In all this flood of people, Seger realized with a sinking heart, his little protesting band wasn’t going to make much of a splash. Anyway, there was maybe enough evidence around here that it was wrong to be sending off three Americans to Mars, while so many of their fellow citizens suffered, without the need for stunts by Seger. He’d learned that there were still cases of malnutrition being discovered among the poorest of the poor: there at the Cape, here at the foot of the Mars ship itself! If such things didn’t turn a few heads, maybe his little gesture really wasn’t going to make much difference.

But he wasn’t going to give up. The effectiveness of the PR wasn’t really the point. Anyway, maybe he could trade on his old NASA contacts to get closer to the pad than most of the rest. Just a little TV coverage would make his mission worthwhile.

Someone in the wagons began to sing, and the rest took it up, as the mules made their mournful way along the packed road. After a couple of words Seger recognized the song. It was the hymn the astronauts had read out from lunar orbit, to mark the deaths of their colleagues. Abide with Me…

He wondered where Fay was. Maybe she was watching on TV out in Houston. He hadn’t seen her since he’d told her, by phone, he was setting up his church. Maybe she’d forgive him, for leaving her behind like that.

On the horizon the Saturn VB was visible as a finger of white, bathed in light from every angle.

Seger was moved, unaccountably. He grabbed at the crucifix pinned to his lapel, so hard the metal dug into his fingers.

York reported to the exercise room, where a nurse weighed her, took her temperature, and checked her heart rate and breathing and blood pressure. It was all brisk, thorough, but somehow perfunctory. As if the nurse — a cheerful woman in her forties — wasn’t really interested in the results. After all, NASA knew all about York’s health by then; fragments of her body, scrapings and fluid samples, already lay around a dozen NASA facilities, as prized as bits of moonrock.

But it made sense on another level. It was all just part of the ritual. Like a priest robing up, she thought. Today, I am different from the run of mankind, and must be treated as such.

She made for the mess hall. There she had to sit in line with her two crewmen, at a table which crossed the head of another, longer table. There was a curtain behind her, and on the table was a gaudy flower bowl with a ribbon which read “Ares,” and a little display of silk and bows in the shape of the mission badge. Two rows of people sat down the longer table, looking at her, with a mundane ridge of sauce bottles and pepper shakers between them.

It was like a wedding breakfast, she thought.

The meal was another prelaunch ritual: nothing on the menu but steak, eggs, juice, toast, and coffee. Every astronaut, back to Al Shepard himself, had sat down to the same fare before The Flight.

York tried to eat, but the steak was thick and massive, and tasted like rubber in her mouth.

She’d fought to get this part of the ritual changed. A little muesli and canned milk would do her fine just now. But the doctors had lectured her about the importance of sticking to a “low-residue” diet before the launch. That was to reduce the volume of her solid wastes. Fine in theory, but it turned out to mean, in practice, steak with every meal, big bleeding slabs of the stuff.

She watched the other people in the room. There was Administrator Josephson, and several senior managers from NASA centers, and from the contractors. She recognized Gene Tyson from Columbia, the firm which had built the MEM, fat and corporate and beaming complacently. There were senior astronauts in here too, Bob Crippen and Fred Haise and others. And there were Ted Curval and Adam Bleeker, grinning and wisecracking as if nothing untoward had happened; but York thought she could see the tightness of their grins, a kind of hardness behind their eyes.

Stone and Gershon, sitting alongside her, were in good form, she thought. They were just two Air Force guys joshing with the other pilots, self-deprecating, almost witty. Humble, brave, relaxed. Almost bored with it. Just another day at the office. It was a good performance.

But, under the surface — the studied casualness, the soft clink of cutlery against china, the occasional sharp ripples of laughter — the atmosphere in the mess hall was extraordinary. Strained to the point of breaking.

York couldn’t think of a damn thing to say that wouldn’t sound lame. And as the hideous meal went on she began to develop a fear that if she spoke at all her voice would crack.

She stabbed a fork into her egg, but the yolk had hardened, and only a little yellow liquid oozed out onto her plate.

Fred Haise kept checking his watch. Like every other item today, breakfast was time-lined.

The members of the crew were released to return to their dorm rooms.

York brushed her teeth. She picked up her PPK, her Personal Preference Kit. She checked over the kit. She wasn’t planning to carry much: a calendar, a yellowing Mariner 4 picture. But she found that some extra stuff had been sneaked into the kit while she’d been at breakfast. There was a little card of Saint Christopher which she recognized: her father used to say that card had gone through World War I with his father. And there was a good-luck card from her mother, and a present from her old high school, a brooch in the shape of an orbital ellipse, with a tiny ruby to represent Mars.

And here was a squat, lumpy form: a little cosmonaut, his troglodyte face leering at her from his squashed helmet, a short chain dangling from his skull. She grinned. “Hello, Bah-reess.”

There was no privacy, of course; probably one of the maids had been bribed to smuggle in all this crap. Anyhow, she didn’t care. She had only one truly private item to carry.

She lifted up her sport shirt. Pinned on the inside, hidden by the mission logo badge, was the silver rookie pin given her by Ben Priest out at Jackass Flats, all those years ago.

She slipped the pin into the PPK and zipped up the kit.

She hefted the little pack. The PPK was coated with Beta-cloth, a nonflammable synthetic material as tough as a fire hose. The PPK was just a mundane little personal item, but even the PPK was built for spaceflight.

She took a last glance around the room, with its single bed and its little window, and the color TV on the stand. She felt a surprising tug, as if she was leaving a nest. In no way was this her home; she’d been there for only a few days. Nevertheless, it was the last place on Earth she could claim as hers. The last place she had slept before the launch.

She took a pencil and signed her name on the back of the wooden door. A little cosmonaut tradition, shown her by Vladimir Viktorenko.

Then, with determination, she opened the door and stepped out of the room.