“Jesus,” Gershon said. He had to shout over the rattling of the walls and equipment. “Eight minutes of this.”

“Can it,” Stone snapped. “Two point five Gs. We’re doing fine. Right down Route One. Three point six. Hang on, guys.”

She felt unable to breathe. It was as if the pressure suit was tightening around her, constricting her. It was a bizarre, terrifying, claustrophobic experience.

A fringe of bubbly darkness gathered at the edge of her vision.

They were utterly alone, inside a tiny artifact arcing above the surface of an empty planet, reliant on the smooth working of their machines to survive.

“Four point three Gs,” Stone called. She could hear the rattle of the thrust in his voice. “That’s it. That’s the peak. Coming up on pericenter.”

Stone and Gershon began to run through a readout of the status of the maneuver so far.

“Burn time four four five.” Four minutes, forty-five seconds. Halfway through. “Ten values on the angles: BGX minus point one, BGY minus point one, BGZ plus point one…” Velocity errors on the burn were amounting to only a foot per second, along each of the three axes of space. “No trim. Minus six point eight delta-vee-cee. Fuel thirty-eight point eight. Lox thirty-nine zip, plus fifty on balance. We ran an increase on the PUGS. Projected for a two nineteen point nine times twelve six eleven point three…”

York translated the numbers in her head. The burn was working. The cluster was heading for an elliptical orbit, two hundred by twelve thousand miles: almost perfect.

“Hey, Natalie.” It was Gershon.

“What?”

“Look up.”

With an effort, she tilted back her head. The helmet restricted her, and under the acceleration her skull felt as if it had been replaced by a ball of concrete, tearing at her neck muscles.

Through her small window she saw the battered southern plain of Mars.

And the bulging landscape above her was lit up, right at the center, by a soft, pink glow; it was like a highlight on a huge, ocher bowling ball.

It was the glow of the burn, the light of the MS-II.

For the first time in the planet’s four-billion-year history, artificial light had come to the Martian night.

The questions came drifting out of a sea of lights so intense that they seemed to bake York’s face dry.

“How does it feel to be on the crew?” “What about the guys you beat out?” “Who will be first on the surface?” “What’s it like in space?…”

The three of them — chaperoned by Joe Muldoon and Rick Llewellyn, head of NASA’s Public Affairs Office — sat on a rickety podium, with the NASA logo emblazoned behind them, and a Revell model of a Columbia MEM on the table before them. The briefing room in the Public Affairs Office was packed, and in front of their table there was what the Old Heads called a goat fuck, an unseemly scramble of microphones and camera lenses, pushed into the faces of the astronauts.

Rarely in York’s life had people been interested enough to ask her to explain herself, her background, her motives, her hopes and fears. And now everything about her was significant: everything that had happened in her life, every aspect of her personality.

It was probably going to last forever. And she found she hated it.

She envied Phil Stone, with his neat, crew-cut good looks and his hint of a Midwestern twang — the stereotypical astronaut hero — for the grace with which he fielded the dumbest, most repetitive questions. And the press had already taken Ralph Gershon to their hearts for his infectious grins — the glamorous, hell-raising bachelor spaceman — and for his wisecracking, and the hint of danger, of ambiguity about him. Even if he did make Rick Llewellyn visibly nervous every time he opened his mouth. And even if there was, as far as York was concerned, an undertow of racism about the patronizing affection with which Gershon was treated.

And that left York: in her own view, the least equipped to handle the media pressure, but the one on whom most interest was focused. And all for the wrong reasons.

It had started the day after her place in the crew was announced. All the outlets used the same ancient stock NASA photo of her, holding up an outdated biconic MEM model. “This quiet, intent and dedicated scientist…” “Redhead Natalie York is, at 37, unmarried and without children…” “We asked beautician Marcia Forbes what advice she would give America’s premier spacewoman. Well, to begin, with those eyebrows, you know…” “This mop-haired 35-year-old native of L.A….” “…A crop-haired brunette of medium height, Natalie York is said to be disconcerted by the prospect of publicity…” “Her dark, close-cropped hair and her Latin good looks make Natalie a woman of glamour and mystery, but a natural for the role of America’s first woman on Mars…”

Hair, eyebrows, and teeth. It drove her crazy.

Already they’d tracked down her mother, who was loving the attention, and Mike Conlig and his new family, who weren’t.

It would help if NASA had given her any preparation for handling the feeding frenzy. Even basic communications training. Instead, the only guideline was: Don’t embarrass the Agency.

Some of the questions were tougher, more pointed, than others.

“Doesn’t the case of Adam Bleeker indicate that we’re not yet ready to send humans on these immense long-duration missions? That we don’t yet know enough about the effects of microgravity on the body? That, in fact, the Ares mission is an irresponsible jaunt?”

“You’re surely right we don’t know enough,” Muldoon said smoothly. “But the only way we’re going to find out is by getting out there and working in microgravity and studying the effects. Sure there are dangers, but we accept them as part of the job. It’s a price of being first. You ought to know that Adam was broken up to be taken off the flight, medical risks or not; and I know everyone in the Astronaut Office would volunteer to take his place…”

“Ralph, you want to talk about your Cambodia runs?”

“Ah, that’s all in the public record now, and I have nothing more to add. It’s all a long time ago.”

“But how do you feel about having to distort records and maintain a cover-up that lasted for years before—”

“You can read about it in my memoirs, Will.”

Laughter.

“What about Apollo-N?”

Muldoon leaned into his microphone. “Ah, what about it, sir?”

“I took the JSC visitors’ tour earlier on. Big heroic machines. Lots of plaques about Apollo 11. Mission Control as a national monument, sure. But Apollo-N might never have happened, still less the Apollo 1 fire, for all the evidence I saw at JSC. What is it with you people? How can you pretend that everything’s upbeat, that nothing bad ever happens?”

“We don’t pretend that at all,” Muldoon said. “I think the crash is uppermost in our minds, every day.”

“That’s what you call it? The crash? The damn thing didn’t crash; it exploded in orbit.”

“We have to learn from what went wrong, move forward, make sure that the losses we suffered aren’t wasted. We can’t afford to brood, or be deterred from our intentions.”

“Look, I’m from out of town. All around JSC I saw Apollo-N car lots and shopping plazas. There’s even an Apollo-N memorial park, for God’s sake. Don’t you think a public reaction like that, spontaneous and visible, deserves something more from you people than ‘learning from what went wrong’?…”

Hell, yes, York thought. Some around JSC thought the malls and so forth were tacky, somehow undignified. York didn’t; as the reporter was implying, such things were symbols erected by the people out there as they responded to the human tragedy. Sure, it was car lots and malls: what the hell else were they supposed to do?

But she’d also gotten to know the pilots’ viewpoint well enough to understand it. They’d accepted the deaths, put Apollo-N behind them, and moved on. Ben would have done just the same. It was difficult for an outsider to accept, but that was the culture.