The very next day, she was supposed to meet Mike. She’d booked them into a hotel in downtown L.A., so they could spend some time together.

After last night she felt truly shitty about going ahead with the meeting, or date, or whatever the hell she was supposed to call it at that point in her relationship. But she decided to go anyhow; she didn’t see much choice.

Before they parted, Ben dug a leaflet out of his jacket pocket. “Here,” he said. “For you.”

Eighteen hours later, in their L.A. motel room, York rubbed the tension out of Mike’s shoulders, and at last he slept.

After that it was York who seemed to be stuck awake.

She was stiff and a little cold, and the sheets beneath her were crumpled, digging into her back as she lay there. The mellow feeling from the minibar brandies had worn off, leaving her feeling stale, her heart overstimulated.

And besides, she had something she needed to talk over with Mike.

She opened the drawer of the bedside table and pulled out Ben’s leaflet.

In the soft glow of the splinters of light on the ceiling she couldn’t read any of it, but she could make out some of the images: the famous photograph of Joe Muldoon standing on the Moon with his hand across his chest, little schematic diagrams of spacecraft flying around the Solar System. At the back there was a tear-off application form; she ran her fingertip along the perforation.

Issued by the National Academy of Sciences on behalf of NASA, the leaflet was tided “Opportunities for Scientists as Astronauts.” It set out a glowing future in space: expanded laboratories in Earth orbit, more stations around the Moon, even semipermanent scientific colonies on the surface to follow the preliminary toe-dips of Apollo. And then there were NASA’s goals beyond cislunar space: the first manned Mars mission, orbital surveys of Venus — and even, more ambitious still, manned flights to the asteroids and the Jovian system. All within the lifetimes of the scientists it was meant to enlist.

It was an application form to be an astronaut.

She’d been tempted to throw the leaflet into the trash. She was immensely disappointed by that garbage: typical NASA dreaming, predicated on an unwavering expansion of funding and an unrelenting political will. For that, she should sacrifice her career, throw away a decade of her life? After all, none of that astounding program was real…

None of it. Except, maybe, Mars.

Everyone knew about the problems: Mike’s NERVA program was years behind schedule, there were delays in the enhanced Saturn booster development, and the Mars lander base technology project was underfunded and lacking focus… And so forth. In the end, if it succeeded at all, NASA would probably reach Mars much as it had reached the Moon: not as part of any long-term integrated strategy of expansion into the Solar System, as set out in that glossy little pamphlet, but as a precarious one-of-a-kind stunt. NASA seemed organizationally equipped for no other mode of working.

But, for all that, progress was being made, and funding seemed secured for the near future. Jimmy Carter’s attitude to space remained to be demonstrated, but Ben told her that Fred Michaels, the NASA Administrator, had thrown his weight behind Ted Kennedy as Vice President, and helped him secure the nomination against Walter Mondale — who was well known as a critic of the space program, all the way back to the 1960s. Carter/Kennedy were clear favorites to win the November election. And after that, things would look better for Michaels, with his links to the Democrats, and allies among the Kennedys both inside and outside the White House…

NASA, it seemed, was still headed for Mars.

She’d intended to talk to Mike about it tonight. Somehow, though, the subject hadn’t come up.

She put the leaflet back in the drawer.

Beside her, Mike shifted a little, but he didn’t wake up. He was turned toward her, and his hair lay in a dark halo about his head. He slept like a child, she thought: facedown, with his arms up around his head, and his face turned sideways. In sleep the tension had drained out of his face, and he looked years younger than his age of thirty-four.

She’d hardly seen Mike in the last few months. His schedule was grueling. NERVA 2 was only seven months away from the Critical Design Review at the scheduled end of its Phase A development. After that Phase B, production and operations, should be starting up in earnest, with the first unmanned flight tests scheduled for 1978, and the Preliminary Flight Certificate — issued after the first manned flight — to be obtained by mid 1979.

But Mike’s people still hadn’t been able to demonstrate a sustained burn of their huge new engine for more than a couple of seconds.

Mike seemed to be taking it particularly hard. He’d clearly been working fifteen or eighteen hours a day for weeks. He’d become gaunt, his eyes sunk deep in shadows, his clothes and hair rumpled and ill maintained. She wasn’t sure if that reflected the way he was coping personally, or the fact that a lot of the problems seemed to be in the cooling systems for which he was responsible.

Still sleepless, she turned on the TV.

An old Star Trek rerun was flickering through its paces. The warp engines were in trouble again, and Mr. Scott was crawling through some kind of glass tube with a wrench.

“If only it was as easy as that,” Mike mumbled.

His head was lifted off the pillow, and, bleary, he was squinting at the TV.

“I didn’t mean to wake you, Scotty.”

He reached for a cigarette. “You want something else to drink?”

“No. The brandy is keeping me awake, I think.” The comforting smell of stale smoke reached her; it reminded her of her mother. “It’s times like this I wish I smoked.”

He grunted. “Don’t even think about it.”

She debated telling him about the form in the bedside drawer.

But he was checking the clock. “I think I’d have woken up anyhow. They should be running the latest burn about now. Something inside me, some dumb kind of tinier, wakes me up at moments like this, even when I’m twenty miles away from the facility.”

“The burns. The tests. Always the fucking tests. Mike, unless you can figure out a way to relax, you’ll make yourself crazy.”

He blew out smoke. “I think we’re all a little crazy already.”

The trouble was, driving people like this had become part of NASA culture. We all worked eighteen hours a day for eight years to get a man on the Moon with Apollo, and if we have to do it all over again to get to Mars, well, by gosh, that’s what we’re going to do…. But mistakes had been made on Apollo, and those mistakes had claimed lives.

She put her hand over his; she could feel how it was bunched up, almost into a fist. She stroked his knuckles. “Listen. I’ve been thinking. We don’t see enough of each other.”

“Hell, I know that. But what can we do about it? We’ve always known what the deal would be.”

She sought for words. “But I think our lives are kind of hollow, Mike; we’ve been neglecting ourselves too much. Too many other things to distract us.” She waved a hand at the motel room. “We need something more than patches of neutral territory like this. We need something solid. I think we should get a place to live—”

He snorted out a billow of smoke. “Where? We’re lucky if we’re both in the same state for more than twenty-four hours.”

She was irritated at his dismissiveness. “I know that. ‘Where’ doesn’t matter. Anywhere. Here, or Berkeley maybe. And it wouldn’t even matter if the damn place was empty for three-quarters of the year. It would be ours, Mike; that’s the point. It would be a kind of base for us. At the moment, all we have is this. Holiday Inn. I don’t think it’s enough.” I’m twenty-eight years old, for God’s sake.

He stubbed out his cigarette and watched her; on the TV screen, ignored, Captain Kirk was facing another crisis. “You’re a crazy woman, Natalie York.”