And the interior was like someone’s utility room — more like a survival shelter than a laboratory, Stone thought — with every surface scuffed and scarred, every piece of equipment patched up, every wall encrusted with junk. Moonlab was an improvised lash-up anyhow, and the place really hadn’t been designed for growth; and every time a crew had gone up with some new experiment or a replacement article it had just bolted the kit to whatever free hydrogen-tank wall space there was, and left it there forever. After five years, the walls were growing inward, as if coated with a metallic coral. Sometimes you couldn’t even find the pieces of kit you needed, and you had to radio down to previous crews to find out where they’d left stuff.

The place was kept hygienic — it had to be — but you wouldn’t call it clean. Hell, you had highly trained pilots and scientists up there. They didn’t want to spend their lives on maintenance, for God’s sake; they had work to do. And the result was unpleasant, sometimes.

Like the black algae that had finally put paid to the shower.

Even the toilets never seemed to vent properly. And the old bird was a chorus of bangs, wheezes, and rattles when they tried to sleep at night. Some long-duration Moonlab crews had gone home with permanent hearing loss, he’d been told.

It was much worse than his first flight out there. It was all a kind of hideous, long-drawn-out consequence of Bert Seger’s original decision to redirect this ’Lab from Earth orbit, back in 1973.

Maybe I shouldn’t be so sniffy about that big tractor out there, the Soyuz. At least the Soviets must feel at home, here, ’Lab’s no worse than a Moscow hotel.

Still, you could see Moonlab as a kind of huge experiment in space endurance. Moonlab was a Type II spacecraft. Type I you’d never repair; you’d use it once and bring it home to discard, or fix on the ground, like Apollo Type II, like the ’Labs, were supposed to be repairable, but with logistic support from nearby Earth. Type III, the ultimate goal, would be able to survive for years without logistic support. Any Mars mission would have to be aboard a Type III spacecraft, a level of maturity beyond Moonlab.

Without the long-duration experience of Moonlab and Skylab, the Mars mission would not be conceivable.

They reached the wardroom, where the plastic table was fixed to the mesh floor, and the crew had rigged up five T-cross seats. They sat at the table, hooking their legs under the bars of the seats, and Stone fixed the TV camera to a strut. Then the performance really began.

There were flags to swap, including a U.N. flag, which had been carried up by Soyuz and would be returned home by Apollo. Each crew had brought along halves of commemorative aluminum and steel medallions, which Muldoon and Viktorenko joined together. They traded boxes of seeds from their countries: the Americans handed over a hybrid white spruce, and the Soviets Scotch pine, Siberian larch, and Nordmann’s fir.

It was time for the ritual meal. The Americans were hosts today, so, from the customary plastic bags, the cosmonauts were treated to potato soup, bread, strawberries, and grilled steak. There was much forced bonhomie and laughter in all this. Tomorrow it would be the Russians’ turn, and — as Stone knew, because they’d practiced even this — the menu would be tins containing fish, meat, and potatoes, tubes of soft cheese, dried soup, vegetable puree, and oats; there would be nuts, black bread, dried fruit.

As he ate, Stone looked dubiously at the TV camera staring at him from above. As space PR stunts went, this one was turning out to be a stinker. Jesus, he thought. I hope nobody I know is tuned in to this.

Viktorenko said, “Of course, as the philosophers say, the best part of a good dinner is not what you eat, but with whom you eat.” He dug out five metal tubes from a pocket of his coverall. The tubes were labeled: “vodka.” The astronauts made dutiful noises of pleasure, and when they opened the tubes up, they found borscht, which they displayed to the camera. A Soviet joke Ha-ha.

With the meal cleared away, the telecast should have been finished, so the crews could relax. But Bob Crippen, capcom for the day, called up from Houston. “Moonlab, we have a surprise for you. Go ahead, Mr. President; you’re linked up to Moonlab.”

Familiar Georgian tones crackled over the air. “Good evening, gentlemen. Or is it morning where you are? I’m speaking to you from the Oval Office at the White House, and this must be the most remarkable telephone call since John Kennedy spoke to you, Joe, and Neil Armstrong on the surface of the Moon, eleven years ago…”

The crews sat around the table, staring into the camera, smiles bolted in place.

Carter made a speech of stunning banality, a ramble that seemed to last forever. Solovyov and Viktorenko looked poleaxed. Carter was duller than Brezhnev.

Jesus, thought Stone. It wouldn’t be so bad if we didn’t know that Carter was on his way out And that he has always been dead set against the space program.

Carter went around the table, speaking to each astronaut and cosmonaut in turn. “So, Joe, I believe this is your first flight in eleven years.”

“Yes, sir, that’s so, my first since the Moon landing. And it’s wonderful to be back.”

“Do you have any advice for young people who hope to fly on future space missions?”

Muldoon’s face might have been carved from wood. Stone knew exactly what he was thinking. Yeah. Don’t fuck yourself over by mouthing off against the Agency. “Well, sir, I’d say that the best advice is to decide what you want to do and then never give up until you’ve done it…”

Well, as long as Carter doesn’t ask if he’s missing his wife, Stone thought, Muldoon will be home clear; everybody in Houston knew that Jill had walked out a couple of months before the launch, but somehow it had been kept out of the press.

Across the table from Stone, Viktorenko dug out five more “vodka” tubes; wordlessly he passed them around. Stone opened his and sniffed at it. Viktorenko nodded to him, holding his gaze. Yes, this really is vodka. But they will think it is borscht. A double joke!

Stone drained his tube in one pull and crushed the metal in his fist.

As the banal speeches and ceremonies went on, the mountains of the Moon, ignored, cast complex shadows over the tabletop.

Rolf Donnelly went around the horn, one last time.

“Got us locked up there, INCO?”

“That’s affirm, Flight.”

“How about you, Control?”

“We look good.”

“Guidance, you happy?”

“Go with systems.”

“FIDO, how about you?”

“We’re go. The trajectory’s a little low, Flight, but no problem.”

“Booster?”

“Everything’s nominal for the burn, Flight,” Mike Conlig said.

“Rog. Capcom, how’s the crew?”

Natalie York was on capcom duty again. “Apollo-N, Houston, are you go?”

“That’s affirmative, Houston,” Chuck Jones replied briskly on the air-to-ground loop.

“Rog,” Donnelly said. “Okay, all controllers, we are go. Thirty seconds to ignition.”

York said, “Apollo-N, you are go for the burn.”

Apollo-N was drifting over the darkened Pacific; Ben Priest could see a bowl of white light in the waters below — the reflection of the Moon — and, all but lost in that milky vastness, the lights of a ship.

The crew lay side by side in their couches, cocooned in their pressure suits once more. Priest felt his heart pumping harder. We’ve done everything we can to check this damn bird out; now we have to go full bore on it, and that’s all there is to it.

At ten seconds the DSKY threw up a flashing “99.” Chuck Jones reached out and pushed PROCEED.

Through the changing numbers on his console, Mike Conlig watched as NERVA’s nuclear core was brought back up to its working temperature. Liquid hydrogen was already gushing out of the big S-NB tank and pumping into the cladding of pressure shell and engine bell, and, Conlig knew, would be reaching the radioactive core about now, where it would be flashed to vapor as hot as the surface of a star.