The irony was, these bulky, clumsy, antiquated, Apollo-style pressure suits would only be needed during the launch phase, and later for the return to Earth. The suits would spend most of the mission stowed in the Command Module of their Apollo ferry craft. The MEM contained suits of a much more modern design for the EVA operations on Mars.

The halls were lined with people: astronauts and managers and NASA support staff, friends and family, all applauding soundlessly. York had to walk through a kind of corridor of faces, smiling in at her, smeared out and distorted by the helmet over her head.

They passed Stone’s family, Phyllis and the two boys. Stone stopped, put down his air unit, and reached out. He hugged his wife against the huge, crumpling chest of his suit, and he let the boys grab at his gloved fingers. He ruffled their hair and blew kisses at them. The boys looked tiny, skinny, against the suit’s soft orange expanse.

But York knew the suit had sealed Stone off from his family; he wouldn’t be able to feel them through the thick, elasticized gloves, nor hear anything of their voices through his helmet save a muffled blur. Inside the suit, the only sound was the hiss of air, the rustle of your own breathing.

Stone was only inches from his boys, but already he might have been a thousand miles away.

They stepped out of the MSOB.

It was not yet 6 A.M. There were press here, beyond barriers, and she was confronted by a barrage of flashlights, popping all around her. The last photo opportunity before they walked on a new world, or died.

There was a little gangplank leading into the transfer van. She was startled to see Vladimir Viktorenko standing by the van door. He was dressed in his full Soviet air force uniform.

Phil Stone drew himself up and saluted Viktorenko, and she heard his voice over her headset radio. “My crew and I have been made ready, and now we are reporting that we are ready to fly the Ares mission.”

Viktorenko saluted back. York couldn’t hear his reply, but she could guess what he said. I give you permission to fly. I wish you a successful flight and a gentle landing. Another little Soviet ritual.

Stone stepped forward to the van and let the suit techs help him toward his seat.

York, in line, moved up to Viktorenko. His smile softened, and he spoke again, silently. Marushka.

She felt something break open inside her, something she’d been holding in, from the moment she’d woken that morning.

She dropped her air unit, careless of how it fell, and stepped toward Vladimir. His uniform pushed into the softness of her pressure suit, and his arms circled her back, tightly enough that she could feel his strength through the layers of the suit.

He stepped back, and she forced a smile. “I found Bah-reess. Thank you.”

He spoke again. He dug into a pocket, and pulled out a little handful of steppe grass. He showed it to her, and tucked it into a pocket on the sleeve of her pressure suit. Then he gripped her arms one last time and helped the techs guide her up into the van.

It was a fine and clear spring morning.

JK Lee stepped out onto his porch and sniffed the air deeply; he could smell growing things, grass and flowers and such.

He found himself coughing.

His lungs seemed to have gotten attuned, over the years, to the characteristic scents of an aviation plant: kerosene, lubricant, ozone, rubber, hot metal. Since he’d emerged from that cocoon of engineering, he’d found himself stranded on a planet whose atmosphere was alien to him.

He lit up a cigarette and, behind a gathering cloud of nicotine and tar, started to feel more comfortable.

It would be a good day to cut the grass.

So he went to his toolshed and started fiddling with the mower, lubricating the blades and checking the plugs. The shed was warm and dark, redolent with the smell of stained wood.

He could hear the voices of commentators at the Cape, drifting out from the windows of all the houses nearby. The launch was all around him, as if it had soaked its way right into the fabric of the neighborhood. And all the other neighborhoods, right across America, that Thursday morning.

Jennine called him into the house.

She handed him the phone. Jack Morgan was calling. He asked if Lee and Jennine wanted to come over to his house to watch the launch over a couple of beers. Lee thought about it, but said no, he wanted to work on his lawn today.

Actually, Lee had been hoping for an invitation from NASA to go down to the Cape, to watch the launch. It would have been a nice touch. It hadn’t come.

He and Morgan gassed on the phone for a while about the old days.

Morgan had quit Columbia and set up as an independent consultant in aerospace medicine, and was making a hell of a lot more money selling himself back to Columbia as a freelance. Still, he’d lasted longer at Columbia than Lee.

The frustration of his do-nothing sinecure had slowly driven Lee crazy, and he’d taken an early retirement.

Art Cane had died a while back, less than eighteen months before MEM 014, his company’s finest product, was due to touch down on Mars. And Gene Tyson — the smug jackass who had once taken over JK’s own job — was head of the company.

Anyhow, Lee went back to his mower, and eventually he rolled the thing out into the sunshine, and when he started it up the rattling roar of the petrol engine drowned out the thin Canaveral voices from the neighborhood.

After a while, Jennine came out again. The sunlight caught the gray in her hair, making it silvery, shining. She brought him a glass of lemonade, and then she took him by the hand and led him into the house.

The TV was on, of course.

And there it was, the already familiar image of the Saturn VB stack, a bundle of white needles. The ripple of early-morning Florida heat haze betrayed the distance of the camera from the launchpad. JK picked out the pregnant bulge of the MEM shroud at the middle of the stack, above the fat first stage and its boosters, beneath the slimmer lines of the Mission Module and the Apollo spacecraft.

“Go over there,” Jennine said suddenly. She had her Polaroid in her hand.

“Huh?”

She waved her free hand. “By the TV. Go ahead.”

He thought of the lawn, half-cut.

Then he went to stand by the TV.

Slowly, JK Lee raised his hand in salute, standing there beside the TV image of the Mars ship, while his wife took his picture with her Polaroid.

The bulk of the eight-mile journey from the MSOB to the pad was via the regular highway, U.S. 1, the main coastal road. This section of the road had been cleared by the local cops, but even so the van, with its convoy of backup vehicles, proceeded incredibly slowly along the wide, empty freeway.

Stone glared stoically out of the windows, and Gershon’s gloved fingers drummed on his thigh.

KSC was big and empty, a rectilinear complex of dusty, straight roads and alligator-infested drainage ditches. The buildings were tour-story blocks, square, low, and weathered — uglier than anything at Houston — with the feel of a government research establishment. In the low morning sunlight, everything was flat and dusty, beachlike.

Occasionally, beyond the cordon, York would see a little knot of people, regular citizens, waving at her and clapping. She felt numbed, isolated.

On the eastern horizon she could see the misty forms of launch complexes, the blocky gantries protruding above the grassy beach. Many of the gantries were disused and half-demolished; they looked like relics, washed up on this scrubby, rubbish land, here at the corroding, entropy-laden margin between sea and land.

The transfer van turned off the highway and started down the access road to the pad.