Every time a blow landed York could feel the fuel pod shudder.

“It’s not working, Ralph.”

“The hell it isn’t.”

He spun like a hammer thrower, and with two hands he delivered one final almighty blow to the cask.

The graphite split right in two.

The fuel pod came free. York stumbled backwards, her boots scuffing at the gumbo in an effort to keep upright. The cables helped her that time, giving her just enough leverage to keep from falling.

The fuel pod went tumbling to the surface, like a dropped relay baton.

Gershon lumbered across to her, his face framed by his visor. “Hey. You okay?”

“Sure. How’s the pod?”

They bent over the little metal cylinder, where it lay in the pink gravel. There was a hairline crack down one seam.

“How about that,” Gershon said. “We busted it. We nuked Mars.”

“Well, it was only a mock-up. Probably the real thing will be tougher.”

“Christ, I hope so.”

“Okay, guys,” the supervisor said. “Both your heart rates are showing a little high. That is definitely it for now. Take five. We’ll resume in an hour.”

Jorge Romero came barging into the simulation chamber. “Goddamn it,” he stormed. “You did it again, Natalie! You broke my damn SEP! And you were a half hour behind schedule!”

York, free of her cabling, was sitting on the Rover with her helmet on her lap, cradling a mug of coffee. She smiled at him. “Oh, take it easy, Jorge. It’s only a sim.”

Romero, small, purposeful, pink with anger, marched back and forth across the fake Martian surface, sending up little sprays of gravel. “But that’s three times out of the last three that my SEP implementation has been screwed up…”

Her training had been intense, the compressed schedule committing her and the others to eighteen hours a day in complex exercises like this, for long weeks at a stretch. She felt her patience drawing thin as Romero paced about. I don’t have time for these debates, Jorge. But she owed him an answer.

“Look,” she said to Romero, “I know how you feel. But you have to make allowances, Jorge. Out on a field trip, you can take as long as you want, days or weeks thinking over a sample if you need to. It’s not like that here. The Marswalks can last only a few hours each. They’ll be even more curtailed than the old Apollo moonwalks. So we have to plan out every step. These simulations are” — she waved a hand — “choreography. It’s a different way of working, for you and me. Real time, they call it.”

Romero was still pissed. “Goddamn it. I’m going to write a memo to Joe Muldoon. All these screwups. Those Flight Operations people just can’t be running the mission properly.”

“But that’s the point of the sim, Jorge. We’re supposed to break things.” She found a grin spreading across her face, but she suppressed it. “I’m sorry, Jorge. I do know how you feel. I sympathize.”

He glared at her. “Oh, you do? So you haven’t gone over to the operational camp altogether?”

She winced. “That’s not fair, damn it.”

His anger seemed to recede. He sat on the Rover, small beside her ballooning white suit. “Natalie. I guess you should know. I’m resigning from the program.”

She was startled. “You can’t.” Romero was a principal investigator for Martian geology. If he was lost to the program, its scientific validity would be greatly diminished. “Come on, Jorge.”

“Oh, I mean it. I’m almost sure I’m going to do it.” He looked around at the sandpit sourly. “In fact, I think today has made up my mind for me. And if you had any integrity left, Natalie York, you’d quit, too.”

“Jorge, are you crazy? You’ll have a geologist on Mars. What more do you want, for Christ’s sake?”

“No. You’ll be a technician, at best. Natalie, Ares is a marvelous system, operationally. Scientifically, it’s Apollo all over again. Look at this.” He waved a hand around the sim site. “All the stuff you’ll actually use to explore Mars. Pulleys and ropes. The MET. That damn beach buggy, the Rover, with its carrying capacity of, what, a few hundred pounds? And the way you fumble with those gloves and that ludicrous handling rod.” His voice was tight, his color rising; he was genuinely angry, she saw “Natalie, all you have to do is look around you to see where the balance of the investment has gone. Did you know they’ve spent more on developing a long-lasting fabric for a Martian Stars and Stripes than on the whole of my SEP?”

Operational. Romero had used the word as if it was an obscenity. Once, York thought, she would have, too. But maybe she saw a better balance. A space program, especially something right out on the edge like the Ares shot to Mars, had to be a mix of the operational and the scientific. Without the operational, there wouldn’t be any scientific anyhow.

She tried to explain some of this to Romero.

“Save it, Natalie. I’ve gone over it all a hundred times. I’ll not be convinced. And as for you—” He hesitated.

“Yes? Say it, Jorge.”

“I think you’ve sold out, Natalie. I supported your application to NASA. Damn it, I got you in here. I hoped you could make a difference. But you’ve gone native. Now we have Apollo all over again, the same damn mistakes. But this time — in part, anyhow — it’s your fault. And mine. And I’m sorry.”

He climbed off the Rover, stiffly, and walked away.

York found herself shaking, inside her pressure suit, from the ferocity of his attack.

In addition to their rising workload as launch day approached, the crew were still expected to attend PR functions. The astronauts called it “time in the barrel.” Usually a head of a chamber of commerce would need a showpiece astronaut to attend a reception and shake hands and pose for pictures and spread goodwill.

York was lousy at it, and she tended to be kept behind the scenes, mostly doing goodwill tours to various NASA and contractor facilities. Gershon spent a lot of his time at Newport, where even so close to launch, the Columbia engineers were struggling to comb out the MEM problems highlighted by the D-prime mission and other tests, and complete their flight article, the MEM that would land on Mars.

York was sent up to Marshall.

They put her up overnight at the Sheraton Wooden Nickel in Huntsville, a town which the tourist information called “Rocket City.” The next day she was taken on a tour of Marshall by a couple of eager young engineers. Marshall had been hived off into NASA from the Army Ballistic Missile Agency, but its military origins were obvious; in fact it occupied a couple of thousand acres within the Redstone Arsenal. She was shown a spectacular rocket garden at the Space Orientation Center, and shown around a huge test stand used in the development of Saturn F-1 engines. Saturn stages were assembled here, and then, bizarrely, transported by water routes to the Cape; they were shipped on barges down the Tennessee River, then moved via the Ohio and Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico, and then around the coast to Florida, where they were brought into the Kennedy waterways.

She spent most of the day in von Braun’s old conference room, with around twenty engineers. Most of them were young Americans, thus confounding her prejudice about Marshall’s domination by Germans. Each of the engineers got up for a half hour, to talk about his or her specialty, while the rest of them remained in the room, half looking at the speaker, and half at her. It seemed odd. Didn’t those guys have anything better to do than look at her looking at Vu-graphs of rockets?

She was taken to a party at the Marshall people’s country club, called the Mars Club.

There, she started to understand them a little better.

This was an isolated group, stuck there in Alabama, and they ate and drank spaceflight. To them, an astronaut was worthy of much greater homage than you were liable to receive in, say, Houston: and the Ares crew especially, as embodiments of von Braun’s thirty-year-old dream of flying to Mars. Having an astronaut come to Alabama made it all real — and reassuring, in the midst of the usual crisis over the overall NASA budget and the future of the centers.