It was like working on an ice rink: a huge, invisible, three-dimensional ice rink, across whose surface items kept escaping from her, slithering away along perfectly straight lines, and on which she felt she was constantly losing her balance.

When York came floating back down into the wardroom, Phil Stone was already in the little galley area, working on the lunch. Food packages and trays floated in the air beside him.

A TV camera, fixed to the wall of the wardroom, was fixed on him; York vaguely remembered that they were scheduled for another public broadcast. She wondered how many people were still watching.

Stone glanced up at York. “You’re starting to look like an astronaut, Natalie.”

“How so?”

“Take a look in the mirror.”

The nearest mirror was fixed over the washbasin. York floated over and inspected herself. Stray wisps of hair floated up around her head in a kind of halo, and the skin under her eyes looked puffy, as if she had been crying. That was another effect of microgravity: the accumulation of fluids under the skin of the face. She prodded at the fleshy pads under her eyes; the skin was tender, as if stretched.

Gershon came soaring down the fireman’s pole, upside down. “Hello, Japan-ee lady,” he said, pulling his eyes slantways.

There was a hiss of static from the comms panel fixed to the wall. “Ares, Houston. We see a box of goodies there, Phil.” Capcom today was Bob Crippen.

York sensed the others stiffening, subtly. Crippen’s forced banter signaled they were going out to the public. We’re onstage again, guys.

Stone held up an anonymous brown bag. “Good day, Bob. Would you believe you’re looking at chicken stew? All I have to do is push the pack inside this little sliding drawer here, like so, and that injects the bag with three ounces of hot water, and I pull it out and mush it up a little. And there you go; beautiful chicken stew.” He stuck the stew onto a tray floating beside him; the tray held four bags, a can of nuts, and a sachet of tropical punch, all fixed with Velcro. Stone floated the tray to Gershon. “Come and get it.”

“Yum.” Gershon snipped the top off his chicken stew bag and began to spoon it into his mouth. He waved at the camera and grinned; he was eating his meal upside down relative to Stone.

Stone said smoothly, “We’ve been flying in space now for more than twenty years, and I guess we’ve figured out how to provide decent food. We’re basically having much the same kind of food that the workshop crews, in lunar and Earth orbits, are eating right now. We have a menu that repeats, every six days or so. Most of our food is rehydratable. Like my noodles and chicken here.” He pointed at his tray. “That’s because rehydratable gives the best food value per pound of weight. But we do have some foods which are thermostabilized — cooked before launch, and then stored in a cold box. I’ve got here stewed tomatoes, and ground beef with pickle sauce, for instance. And some foods we can carry in their natural form, like my almonds here. And then I have these freeze-dried pears, and this strawberry drink… We don’t have a refrigerator or a food freezer, as the Skylabs have, but we do have something new: an oven. It’s fan-forced, of course, not convection. Because hot air doesn’t rise anywhere in zero G. And we’ve even got hot and cold running water, here in this little galley of ours.”

Gershon said sotto voce, “Tell him about the farts, Phil.”

Oh, sure. Hot mike, asshole.

Actually the farts were a real problem. There was a device in the spigots that was supposed to scrape excess hydrogen, which was a by-product of the Mission Module’s power cells, out of their water supply. But the gizmo didn’t work too well, and a lot of gas got into their stomachs. And out again almost as quickly.

“Ares, Houston.” Ares was already so far from Earth that it took a full six seconds for their signal to reach Houston, and for Crippen’s reply to come back. “Phil, we’re told we have a pretty good audience here.”

“We’re gratified to hear that.”

“Phil, would you say you actually enjoy the in-flight catering?”

Stone hesitated. “It’s hard to say. Even stuff in its natural form tends to taste different, somehow, up here; I guess there’s some subtle physiological change — a response to microgravity — we don’t understand yet. Then there’s the packaging. I know this form of food has a lot of advantages. There’s little chance of food particles getting into the equipment. But the Russians have been sending their cosmonauts up with cakes and bread since 1965…”

Six seconds.

“Copy all that, Phil,” Crippen said, “but it wasn’t quite the question I asked.”

Stone said firmly, “It’s the answer you’re going to get, Bob.”

After the delay, York heard laughter in the background, in the MOCR.

“Ares, Houston, thank you. Ah, Ralph, Phil, Natalie, could we get you all in one shot for a moment, please?”

Stone looked puzzled. “Say again, Houston.”

“If we can have you all in the camera’s field of view for a couple of minutes.”

Stone drifted close to York, who stayed by the table; and Gershon floated down behind them, facing the camera.

“Ares, Houston,” Crippen said. “Just about now, ah, at five plus one plus forty-two” — one hour into the mission’s fifth day — “you are passing a significant boundary. Although you may not feel it. It’s something you might like to think about as you eat your meal today.”

“We look forward to hearing about it, Bob.”

“…Maybe one of you could tell us what you can see out of your picture window right now.”

York turned. The “picture window” was a two-foot-wide viewport set in the wall of the wardroom, big enough to have to curve to follow the concavity of the pressure hull; it was triple-paned, with the thick, tough feel about it of an airplane window.

“I see Earth and Moon,” she reported. “They’re both pretty much full, although I can see a thin slice of shadow down the right-hand limb of each of them.” Earth was so distant, its sphericity wasn’t obvious; it was reduced to a flat blue bowl of light, with its pale, shrunken companion close by its limb. “The Earthlight is still bright,” she said. “Strong enough to read a book by, I’d say. But…”

“Go ahead, Natalie.”

“Something is different.” She peered into the window to see better. “The sky is just like a clear night on Earth. And — my God — it’s full of stars. Earlier in the flight the glare of Earth was so bright it blacked out everything else. Now, I can see the stars. I can recognize the constellations again, for the first time on the trip.”

“Ares, I guess you’ve really gone up into night.”

“Yes, we have. A huge, empty, cold night at that.”

“Ares, Houston. Thank you, Natalie. Ares, here’s the significance. You’re now almost exactly five hundred and sixty-two thousand statute miles from the Earth. That’s twice as far as any human has traveled before. And you’re now passing out of the Earth’s sphere of influence.”

Sphere of influence — an imaginary bubble in space centered on Earth, an almost perfect sphere where the gravitational potential of Earth and sun were in balance. Inside the sphere of influence, Ares had essentially been in an orbit dominated by Earth; beyond that point, however, the craft had escaped from Earth and was in solar orbit, a new planet.

Stone said, “Thank you, Bob. We understand, and we’re impressed, almost humbled, with the thought…” Stone seemed dissatisfied with his own trite words. He was looking at York thoughtfully. “Natalie, you want to add anything to that?”

She stared back, frozen, her mind suddenly empty. Well, you’ve griped often enough about the inarticulate grunts they send into space. Now’s your chance to do better.

For some reason she thought of Ben Priest. What would he advise her?

Just say what you feel, Natalie. Don’t hide behind technicalities. And don’t let it embarrass you.