Then, it was said, she’d end up serving as a nonscientific grunt on training trips. Making sandwiches for astronauts. And if she came back into the mainstream of academic science later, she’d have a hell of a gap in her bibliography. She could be blowing a promising career.

Besides, you only have to watch Dallas to see what kind of a cultural desert you’re walking into. And the climate down there in Texas, my dear. Oh, my!

She got stubborn. She even started defending the space program. As an application of government technology, space was somewhere between true science and the opposite. At least it didn’t actively kill people. By contrast she cited Ben Priest as an example of an intelligent, thoughtful adult who was able to survive, precariously maybe, in the dumb-fighter-jock snake pit of NASA.

Anyway, the only way she was going to get to Mars was via Houston. So that settled the argument, as far as she was concerned.

She didn’t see Mike Conlig.

When she’d finally gotten up the nerve to tell him about her application, he didn’t seem surprised. He didn’t even seem to take it seriously, she thought.

He called a few times, from Marshall or Santa Susana. But he wouldn’t come to Berkeley, to talk, or help her close out her life.

Maybe he was being patronizing — maybe he thought she was following a whim, that she wasn’t serious, she wouldn’t see it through. If that was true, he didn’t know her too well after all.

Or — she wondered — perhaps he suspected something about her and Ben Priest. She’d fallen into bed with Ben only once more since that time at Pasadena all of two years ago. But she was no actress; she knew she couldn’t help showing what had happened, in her voice, her eyes, her body language… that is, if Mike was perceptive enough to see, caring enough to devote the attention.

Which, she figured sadly, he wasn’t.

But their conversation was too stiff, too many things left unspoken, for her to tell for sure.

There were a lot of details.

She got another letter. It said she was to report to Houston to start her ground training in just six weeks, which was a ludicrously short period of time for any working scientist to disengage herself from her commitments. She entered into a regime of eighteen-hour days. She tried to close out her research work with final papers and draft contributions to joint work, and she reassigned the graduate students who were working with her, and she disengaged herself from her teaching commitments.

Her salary offer was on a government grade equivalent to what she would have received as a civil service scientist. She hadn’t expected riches as an astronaut, but the pay seemed lousy, actually, considering the dislocation to her life, the hours she would have to put in, the risks, for Christ’s sake.

She was concerned enough to call Ben Priest about it.

“Am I being picked on?”

“It’s nothing personal. You’ve got to remember that you’re at the bottom of an immense pecking order, Natalie. You can’t make more money than the senior military astronauts. I guess you can see that. And their salaries are rigid, because they are locked into a military pay scale.”

“Yeah, but civil service salary scales are rigid, too, once you’re inside. Promotion is slow, and—”

He cut her off. “You have to ask yourself, Natalie. Is this really an issue for you? Is the salary a genuine factor in your decision to join NASA? If it isn’t, quit beefing and move on.”

She thought about that.

She signed the forms.

She had to sort out her pension contributions. She sold her car and gave up her rented apartment. She made out a new will: her mother was the main beneficiary, and, after some thought, she made Ben Priest her executor. She bought herself a new wardrobe: slacks and light shirts, suitable for Houston. She spoke to her savings and loan and her bank, and made arrangements for her mail to be forwarded.

She even got chased by the press, local paper and radio crews looking to run comic pieces on the new lady astronaut. After the first embarrassing result appeared — “Space Beauty Is Over the Moon” — she chased the reporters away, and they soon seemed to forget about her.

There was a round of farewells, which she hated.

She took a final drive around Berkeley. She headed up Dwight Way and across Telegraph Street, passing the little shingle houses there, and then into and above Strawberry Canyon. The hills were a lush summer green. Farther off, beyond the flats of Berkeley, she could see the misty blur of San Francisco and Marin County, linked together by the rust-colored Golden Gate Bridge. The air was fine, laced with eucalyptus.

How the hell could she give up all this for the humid smog of Houston?

She hadn’t anticipated how difficult this aspect of her odyssey would be. Her workplace, the apartment she’d rented for years, Berkeley itself: all of it, she realized, maybe belatedly, made up the fabric of her life. Pursuing Martian geology, flying into space, was one thing! — but she hadn’t bargained for how hard it would be to clean out her apartment, and to accept the cards and small presents and exchanged addresses, and continually, constantly, say good-bye.

Gershon walked around the parking lot, working the stiffness out of his legs after his drive out from the city. It was colder than he’d come to expect for California.

The L.A. division of Rockwell was strung out around the southern border of Los Angeles International Airport. Beyond the fence, the airport was a plain of concrete, with aircraft rolling between distant buildings like little painted toys. There was a distant rumble of jets ramping up, and a remote, evocative whiff of kerosene. If he squinted, he could see a line of big airliners stacked up in the sky.

The Rockwell headquarters building was an uncompromising cube of brick, four stories high, without a single window. Ralph Gershon had never seen anything like it; it was like the kind of dumb, baffling modern sculptures that earned their creators thousands of dollars. No natural daylight at all. Christ. He was here for a regular meeting of the MEM Technical Liaison Group, and liaison group meetings were meetings from hell anyway. The thought of spending all day inside that goddamn box of bricks was depressing.

Beyond the clutter of Rockwell buildings, he could see all the way down Imperial Boulevard to Santa Monica Bay. He liked the way the morning light was coming off the water, steely gray and flat.

“Here.”

There was a small, wiry man at his side, with a balding head and rimless glasses and big, ugly freckles; he was holding up a cigarette packet.

“Thanks,” Gershon said. “I don’t.”

“Uh-huh.” The guy took a cigarette himself, tamped it against the box, and lit up. His arms were disproportionately long and bony, and they stuck out of his sleeves. Just behind him in the parking lot, there was a T-bird, gleaming black. “You looked like it was a good moment for a smoke.” He had a broad, bold New York accent. He was maybe fifty, and he looked familiar to Gershon.

“You here for the MEM thing?” Gershon asked.

“Yeah. And you? You from NASA? A pilot, maybe?”

“How do you know?”

The guy tapped his own small paunch. “Because you look fit.”

“I’m the Astronaut Office rep.” Gershon hesitated when he used the word “astronaut.” As he always did. Look at me, the great astronaut. When I haven’t flown anything for NASA except a T-38 trainer. But then that little guy had used the word “pilot.” Maybe he understood.

The stranger stuck out his hand. “My name’s Lee. John K. My friends call me JK.”

The handshake was firm, the palms callused. It wasn’t the grip of a pencil-pusher.