“Ares, Houston, you’re looking good here,” Crippen said. “Right down the old center line.”

“Thank you,” Stone said. “Things look fine up here, too. Rates looking good.”

She looked out of her window. The Earth was falling away, visibly; it was a remarkable sight, as if the Earth was a special-effects prop, being hauled away from her window.

The sense of motion, of speed, was remarkable.

“How’s it going, York?” Stone asked drily.

She started. He’d caught her rubbernecking again. “Fine. Fine, Phil.”

She turned back to her station. She had her job to do, and she should get to it. It won’t fail because of me. The mantra of everyone involved with the Ares program.

She stole a glance at Stone. He was watching his own readouts, eyes fixed on the goal, apparently oblivious to her again. Stone was in utter control of himself. He always was.

She began to watch the status of the External Tanks in earnest, their brief biographies spelled out by the displays in front of her.

Floods of liquid oxygen and hydrogen, sixty-four thousand gallons a minute, pumped out of the tanks to be consumed in the engines of the MS-II. Already the pressure in the tanks was dropping away, she read; to keep the pressure up, there was a complicated backfeed system which took vaporized gases back from the engines into the tanks. The fuel system was surprisingly complicated, elaborate, a system of huge pipes, fountains of supercold liquid propellants cascading into combustion chambers as hot as the sun…

In the middle of the burn, Crippen said, “Okay, Ares, Houston, we’d like to try for the TV request.”

Stone and Gershon both stifled groans. York glanced up self-consciously at the little Westinghouse TV camera fixed to its bracket above her head.

Crippen said, “We would like five minutes’ worth of TV, and we would like an exterior shot, with a narrative if you can give us one.”

“Copy,” Stone said.

NASA was following a policy of televising the most dramatic moments of the mission. It was all to drum up interest and enthusiasm for Ares, to allow the great American public to see what they were paying for. A feed from the Command Module to the TV companies had been provided during the launch itself, for example. But York wasn’t so sure that had been a good idea. The launch probably looked too damn comfortable to a generation that had been brought up on the glamorous pyrotechnics of Star Wars.

Stone nodded to York, and she pushed a button on her console to start the camera.

“Okay,” said Stone. “Welcome to Ares. You’re looking at us in our Command Module here. We’re in the middle of our TOI maneuver. We see out of our windows the sun going by, and, of course, the Earth. We can give you the time of day in our system of mission elapsed time: thirty-seven hours, and fifty-one minutes, and umpteen seconds. Now maybe Ralph can show you what we see out of our windows.”

Stone nodded to York. She reached up to pull the TV camera off its mount. Because of the thrust she couldn’t just float it; she had to pass the camera to Gershon. It felt massy, awkward, in the gentle acceleration of the MS-II.

“Okay, Houston, here you go,” Gershon said. “Here you see the Earth, falling away beneath us.”

“Copy, Ares. Fine images.”

“It really is a fantastic sight,” Gershon said. “We’re somewhere over the Atlantic right now, and I can see the eastern seaboard, from Florida all the way up to Newfoundland, as clear as crystal. I don’t know if that’s visible in your images.”

“We see it.”

“And as I look to my right, I can see, just toward the limb of the planet, what must be Western Europe and Africa. I can see Spain, and the British Isles, all kind of foreshortened. The British Isles are definitely a greener color than the brownish green that we have in Spain. There’s a little haze over Spain, and what looks like cumulus clouds piled up over the south of England.”

“Copy. That matches the weather reports we have today.”

“Good to know I’m looking at the right planet, Houston…”

Stone said, “I have a comment about the point on the Earth where the sun’s rays reflect back toward us. In general the color of the ocean is uniform, a rich blue, except for that region — a circle, maybe an eighth of the Earth’s radius. In this circular area, the blue of the water turns to a grayish color and I’m sure that’s where the sun’s rays are being reflected back on up toward us.”

“Roger, Phil,” Crippen said. “That’s been observed before. It’s similar to a light shining on a bowling ball. You get this bright spot and the blue of the water then turns into a grayish color.”

“A bowling ball, yeah. Or maybe the top of Phil’s head.” Gershon laughed at his own joke.

It was true, York saw, twisting her head; there was a huge highlight on the blue surface of the ocean. Damn. The thing really is a sphere. Like a ball of steel.

“Thank you, Ares. How about an internal position now, please? Maybe you’d like to talk us through what the TOI is all about, today.”

Gershon passed the camera back along the cabin, and York fitted it to its pedestal, so it had a panoramic view of the three of them. She caught Stone’s face; he rolled his eyes, and pointed to her and the camera.

York was on.

She turned back to her displays and tried not to look up too often at the camera. Her throat felt tight, her face flushed inside her helmet; suddenly she could feel every hot crumple of her pressure suit. She keyed the press-to-talk switch on her headset cable. “Okay, Houston. This is our TOI maneuver: TOI, for Transfer Orbit Injection. Right now, the big engines on our main booster stage, the MS-II, are firing to push us out of Earth orbit. The MS-II is just a version of the second stage of the old Saturn V, modified to serve as an orbital injection vehicle. The S-IIs which took Apollo to the Moon had five J-2 engines. Well, we’ve got just four engines, upgrades called J-2S; the central one was removed to accommodate a lox tanker docking port. The MS-II has more insulation, to stop boiloff, and its own small maneuvering engines, and more docking ports at the front.

“I guess you can say we’re all pretty much relieved that the MS-II is working as well as it is; we’re going to rely on the MS-II not just to leave Earth but to slow us when we get to Mars, and to bring us out of Mars orbit when we’re ready to come home…”

She dried up. She was speaking too fast, waffling.

“Stand by,” Capcom Crippen said. “Okay, we’ve cut the live feed. Ares, you’ve got a pretty big audience: it was live in the U.S., it went live to Japan, Western Europe, and much of South America. Everybody reports good color, they appreciate the great show”

Gershon said, “Keep those cards and letters coming, folks.”

“Missing you already,” said Crippen.

Christ, what rubbish. No wonder they cut the feed.

She hadn’t meant to say any of that; she’d wanted to say something personal.

To say how it felt, to see the Earth fall away.

She’d always criticized earlier generations of astronauts for their lack of eloquence. Maybe it wasn’t so easy after all.

“ETs depleted,” York reported. “Ready for sep.”

“Roger,” Stone said.

More than two million pounds of fuel, a treasure that had taken five years to haul up to Earth orbit, had burned off in sixteen minutes.

“Three, two, one. Fire.”

Outside, pyrotechnics would be severing the securing bolts and frames at the top and bottom of each tank, and guillotines should be slicing across the wide feed pipes which had carried fuel from the tanks into the MS-II’s belly. York half expected to hear a rattle of bolts, muffled clangs, like the staging during the Saturn VB launch, but she heard and felt nothing.

“ET sep is good,” she said.

“Confirm ET sep,” said Crippen.

“Hey, how about that.” Gershon was looking out of his window. “I can see a tank.”