Beyond her window the receding steppe rocked back and forth like a plaster-of-paris model in a sim. She saw a little circle of engineers, waving their caps, their faces turned up like dusty flowers.

Grit fled in concentric circles across the steppe, away from the capsule, and the technicians staggered back, shielding their eyes.

Then she could no longer see the ground: her window was a disk of clouded sky.

York’s pressure suit was getting hot. She could feel perspiration pooling under her, in a little slick that gathered in the small of her back. But at the same time, thanks to some quirk of the Soviet suit’s cooling system, her feet were cold. She tried to curl up her toes inside the layers which constrained them.

Gershon, lying beside her, was all elbows.

There was a TV camera — a crude-looking thing, like something out of the 1950s — fixed to the cabin wall, just above Gershon’s head. York didn’t know if it was live or not. A small metal toy, a spaceman, dangled in front of the lens on a metal chain; as the cabin swung about under the chopper, the little toy rocked back and forth.

Viktorenko caught her eyeing the model. “You are admiring my friend Boris.” He pronounced it Bah-reess “Boris has a major role to play, in the correct functioning of the Soyuz.” He pointed. “You see the TV camera. That is trained on Boris at all times. By watching his antics, the ground can determine the exact moment at which we become weightless. Ingenious, no?…”

Then the capsule lurched to the right. York felt the weight of the two men compressing her against the wall.

Viktorenko roared with approval. “It is just like Disney World! Ha-ha! Now, Ralph and Natalie. You must imagine that we are returning to Earth aboard a real Soyuz, perhaps after spending a hundred days or more aboard our wonderful space platform Salyut. We have endured the gentle buffeting of reentry — a mere three or four Gs, thanks to the cunning aerodynamic design of the Command Module — and soot has coated our window following the scorching friction of the air. But we discard our window shields, and we see bright sunlight, a Kazakhstan morning. Now here come the parachutes: the three drogues, crack crack crack in swift succession, and then the main chute, a great white sail above us.” Viktorenko mimed a slow, featherlike rocking. “So we drift downward, like a snowflake, all three tonnes of us…”

She closed her eyes. She was certain something was intended to go wrong, somewhere down the line. It was just a question of when, and how bad it would be, and whether she’d be able to cope when it came. It was like every sim: it was a sadistic game, in which Viktorenko was in complete control. And the bastard knew it.

“And now the moment approaches,” Viktorenko said. “The reunion with the mother planet! But her embrace is hard. So compressed gases have been pumped into the base of your seats, to absorb the shock, you see. And, less than two meters from the ground, retrorockets will fire to cushion the impact. Of course we have no retrorockets, for this is only a training mock-up… Perhaps we will be fortunate, and the wind will be low; otherwise, we may bounce—”

There was a crackle, a brief Russian message on the radio. Viktorenko acknowledged and checked a chronometer.

“Three, two, one.”

Loose cables clattered against the hull. The chopper had released the capsule.

The Command Module fell, dragging her down with it.

The Soyuz slammed against a hard surface, with a vast metallic slap.

The impact was more violent than York had expected. Her ill-fitting couch rammed into her back, all the pressure points gouging her body.

“Fuck,” Gershon gasped.

At least I’m down She glanced around, quickly, at the still, almost silent cabin; she could hear the distant noise of the climbing chopper. Is that it? Is it over? No bouncing, no dragging — are we down?

Then the capsule tipped to her left, quite smoothly, so that her weight was pressed against Gershon’s.

“Fuck,” Gershon said again.

York shouted, “What the hell’s this, Vladimir?”

The window beyond Viktorenko was briefly darkened, though York couldn’t see by what. Viktorenko grinned. “Evidently something has gone wrong.”

The capsule started to roll the other way, to York’s right, and the weight of the two men came down on York again.

Beyond her window, obscuring the glass, water, silvery gray with murk, was bubbling up.

So that’s it. This is the carefully designed screwup. The Soyuz is supposed to come down on land…

“Fuck,” said Gershon.

“Welcome to Ozero Tengiz,” Viktorenko said. “Tengiz Lake, a salt lake all of twenty miles wide, and less than a hundred miles from—”

York groaned. “Do we really have to go through with this? I mean, rehearsing for an emergency water landing? After an emergency retrieval from orbit by a Soyuz?”

“Would you rather endure such an occurrence without preparation? All of your training has a context. You must understand that. Our cosmonauts are trained to handle all conceivable survivable emergencies.”

“Not the unsurvivable ones,” York said.

“But few points in a mission are true dead zones; in most situations there are options. The present exercise covers just one contingency. Of course for this particular exercise you must thank my old friend, Joseph Muldoon.”

Gershon retrieved his wad of gum from the base of his chair, mashed it in his gloved hand to make it soft, and pushed it back into his mouth. “Fuck Muldoon,” said Gershon. “And fuck you.”

The Russian watched with appalled fascination.

York said, “All right, Vladimir, we’ll play ball. What’s the drill?”

“Survival gear,” Viktorenko said. He unzipped his pressure suit.

York felt enormously weary. But she didn’t have a choice.

She took off her helmet and jammed it behind her seat.

The outermost layer of her suit was a coverall of a tough artificial fabric, with pockets and tool-loops and flaps. It opened up at the front, revealing the flaps of cloth called the “appendix,” bound up with rubber bands; when York slipped off the bands the bunched material unfolded.

With the outer suit layer lolling around her like a deflated balloon, York went to work on the inner layer, of an airtight, elasticized material.

In the restricted space, with the ceiling of the cabin just inches from her nose, movement was virtually impossible, and she kept catching at controls and switches with her feet and hands. The interior of the cabin was becoming chaotic, with the squirming bodies of the three of them and discarded bits of equipment sloshing back and forth in the confined, rocking space.

“It is easier if you help each other!” Viktorenko called cheerily.

“Fuck off,” York said.

When her pressure garment was off, she was down to her long thermal underwear. She started to pull on her survival gear: a red sweater, a jumpsuit, a jacket, thickly padded trousers, an outer jacket…

“But this is poor,” growled Viktorenko. “Poor! You must work as a team. On Mars, forty million miles from Earth, there are only your crewmates. You must turn to each other for aid as a child might turn to his mother, instinctively, without asking. Do you understand? And that aid must be offered without calculation or hesitation. It is the way you must adopt. Tomorrow we will do this better.”

“You must be kidding,” York snapped. “We have to go through all this again?”

Viktorenko, pulling on his own gear, continued to lecture them. “Listen to me. Our Soviet training is tougher than yours, and some within NASA have come to understand this. In some of our exercises, there is no chance of seeking help. There is no rescue team! For there will be none on Mars! It is all purposeful. For, when a man realizes a mistake might cost him his health or even his life, the situation is transformed. Suddenly there is an incentive to concentrate.