“Colonel Muldoon. Lieutenant Colonel Viktorenko. Good to see you here…”

It was Fred Michaels. The NASA Administrator stood not two feet away from Muldoon, his jowls peppered lightly with sweat; behind him Muldoon recognized the assistant administrator, Josephson, the quintessential paper-pusher.

Viktorenko made Michaels effusively welcome and insisted on pouring him and Josephson slugs of vodka.

Tim Josephson drew Muldoon away from the others. “I’m sorry to bother you with this now, Joe. But we need a decision from your crew tonight.”

“On what?”

Josephson opened up a folder. “The call sign for your Apollo on the Moonlab/Soyuz flight. As you know, at the instigation of Congress, we’ve been holding a competition for elementary and high-school students to come up with a name.” He began shuffling pieces of paper in the folder. “We had seven thousand entries, submitted by teams totaling seventy-one thousand schoolchildren. Each name had to be backed up by a classroom project. The judging criteria were 80 percent for the quality and creativity of the project, and 20 percent on the name’s clarity during transmission and its ability to convey the American spirit. And—”

“Oh, give me a break, Josephson. For Christ’s sake.”

“I have a short list of the twenty-nine finalists here. We’re behind schedule with this already. I thought if you and the crew could get together tonight on this, and—”

Muldoon threw back another vodka. “Fuck off,” he said.

Josephson, behind his glasses, looked shocked. He opened his mouth, then closed it again. He looked down for a minute, as if composing himself.

Then, when he looked up, his face was hard.

“Colonel Muldoon. Perhaps we could discuss this elsewhere. Your room?”

Michaels looked furious, thunderous. Vladimir Viktorenko winked at him.

Ah, hell. “Sure. Let’s go.”

Muldoon drained his vodka.

“Listen, Josephson. I—”

“You listen to me.”

Josephson was still just a skinny streak of piss, but he was in absolute control of himself, Muldoon realized; and, in the confines of Muldoon’s room, he had suddenly become genuinely intimidating. “I’m tired of your drama-queen incompetence, Colonel, the way you’re prepared to embarrass yourself, the Agency, and the government, even here. You and those other space cadets of yours are damn lucky to have gotten this flight at all. We’ve heard your public pronouncements. We know you were pissed at the cancellation of the last Moon landings. We know you think the joint flight is just a PR stunt. We know you think you’re stuck here working on creaky Soviet technology.”

Muldoon had a deepening sense of danger. “Look—”

“I had to go in front of Congress because of the way you mouthed off against the Agency. You, Muldoon. The astronauts go in there and they’re treated like heroes I went in and I was totally humiliated. That is never going to happen to me again. Is that clear? Now take this list.”

Staring into Josephson’s narrow, calculating eyes, Muldoon saw everything — his whole life, all his aspirations — narrow into that one moment. The road to Mars lies through this bottleneck, this piece of paper, the seventy thousand high-school kids and their seven thousand fucking names, in this shitty room on the wrong side of the planet. I really have to do this.

And the lightness of the Moon was, after all, a long time ago.

He took the list from Josephson. He looked at the names on it. Adventure. Blake. Eagle. Endurance.

Josephson said, “Do you want me to go find Phil and—”

“No. I’m the commander. Here.” He stabbed at a name. “This one.”

Josephson looked at the paper. “Grissom”

“The commander of Apollo 1.”

Josephson studied Muldoon’s face for a moment; then he nodded. He turned and left the room.

Muldoon splashed water in his face. Then he went back to the bar and started working on getting seriously drunk.

It took her an hour to get suited up, in the personal gear room.

The safety instructions alone were intimidating enough. Hundreds of facts were thrown at her, about D-rings and lanyards and oxygen bottles and hypoxia and survival procedures… My God. And I’m only going to be a passenger in the damn thing.

But here she was, trussed up in a flight suit, with an oxygen mask, straps everywhere, a parachute, emergency oxygen, intercoms, survival kits for several unlikely environments tucked into her pockets. There was a sick bag in a pouch on her leg. She even had her own flight helmet, a World War I-style Snoopy hat. Look at me, the newest fighter jock hero.

She walked out to the field. There was Phil Stone, the senior astronaut, who was going to take her up today. Stone was tall, proudly bald, the best part of fifty. He grinned and shook her hand with a big gloved mitt. “Welcome to the carny ride,” he said.

She smiled back uncertainly.

Beyond him, a gleaming toy on the tarmac, was the T-38 itself. The trainer was an intimidating white dart. The wings were just little stubs, incredibly short, and the sleek white shape had more of the feel of a rocket about it. It seemed incredible, against intuition, that such a small, compact machine could support itself in the air and fly.

You’re getting down to the wire, Natalie. You say you want to be an astronaut. You mock the hero-pilot tendency. That’s fine.

But it means you have to cope with experiences like this.

Two techs helped her climb up and lower herself into the cockpit. The T-38’s white-painted walls were only just far enough apart for her to squeeze in. She would actually be in a separate cockpit behind Stone’s, under her own little bubble of glass.

Stone clambered aboard, in front of her, and spoke over the intercom. “Natalie, can you hear me?”

“Sure, Phil. Loud and clear. And I—”

He cut her off. “Final safety instructions,” he said. “I’ll tell you when to close your canopy bubble. Do it slowly, Natalie. Now, your parachute is set to open as soon as you eject. That’s appropriate for low altitude. Later I’ll tell you when to change the setting to high altitude, when you need to have a delay between ejection and the chute opening; you do that by fastening the hook to that ring on your chute, and…”

And the noise of the jets rose to a roar, drowning out his words.

The plane started to taxi.

Stone, sitting in his bubble ahead of her, looked out calmly, his motions deft and precise. The controls before her moved in sympathy with Stone’s, working themselves like a high-tech pianola.

She felt her pulse rate rising, her breathing deepening, and the rubber stink of her oxygen mask grew sharper; she felt sweat pool under her goggles, on her squeezed-up cheeks.

She consoled herself that she was going on a ride which few people would experience: high, fast, probably extraordinarily beautiful. Even if she left the corps tomorrow, she would have that to take away from there.

Yes, but I’m pretty sure I could get by without it…

Without warning, the plane threw itself down the runway, pressing her back into her seat. Within a few seconds she could feel the wheels leaving the ground.

The plane pitched upward steeply, and she lost sight of the ground.

There was a layer of cloud above, lumpy cumulus. The clouds seemed to explode at her, and she shot into white mist. She was through it in a second, emerging into bright, clear sunshine.

She glanced down: the land was already lost, remote, a patchwork of faded brown with the gray shadows of clouds scattered over it.

The T-38 rose almost vertically, like a rocket. In a few seconds, the sky faded down to a deep purple.

The surface of Earth was remote, small, the works of humanity already reduced to two-dimensional splashes of color. It astonished her to think, given the facility with which she had leapt from the ground, that just a century ago no human on the planet had undergone such an experience.