"Why's that?"

"To keep them from getting abraded by 'interstellar shit' as you so delicately put it, my dear. The cameras focus on a set of mirrors—the mirrors are exposed but we can sort of peel layers off as the images degrade, the way you peel a layered face shield off a motorcycle helmet in a dirt race. God, you look fabulous!" She kept her gaze on the road but the delicate fan of lines around her eyes deepened with pleasure. Her hair was piled in some kind of style George could only identify as «up» and she was wearing pearls and cream silk. "So anyway," he said, "if you think of the potato, we dock on the long side, like where you'd put the butter—"

"Or the soy-based butteroid nonfat substance, with the taste of real margarine," Anne muttered, eyes on the traffic.

"You fly into this tube and then there's an airlock, but you have to suit up to go from the docker to the airlock. Then you go down this little rock corridor with the wall surfaces all sealed up and there's another airlock just in case—"

"Just in case what?" Anne wanted to know, but he hardly heard her.

"Then you get to the living quarters, which are right in the center where the shielding is best and Annie, it's beautiful inside. Kinda Japanese-looking. Most of the walls are really light panels, so we don't go nuts from the dark. They're sort of like shoji screens." She nodded. "So. There're four concentric cylinders inside, okay? The bedrooms and the toilets are around the outer cylinder. The rooms are pie-shaped—"

"Did you set aside one for the exercise and medical equipment?"

"Yes, Doctor. I put the stuff in there, but you'll have to set it up the way you want it when you get there." George closed his eyes, picturing the rest, then stared straight ahead, not seeing the traffic or San Juan, but the unique and wonderful vessel that would be their home soon, which felt cozy and nautical to him, everything in its place, neat and organized and surprisingly comfortable. "The next inner cylinder has a big common room with built-in tables and benches and the kitchen, which is good, you'll like it. Did you know Marc Robichaux can cook? French stuff. Lot of sauces, he says—"

"I know. Marc's a honey. We've been in touch on the net a lot."

"— but we're eating out of tubes until we've got gravity. Oh! And I had the robots hollow out an extra room with a stone tub, like a Japanese bathroom, where you soap up and rinse off in a little water and then soak."

"Oooh, now that sounds seriously okay," Anne purred. "How big is it?"

He leaned over and planted a kiss on her neck. "Big enough. Now. In the center, there are two more concentric cylinders for the Wolverton tube, right? Column of plants stuck in holes all around the outer cylinder. Leaves coming out into the living area, roots converging toward the center, right? All the air and almost all the wastes get filtered through the plant cylinder. I've seen them before but God, this one is beautiful! Marc has been working on the plant mix for months—"

There was more about the plants and then George went on to tell her about the bridge and how the mining robots fed the mass-drivers. And Anne gathered that he and Sofia and Jimmy would be working on AI programs that would make the asteroid self-navigating on the return trip, locking onto Earth broadcasts and Sol's radio frequency, so the system could do the kind of calculations Jimmy was doing on the trip out, in case he was killed. And there was also a VR flight simulator for the docker-lander they'd all train on, in case D.W. was…

Anne nosed the car into a parking space at that point and shut off the motor. There was a long silence, both of them sobered by the knowledge that casualties were likely. They were all being cross-trained, to build redundancy into the final crew of eight.

"The ship will just about fly itself on the way back," George said finally.

"That's the part I like," Anne said firmly. "The 'on the way back' part."

Anne still played Official Skeptic, but the past eighteen months had worked a surprising internal change in her. Time after time, it looked as though the entire mission would be scrubbed; each time, Anne marveled as Jesuit industry and Jesuit prayer were brought to bear on the problems.

The first asteroid turned out to have a faultline likely to give way under one G of acceleration. The second appeared perfect until a remote assay showed too high an iron content, which would foul the engines over the long term. A few nights later, the evening prayers of a Jesuit physicist were interrupted by the sudden realization that his load-bearing calculations were unduly limited by the specification of a roughly cylindrical rock. He finished his prayers, rapidly rethought his assumptions, and woke up Jesuit colleagues in several different time zones. Twelve hours later, Sofia Mendes was authorized to contact Ian Sekizawa and instruct him to broaden the search to include asteroids of nearly any shape, as long as they were roughly symmetrical around the long axis. Within days, the reply from Ian came: he'd located a rock that was more or less ovoid, would that do? It did, nicely.

There was a similar crisis over the biphasic cladding for D.W.'s docker. The material used to sheathe spaceplanes had to function in the unimaginable cold of space as well as in the blast-furnace heat of entry and exit from an atmosphere. Military orders, being the most lucrative contracts, took precedence over civilian projects. Intense prayer, along with astute technical and diplomatic skill, was dedicated to this problem. Unexpectedly, the military government in Indonesia fell and the Indonesian Air Force's order for a spaceplane was canceled, freeing up material for the private order that had been placed months earlier by Sofia Mendes on behalf of an anonymous group of investors.

After a while it became hard to ignore how, against odds, the dice kept coming up in favor of the mission. The crew members went on with their training, their work unaffected by the waxing and waning of confidence, but they all experienced varying degrees of amazement. Even the Jesuits were divided. Marc Robichaux and Emilio Sandoz smiled and said, "See? Deus vult" while D. W. Yarbrough and Andrej Jelacic shook their heads in wonder. George Edwards and Jimmy Quinn and Sofia Mendes remained agnostics on the question of whether these events were minor miracles or major coincidences.

Anne said nothing but as the months passed, it was increasingly difficult to resist the beauty of belief.

And so, as fate or chance or God would have it, nineteen months and twelve days after Anne began compiling her list with "1. Bring nail clippers," she was able at last to cross off the wry final entry: "Vomit in zero G." Unable to stomach even playground swings as a child, she was resigned to the idea that having the contents of her abdomen drift lungward would probably be sufficient to set off the space sickness that still afflicted 15 percent of all travelers, despite medical advances. Not completely pessimistic about her chances of avoiding this, she wore the antinausea transdermal patch that D. W. Yarbrough swore by, and swore at it when she could breathe again.

On the whole, however, she was able to congratulate herself. Everyone had expected her to be frightened so, of course, she decided to confound their expectations by enjoying the ride. And she did. The vertical liftoff was incredibly noisy but there was very little sense of motion. Then there was the thrill of building to four Gs, of being plastered against her couch as they roared along toward Mach 1, when suddenly the noise dropped off behind them. The sky quickly got blacker and blacker and then D.W. turned the afterburner off and she was thrown forward against the belts so hard she thought she'd ruptured her heart. Then she caught sight of the moon and the turquoise rim of the Earth against the dense darkness, straight out the cockpit window ahead of her. As Asia rolled under them into a sunset of great and memorable beauty, Anne felt herself drift away from the couch and begin to float.