York was the only woman.

Jesus. White male pilots with professorships. What chance do I have?

The candidates congregated at lunch and over dinner. The men organized trips to the Alamo, in downtown San Antonio. York kept away from those macho gatherings and tried not to let herself get depressed.

On the first morning of the tests, she had to start at six o’clock Texas time, which was 4 A.M. Berkeley time. So that was the first of her handicaps. She couldn’t even get a coffee; she was supposed to fast until lunch for the purposes of the tests.

The tests were going to last all week.

The first test was for glucose tolerance. Blood was drained from her arms while she forced down incredibly sweet glucose liquid.

Then she was subjected to eye tests: there was an Ishihara color-blindness test, and a photograph of her retina taken by a flash blazing into her eye. She had to drink a liter of lukewarm water, after which a weight was placed on her eyeball, to measure the fluid excreted.

There were internal medicine tests. She had to lie for an hour inside a Faraday cage, a metal box that excluded electric fields, while a cardiogram was taken. York felt like a chimpanzee in a zoo. Then she was strapped into a device fitted with a parachute harness, designed to hang her while the blood pooled to her feet. She had to hyperventilate until blackout symptoms began to show, little dots darting around her vision.

Then — brutally quickly — she was given a Master heart test, where she climbed and descended stairs while holding electrodes to her chest. At the end of the test she had to fit her lips around a mouthpiece so her exhaled carbon dioxide could be collected for volume measurements.

There were tests of her vestibular system, the balance apparatus of her middle ear. Hot and cold water was poured into her ears to confuse her vestibular canals, making her dizzy. Doctors peered into her eyes, watching how long it took her eyelids to stop flickering.

Later, she was told to walk in a straight line through a darkened room. The idea was to test for vestibular imbalances. When the lights came up she found she’d drifted maybe a yard to the left of the room’s center line.

The tilt chair was another vestibular test. It looked a little like an electric chair, mounted on a rotating platform in the middle of a pitch-dark room. She was strapped into the chair, and electrodes were fixed to track her eye motion. The chair was spun around, once every three seconds, and tipped back and forth. Every so often they would reverse the direction of tilt and rotation. It was like a carousel ride, run by lunatics; every tilt made York feel as if she wanted to upchuck, but she was determined she wasn’t going to give those assholes that satisfaction.

She had to give urine samples at half-hour intervals, for three hours; she had to drink quarts of water to generate the raw material. She had to give blood six times. In the end the veins in both her arms collapsed from repeated pricking.

In the midst of the physicals, she went through psychological tests: playing with blocks, drawing self-portraits, completing a five-hundred-question multiple-choice personality test. There were IQ tests, Rorschach inkblot tests, memory tests, vocabulary tests, tests of math and reading.

She went through a written paper on her “personal values,” which sought to examine the motives she had for going into space. She labored over the fifty questions, covering possible motives like money and fame, the good of mankind, and the thrill of it all, as well as the possibility of scientific discovery.

On her first pass through, York tried to answer honestly. Of course, it’s the scientific discovery They’re selecting mission specialists here! What the hell else do they expect? But then she wondered if she ought to try to be smarter. It would be a bad thing to seem unbalanced, obsessed about the science to all else. Any astronaut, even a specialist, was going to have to help out with the chores. And besides, the Mars crew was going to have to be presentable to the press, projecting the right all-American, NASA-tradition, John Glenn — wholesome image.

She went through her scores again, trying to anticipate what the selectors might be looking for.

Then she figured that all the other candidates would have worked this out as well and would similarly be doctoring their answers.

She went through a third time, trying to take that into account…

An earnest young man took her through a scatter chart rendered by a computer. He sounded puzzled by the results: here she showed herself to be dedicated to a single goal, there flexible and capable of balancing multiple objectives; over here the results said she was strongly self-motivated, but there she was coming up as happiest working with a team… and so forth. It was a complex, meaningless dance.

She gritted her teeth and tried not to say anything to make it worse. She wondered how much all this was costing.

One morning she was given barium sulfate for breakfast, to provide contrast in X-rays of her gall bladder. Another time she was provided with a tritium solution, so her percentage of body fat could be measured. She took pills which gave her diarrhea, and which caused her piss to come out green. In the EEG test, eleven needles were poked half an inch into her scalp.

Even her teeth were checked over. A cheerful, inane dentist tut-tutted over her mouth’s state of disrepair, and he seemed to take a lot of comfort in telling her in great detail how much preventative dental work she’d have to endure. You don’t want toothache or an abscess halfway across the Solar System, ho ho!

In the course of a healthy life, York had had hardly any experience of hospitals. The doctors here were Air Force, specialists in aerospace medicine. In her ignorance, she had expected the tests to be tough. In fact what they hit her with was so far beyond her experience that it scared the hell out of her. The tests struck her as ordeals: barbaric, brutal, often ridiculous, barely scientific.

The final test, on the Friday, was a sigmoidoscopy. She had to give herself an enema. Then she lay on a bench while a woman doctor shoved a rod up her rear, straightening out the intestines, probing farther and farther.

York was exhausted, angry, humiliated, frightened. It took a powerful effort of will to submit herself to this last invasion.

Before San Antonio, she’d treated the whole thing casually. An indulgence for Ben, maybe. An adventure. An amusing battle of wits between herself and NASA, in which she would see how far she could get before they found her out.

Now, all that had changed. She didn’t want the investment in pain and humiliation to be wasted.

Withdrawing her application became unthinkable.

Her test results, when they came, showed her medical history to be “unremarkable.” She was “in no apparent medical or psychological distress.”

Comforting, she thought. Well worth a week in medical hell.

Then she was called to Houston itself for an interview.

The plane landed at Houston Intercontinental. York made her way into the terminal, and, as she’d been instructed, found the Continental Airline Presidents’ Club. She faced a plain glass door with a one-way mirror. When she knocked, the door was opened by a NASA protocol officer, a short, dapper man in a blazer. She identified herself, and he hurried her inside — out of sight of the press? — and offered her a diet soda.

When all the candidates had arrived — it was the San Antonio group — they were to be taken in a limousine to the Nassau Bay Hilton.

When she stepped out of the air-conditioned airport building the August heat hit her in the face, moist and enclosing, as if the ground was steaming. Although the afternoon was well advanced, the sun seemed to be directly overhead.