“You know,” she said dreamily, “maybe if it is ending, it’s fitting it should be like this. In the air, I mean. Do you remember that flight to San Francisco? You had just got accepted by the Astronaut Office…”

It had been Malenfant’s third time of trying to join the astronaut corps, after he had applied to the recruitment rounds of 1988 — when he wasn’t even granted an interview — and 1990. Finally in 1992, aged thirty-two, he had gotten an interview at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, and had gone back to his base in San Diego.

At last the Astronaut Office had called him. But he was sworn to secrecy until the official announcement, to be made the next day. Naturally he had kept the secret strictly, even from Emma.

So the next day they had boarded a plane for San Francisco, where they were going to spend a long weekend with friends of Emma’s (Malenfant tended not to have the type of friends you could spend weekends with, not if you wanted to come home with your liver). Malenfant had given the pilot the NASA press release. Just after they got to cruise altitude, the pilot called Emma’s name:

Would Emma Malenfant please identify herself? Would you please stand up?

It had taken Emma a moment to realize she was being called, for she used her maiden name, Stoney, in business and her personal life, everywhere except the closed world of the Navy. Baffled — and wary of Malenfant’s expressionless stillness — she had unbuckled her seat belt and stood up.

I hope you like barbecue, Ms Malenfant, said the pilot, because I have a press release here that says you are going to Houston, Texas. Commander Reid Malenfant, US Navy, has been selected to be a part of the 1992 NASA astronaut class.

“…And everybody on the plane started whooping, just as if you were John Glenn himself, and the stewards brought us those dumb little plastic bottles of champagne. Do you remember, Malenfant?” She laughed. “But you couldn’t drink because you were doubled over with air sickness.”

Malenfant grunted sourly. “It starts in the air, so it finishes in the air. Is that what you think?”

“It does have a certain symmetry… Maybe this isn’t the end, but the beginning of something new. Right? We could be at the start of a great new adventure together. Who knows?”

She could see how the set of his shoulders was unchanged.

She sighed. Give it time, Emma. “All right, Malenfant. What UFOs?”

“Tanzania. Some kind of sighting over the Olduval Gorge, according to Bill.”

“Olduval? Where the human fossils come from?”

“I don’t know. What does that matter? It sounds more authentic than most. The local air forces are scrambling spotter planes: Tanzania, Zambia, Kenya, Mozambique.”

None of those names was too reassuring to Emma. “Malenfant, are you sure we should get caught up in that? We don’t want some trigger-happy Tanzanian flyboy to mistake us for Eetie.”

He barked laughter. “Come on, Emma. You’re showing your prejudice. We trained half those guys and sold the planes to the other half. And they’re only spotters. Bill is informing them we’re coming. There’s no threat. And, who knows? Maybe we’ll get to be involved in first contact.”

Under his veneer of cynicism she sensed an edge of genuine excitement. From out of the blue, here was another adventure for Reid Malenfant, hero astronaut. Another adventure that had nothing to do with her.

I was wrong, she thought. I’m never going to get him back, no matter what happens at NASA. But then I never had him anyhow.

Losing sympathy for him, she snapped, “You really told Joe Bridges to shove his job?”

“Sweetest moment of my life.”

“Oh, Malenfant. Don’t you know how it works yet? If you took your punishment, if you sweated out your time, you’d be back in rotation for the next assignment, or the one after that.”

“Bullshit.”

“It’s the way of the world. I’ve had to go through it, in my own way. Everybody has. Everybody who wants to get on in the real world, with real people, anyhow. Everybody but you, the great hero.”

“You sound like you’re writing my appraisal,” he said, a little ruefully. “Anyhow, ass-kissing wouldn’t have helped. It was the Russians, that fucking Grand Medical Commission of theirs.”

“The Russians scrubbed you?”

“It was when I was in Star City.”

Star City, the Russian military base thirty miles outside Moscow that served as the cosmonauts” training centre.

“Malenfant, you got back from there a month ago. You never thought to tell me about it?”

Through two layers of Plexiglas, she could see him shrug. “I was appealing the decision. I didn’t see the point of troubling you. Hell, Emma, I thought I would win. I knew I would. I thought they couldn’t scrub me.”

Far off, to left and right, she saw contrails and glittering darts. Fighter planes, perhaps, converging on the strange anomaly sighted over Olduval, whatever it was, if it existed at all.

She felt an odd frisson of anticipation.

“It took them a morning,” Malenfant said. “They brung in a dozen Russian doctors to probe at my every damn orifice. A bunch of snowy-haired old farts with pubic hair growing out of their noses, with no experience of space medicine. They ought to have no jurisdiction over the way we run our programme.”

“It’s their programme too,” she said quietly. “What did they say?”

“One of them pulled me up over my shoulder.” Malenfant suffered from a nerve palsy behind his right shoulder, the relic of an ancient football injury, a condition NASA had long ago signed off on. “Well, our guys gave them shit. But the fossil stood his ground.

“Then they took me into the Commission itself. I was sat on a stage with the guy who was going to be my judge, in front of an auditorium full of white-haired Russian doctors, and two NASA guys who were as mad as hell, like me. But the old asshole from the surgical group got up and said my shoulder was a ‘disqualifying condition’ that needed further tests, and our guys said I wasn’t going to do that, and so the Russians said I was disqualified anyhow…”

Emma frowned, trying to puzzle it out. It sounded like a pretext to her; Malenfant had after all flown twice to the Station before, and the Russians must have known all about his shoulder, like everything else about him. Why should it suddenly become a mission-threatening disability now?

Malenfant put the little jet through a gut-wrenching turn so tight she thought she heard the hull creak. “I knew we’d appeal,” he said. “Those two NASA surgeons were livid, I’m telling you. They said they’d pass it all the way up the line, I should just get on with my training as if I was planning to fly, they’d clear me through. Hell, I believed them. But it didn’t happen. When it got to Bridges—”

“Was your shoulder the only thing the Russians objected to?”

He hesitated.

“Malenfant?”

“No,” he said reluctantly. “They smuggled shrinks” remarks into their final report to NASA. They should have presented them at the Commission… Hey, can you see something? Look, right on the horizon.”

She peered into the north. The horizon was a band of dusty, mist-laden air, grey between brown earth and blue sky, precisely curving. Was something there? — a spark of powder-blue, a hint of a circle, like a lens flare?

But the day was bright, dazzling now the sun was climbing higher, and her eyes filled with water.

She sat back in her seat, and her various harnesses and buckles rustled and clinked around her, loud in the tiny cockpit. “What did it say, Malenfant? The Russian psych report.”

He growled, ” ‘Peculiarities.’ ”

“What kind of peculiarities?”

“In my relations with the rest of the crew. They gave an example about how I was in the middle of a task and some Russkie came over nagging about how we were scheduled to do something else. Well, I nodded politely, and carried right on with what I was doing, until I was finished…”