York was pretty uniformly appalled by the astronauts she’d met so far. Ben was clearly atypical. And she couldn’t believe guys like Jones; they were like relics from some grisly Flintstones version of the 1950s. To her, the whole bunch of them seemed utterly self-obsessed.

Well, screw them.

She and her friends at Berkeley had done little, over the last couple of months, but follow the fallout from the events at Kent State in May. Some of them were preparing their own demonstrations in support and sympathy. She was prepared to bet Chuck Jones — probably Bleeker, too, even Ben — hadn’t even heard of the Kent State trouble, the way it was tearing the country apart. They were so cocooned inside their precious programs.

She felt blind, unreasoning anger, almost a hatred of astronauts and the system that had produced them.

As he stumped over the landscape, Chuck Jones could barely see the rocks around him. He just kept on going over and over the events of the last few days.

Fred Michaels, associate administrator, had come to the Astronaut Office in Building 4 personally to wield the axe. He’d stood there in his waistcoat, plump as a seal, in front of a room full of sport shirts and crew cuts.

Michaels’s personal presence wasn’t much consolation for Chuck Jones.

Michaels was there to announce, tersely, that the bean counters were cutting all the remaining Moon flights — save only for one more, Apollo 14, which was due to fly early in 1971.

Jones couldn’t believe it; in a few words, Michaels was shredding his, Jones’s, one-and-only chance of a Moon flight.

There was some argument from the floor, but Michaels slapped down their questions. “It’s for the good of the program, damn it, the longer-term good of the Agency. We’ve done what we’ve had to do. And Tom Paine” — the NASA Administrator — “doesn’t like this any more than I do. Less, even. But we’ve had to accept this, to give us all a future. I’m sure most of you men understand that.”

Sure, Jones thought, you might understand it in your head. But, when you’ve just had the flight you’ve trained for over years taken away, you can’t take it in your fucking gut.

And the anguish in the Office had gotten all the greater when Deke Slayton stood up, his face like granite, to announce that it had been decided that this last mission, 14, should be upgraded to a J-class, a sophisticated scientific expedition. So 14 would get the advanced LM with the Lunar Rover, and the Service Module with orbital instrument pallet, which had been assigned to Apollo 15. And with 15’s equipment had come its landing site: a place called Hadley, in the foothills of the lunar Apennines.

But 15’s original crew — Dave Scott, Jim Irwin, and Al Worden — was already in intensive training for the Hadley site.

So, Deke said, he was standing down Alan Shepard and his crew, who had been the prime assignment for Apollo 14. Scott and his crew had been promoted to 14 instead, and they’d take their backup crew of Jones, Bleeker, and Priest with them. The date of the flight would be put back a few months, to give Boeing a chance to get the Rover ready, and let Grumman finish their LM upgrades. Deke said he’d expect Shepard’s crew to pitch in and support Scott’s training from thereon.

Jones saw Al Shepard walk out of that meeting, his face like a tombstone. You didn’t want to cross Al at the best of times, and it was obvious that despite his seniority he hadn’t been taken into Slayton’s confidence about the rearranged schedules before the meeting. Slayton was a good old buddy of Al’s, too, all the way back to the Mercury days. A hell of a way to handle things, Deke. Well, Jones expected Slayton would be getting a few choice words of advice from Shepard afterward.

Jones had his own points to make, though.

He left it a couple of hours, then he went storming into Slayton’s office.

“Damn it, Deke, I shouldn’t be backup. You ought to be making me commander of the prime crew for 14, in place of Scott.” After all he — Jones — had been one of the original batch of Mercury astronauts, and the fourth American in space. And he’d already started his training for his own later J-class mission besides.

He’d waited a hell of a long time for this, the crown of his career, and he wasn’t giving up his mission — to be busted down to hole-in-the-sky trash-can Skylab flights — without a fight.

But Deke had just waved him away. “You don’t have a case, Chuck. Listen: Al Shepard is also one of the original batch, in case you forgot that, and he’s been waiting for a lot of years for a second flight after that damn ear illness. And he was the first American in space; Al outranks you, Chuck. But I’m still standing him down in favor of Dave Scott. You’ve got to face it, Chuck. I don’t like this any more than you do, but Scott’s is the best prepared crew I have, for the one mission we’ve got left.”

“Yeah.” Of course Jones understood that. The mission was the thing; nobody within NASA wanted to do anything that carried the slightest risk of a foul-up.

Nobody, that is, save the astronauts who weren’t aboard the last Apollo out.

Understanding it didn’t stop him trying, though; and he had stayed in Slayton’s office for a long time, arguing hard…

There was another piece of the old rock, anorthosite or whatever shit it was, in his way. Jones kicked it aside and stalked on.

The afternoon was to be a simulated three-hour moonwalk. York had to make up the numbers, in the absence of enough astronauts. Jones teamed with Priest, and Bleeker paired off with York. Jorge Romero would stay behind in the truck and act as a capcom. The astronauts wore backpacks, radios, and cameras, and they followed traverses laid out on coarse maps designed to match the quality of low-resolution orbital photographs.

York and Bleeker stopped at the first sample point. There was a large, fractured boulder, shot through with anorthosite. Bleeker set up a gnomon and took a photograph of the rock face. The gnomon was a device for calibration, a little tripod with a color scale for the photography, and a free-hanging central rod to give local vertical. Bleeker hit the rock with his hammer, and broke off a piece the size of his fist. He placed the sample in a small Teflon bag and dropped it into the pack on York’s back. He’d donned lunar gloves to do the work; York could see how stiff and clumsy the gloves were.

“How was that?”

She grinned back at him. “Standard operating procedures, Adam; Jorge will be proud of you.”

They walked on.

Bleeker raised his face to the sun, a vague half smile on his face. Bleeker was pale, freckled — a northern boy — and he wore plenty of sunblock on his exposed skin, there in the California heat. York hadn’t spent any time alone with him before today. He seemed bland, unimaginative, rather empty. Ideal profile for a moonwalker, she thought wryly.

“I guess this training is very different from what you’ve been used to,” she said.

“Oh, you bet. Especially compared to my assignment before joining the Astronaut Office.”

“What was that?”

“Five-ten Squadron. That’s a fighter-bomber squadron, based in Virginia. Beautiful part of the country. Do you know it?”

“No…. What kind of bombs?”

He glanced at her, professional reserve coming down behind his eyes. “Special weapons.”

Oh. Nuclear.

“We were trained to deploy out of West Germany. We’d have flown low, a hundred feet, under the enemy’s radar.” He mimed the maneuver with a dusty hand. He pulled his hand so it soared straight upward. “The idea was to let go of the payload at just the right moment. The package would follow a two-mile arc to the target.” He grinned again, almost shyly. “While it was falling I’d be hightailing it out of there, as fast as I could go, before the detonation.”

“I’ll bet. It sounds risky.”

“All flying is risky,” he said levelly. “But the F100s we flew were beautiful ships…”