called her mother. Then she suggested that they should wait a while, in case there were any more calls.

So, bizarrely, Viktorenko found himself back on the sofa, holding York’s trembling hand, and watching the stupid sitcom run its meaningless course.

After a time, York said: “I can’t stand this, Vladimir.”

“What?”

She made a small gesture; he guessed she was holding herself in, tight. “The uncertainty. The roller-coaster ride. The lack of control I have over my own life. My God, Vlad, after the space soak mission was canned I thought I was farther from Mars than ever. And now — out of nowhere — this.”

He squeezed her hand. “You were never in the military, Marushka. This is the military way to do things. In the military, you have no choices, no control. Perhaps your civilian NASA has more of a military streak than many care to admit.”

The phone rang. It was Adam Bleeker, whose seat York had taken. York spoke to him briefly, quietly.

“How is he?”

She shrugged.

They sat a little longer, but there were no more calls. No doubt those idiots in the Astronaut Office were closing ranks, punishing York — and Gershon, probably — for ousting their buddies, their preferred candidates.

Eventually Viktorenko decided enough was enough. “No more of this! We would handle matters so much better in Russia. Come. We will go out. We will eat, we will go to a barbecue pit or a Pizza Hut or a Mexican drive-in, or whatever you like. My treat! The treat of the Soviet Union, Marushka!”

At first she demurred, but he insisted.

As they left the apartment, a fat young man with a tape recorder came running up the hall; a spotlight glared over his shoulder.

“Ms. York! KNWS-TV News. How does it feel to be the first woman on Mars?”

Ocher light, oddly mottled, shone down through the little Command Module window beside her: Mars, grown so huge it no longer fitted into the window; Mars, sliding like oil past the glass.

“Three minutes to loss of signal,” capcom John Young called up.

“Roger,” Stone replied.

The crew sat side by side in Apollo. York’s pressure suit felt hot, bulky, the angular acceleration couch uncomfortably restricting after so long in the Mission Module’s shirtsleeved environment.

“Ares, Houston, we read you as go for Mars Orbit Insertion. Everything is go for MOI. Two minutes to loss of signal. Be assured you’re riding the best bird we can find.”

“Thank you, John. We appreciate that.”

Sure. But Young’s assurances weren’t all that comforting, York thought.

Just now, Ares was free-falling past Mars. Even if the big MS-II engines failed altogether, they still had enough speed to escape from Mars’s gravity well and emerge on a free return trajectory back to Earth.

But if Stone, and Mission Control, decided to commit to MOI, the Mars Orbit Insertion burn, then their final abort option would be gone. They would be committed to Mars orbit.

MOI really was the moment of truth, the moment when Ares finally cut the long, fragile ties of gravity and celestial mechanics that could draw it home to Earth again.

But Ares was about to fall around the back of Mars, into its shadow, and out of radio line of sight of Earth; and it was at that point, with Stone able to rely on nothing but the instruments in Ares, that the burn would be initiated. The crew would be on their own — isolated by time lag and the rocky bulk of Mars — when it most mattered.

According to the ground’s best predictions, they were going to hit the MOI window within plus or minus ten miles of the required height above Mars.

However, who the hell believed predictions?

The MS-II was going to impose a tough acceleration. So all the stack’s remaining modules — the MS-II and MS-IVB booster stages, then the MEM, the Mission Module, and Apollo — were still strung out along the center line of the stack, along the line of the burn. Then, after the burn was completed, and they were safely in Mars orbit — if they got there — the crew would have to go through a complex repositioning exercise to prepare for the landing. It was one hell of a way to run a mission, York thought: to reassemble your spacecraft in Mars orbit…

“One minute to loss of signal,” said Stone.

“One minute,” John Young said, almost simultaneously. He must be timing his transmissions so they arrived to match their local events. “Ares, this is Houston. All your systems are looking good going around the corner.”

“Copy that, John.”

York could hear the tension in Stone’s voice. Gershon sat in the center couch, uncharacteristically silent, pensive.

The ocher light shifted. She looked up.

Ares was dipping low across Mars.