Although he looked familiar, at first she didn’t place him. She shied away, studying his face. It wasn’t impossible for press people to have gotten into even as private an event as this; she really, really didn’t want to have to say or do anything that would be quoted.

His smile faded. “You don’t recognize me, do you? My God, Natalie. Well, I guess it’s the new uniform—”

It was Mike Conlig.

“Mike. Jesus. What the hell happened to you?”

He grinned, and self-consciously ran a hand over his clean-shaven chin. “You don’t like it?”

“It’s a hell of a change, Mike.”

“Well, needs must.”

“You still with Oakland?” Conlig had left NASA after the Apollo-N debacle and moved to Oakland Gyroscope.

“Sure.” He looked at her, calculating, as if wondering how she would receive his news. “I’m doing fine there. In fact we’re making parts for the Saturn VB. Maybe you should come visit us someday.”

“Sure,” she said vaguely.

“I’ve moved away from the engineering now. Management.” He laughed, self-deprecating. “There’s talk of making me a veep of technology. Can you believe that? And you — how are you?”

Me? Still playing at being a spacewoman. “Oh, fine,” she said awkwardly. “If you read the press, you probably know more about me than I do.”

“Yeah. I was pleased for you, Natalie. Pleased you achieved what you wanted…” He sounded embarrassed, and he backed off quickly into generalities. “And it’s good the way interest has picked up in the mission, since your appointments were announced. I follow the news, of course. There has been a lot of hostility over the years, to the Mars initiative, hasn’t there? But now that seems to be reversing. It’s like Apollo 11 all over again…”

That seemed to be true, she reflected; a number of people had said it to her. Somehow the general, persistent opposition to manned spaceflight had dissipated, if briefly, as people focused on the three of them, the humans who would be making the extraordinary journey. When spaceflight came down from the realms of rocketry and scientific objectives, and turned into something human, people responded.

But York knew that Muldoon and Josephson and others were already worrying about what would come after Ares, how quickly this mood would dissipate.

“I think it’s because of you, Natalie,” Conlig said hesitantly.

“Me? How so?”

“Because you’re a woman, probably. And because you’re a recognizable human being, definitely. Not one of those damn inarticulate robots they sent to the Moon. Underneath, I figure, people always did want the space program to do well. To go places. It’s a basic human thing. And hell, we can afford it, when Reagan is talking about spending a trillion bucks on defense. But the cold, inhuman face NASA always puts up turns everybody off. But now, people want you to succeed because you are one of us. You know what I mean?” Conlig was studying her, his expression complex.

“Damn it, Mike. That’s probably the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

It was the first time she’d seen him since their final fight, after the NERVA thing. It was brave of him to come, she supposed. If her own feelings about Ben were so complex, so guilt-laden, God alone knew what Mike must be feeling.

But he didn’t seem perturbed. Maybe he’d found some way to rationalize what had happened, his own part in the disaster. If so, she thought, she envied him.

“You should come over,” he said again. “You ought to meet Bobbie.”

“Your wife, right?”

He did a double take. “You haven’t met her.” He turned and pointed vaguely to a slim, blond woman, over by the line of cars. She was holding a child, and she waved back.

“You’ve got a kid.”

“Two.” Conlig grinned, unselfconsciously. “The baby’s not here; he’s with his grandmother. You didn’t know about the kids either. Hell, Natalie. And to think—”

To think they might have been mine. She turned away from the thought, and Conlig, mercifully, shut up.

She managed to get away fairly easily. Mike had become gracious.

He extracted from her another couple of promises to come visit, to tour his gyroscope plant. They parted with a handshake.

York hurried to her car, confused.

Conlig had been much more in command of himself than she remembered. All that obsessiveness, the single-mindedness, had dissipated. Maybe it had served its purpose in propelling him to where he needed to get, and had been discarded, like a spent booster stage.

Conlig looked like what he’d become, she thought: a prosperous, aspiring forty-year-old.

Mike had started a family. Set down roots. He’d put aside the obsessive, technology-oriented goals of his youth. He’d joined the human race. He’d grown up. He’d become the kind of person she always seemed to look at from the outside, but could never imagine becoming herself.

So where the hell does that leave me?

The existence of the Mars mission had distorted the whole history of the space program, she’d come to see. NASA existed for one purpose only, to land the three of them on the surface of Mars and bring them home again. Nothing else mattered — not even whatever the hell came afterward.

And in the same way, Mars had warped her own life, as if she was a scale model of the greater world.

Hell, maybe I could have been happy, and a lot better off, as a rock hound for some oil company somewhere. But the red glare of Mars had dazzled her, and to reach it she’d sacrificed everything: her career, her science, maybe, probably, her chance of having a family, even her future after the mission.

Mike Conlig was like an image of the adult she might have become. If not for goddamn Mars.

As she got into her car, alone, a black depression settled on her.

Building 3 was the JSC cafeteria. York, Mars astronaut or not, still queued for lunch with the rest. She took a seat at a small table by the window. The food was sticky government issue — smothered steak with rice — washed down with soda.

The cafeteria was one of the older of JSC’s buildings, a big gloomy room with small windows and ceiling tiles, done in an early-1960s style that reminded her, claustrophobically, of her high school.

Adam Bleeker sat down opposite her. “You mind?”

She forced a smile. She hadn’t seen him approach. Bleeker’s face was calm, as empty of expression as ever. Maybe he really is like that inside. “No. I mean, hell, no, of course not, Adam. Please.”

He nodded and sat down, with his tray. He had a vegetable lasagna, today’s healthy option; he picked up bits of pasta in his fork and brought them to his mouth. The daylight made his eyes an intense blue, impenetrable.

York tried to think of something to say.

“You busy?” she asked.

He grimaced around a mouthful of pasta. “What else? Busier than when I was on the flight, if you can believe that. They’ve got me in the sims more often than I can count.”

“I guess it shows how much—”

“ — you need me. I know, Natalie.”

“Look, Adam, I know how you must feel. Your training goes back to the Moon landings, for God’s sake. And to be overtaken by a rookie like me—”

“I’ve been studying space medicine,” he said unexpectedly. “In my spare time.”

She was startled by the non sequitur. Maybe it showed something about Adam’s state of mind. “Really? Why?”

He eyed her. “Wouldn’t you? I never took it seriously before. You know what I’ve found out? Legally, as a spaceflight crew, you’re a federal agency radiation worker. How about that. And you’re covered by Occupational Safety and Health Administration regulations, when it comes to radiation doses you receive in space.”

“So what does that mean? I’ll bet if we stuck to the rules, we’d never fly out of Earth orbit.”