BANANA RIVER

Gregory Dana had stayed overnight in the Holiday Inn. He’d been lucky to get a room. Every motel in central Florida had been booked since February. Some of them were even charging overnight rates for the use of poolside deck chairs. But the inn management had remembered Dana and given him the room he habitually used on his working visits to the Cape.

In the motel lobby, Dana bought up bumper stickers, T-shirts, button badges for Jake and Maria. ARES: I WAS THERE. The youngsters, with Mary, were with Sylvia at Hampton; both of them were teenagers — and hauntingly like their father — and they would probably be too cool for all this junk; but Dana didn’t mind. Let them save it for their own kids.

He’d hired a small cabin cruiser for the day, and he picked it up well before dawn. He set off down the river. He was aiming for an anchorage three miles south of the pad.

He could have gotten a pass for a grandstand, or followed the events of the launch from one of the NASA centers, of course. But this seemed more appropriate. He preferred to be alone. He needed the space to remember Jim, today of all days — the day when Jim might have been one of three Mars explorers, wadded into the tip of the huge rocket on Pad 39A.

Anyway, he liked to be on the water. It was a reason for staying in Hampton as long as he had. And he’d always been struck by the siting of this spaceport there at the border of land and ocean. It was as if three elements — land, sea, and space — had come together in one place, there where the long line of stark ICBM gantries challenged the erosion of the flat landscape.

So it was appropriate to be on the water. And besides, he knew he’d have a better view of the launch at his planned anchorage than from the VIP stands.

He began to thread his way up the channel through the thousands of yachts, houseboats, dinghies, catamarans, and kayaks. The waterway was almost as choked as the roads. It was going to take him a couple of hours to get to his vantage spot, but he had the time.

The sun was coming up, through the low clouds out over the Gulf Stream.

MANNED SPACECRAFT OPERATIONS BUILDING, COCOA BEACH

The Suit Room was about the size of a large hotel suite: white-walled, windowless, surgically sterile. There were three reclining couches in the middle of the room. Three orange pressure suits, their empty helmets like gaping mouths, lay on the floor. The white light was dazzling; the room looked like a futuristic laboratory, and the suits were like the cocoons of gigantic, dissected insects.

Suit techs, in their white coveralls, caps, and surgical masks, approached the crew, applauding. Some of the techs wore that gentle, misty look that had followed York around her tours of the country in the last few months.

After her dorm room and the mess hall, it was the first truly inhuman environment York had entered today.

She felt her blood pool in her stomach.

She didn’t want her step to falter. She was grateful for the calm, purposeful stride of Phil Stone, just ahead of her; all she had to do was follow Phil and she’d be okay.

She was taken behind a screen by a couple of nurses. She had to strip down. Her own warm clothes were taken away from her; she watched the little bundle being packed away, and she wondered if she’d see the clothes again.

For a moment she stood naked, bereft of all possessions, poised between the ground and the sky.

Her chest was swabbed and a biomedical instrument belt was buckled around her waist, with wires snaking up to four silver chloride electrodes that were plastered to her chest. The little electrodes were cold and hard.

Now she had to massage her backside with a salve before she slipped on her fecal containment bag, a large plastic diaper with a pee-hole in the base. It was humiliating, but mandatory. If something went wrong in orbit it could be five or six days before she could be brought back to Earth. And you’ll be stuck inside this suit for that whole time. You’re going to have a bowel movement in that time, no matter how much steak you’ve shipped. So wear the goddamn diaper.

So here was York, beginning her journey to Mars by rubbing zinc cream over her own skinny butt.

After the diaper she slipped her legs into a kind of jock strap, and then came a tough, comfortable sports-style brassiere, and then a set of underwear, wrist and ankle length.

She was fitted with a catheter, which led to a tube attached to a urine collection device, a thing that looked like a hot water bottle.

Next two suit techs came toward her, carrying her pressure suit. It was a pristine orange carapace in human shape, its arms and legs dangling, emblazoned with the NASA logo and the mission patch. The techs sat her down and began to load her into the suit.

The suit had three layers. The inner layer was five-ounce Nomex, soft and satin-smooth against her flesh, and the outer layer was tough Beta-cloth. The middle layer, the pressure garment assembly, was a bladder of neoprene laced with a network of hoses and valves; when inflated it would compress her body with a quarter-G pressure. The suit was fitted out with pulleys and cables and joints, to help her move around when the thing was pressurized.

To York it was like climbing inside a second body, with veins of rubber, pulleys for joints, cables for muscles.

She was led out from behind the screen to the reclining couches. Stone and Gershon were already sitting there, side by side. Evidently it didn’t take as long to fit a condom as a catheter.

Six techs attended her. Two led her to her couch and sat her down, and plugged tubes from metallic blue and red connectors in her chest into a small couch-side air supply console. They lifted black rubber pressure gloves onto her hands and heavy boots onto her feet. A second pair of techs lifted her Snoopy skullcap into place, fiddling with the microphone under her chin.

It was like an extended grooming, she thought. All the touching. Maybe there was a subtext to the preparation, something deep, something reaching back to primate history; she needed to be handled, stroked, before being sent off to impossible danger.

The last two techs approached with her helmet. It was a big goldfish bowl with a thin metal rim.

She took one last sniff of the antiseptic air, listened to the murmurs of the techs, felt the faint air-conditioned breeze on her face.

Then the helmet was lowered over her head. At her neck, metal rasped against metal.

She was sealed in. The sounds from outside were diminished, her vision distorted by the curvature of the glass of the helmet. The noise of her own breathing, and of the blood pumping at her neck, was loud in her ears.

Then she had to lie back in the chair and wait, for a half hour that seemed much longer. Her air-supply console was filling her suit with pure oxygen, purging her system of nitrogen.

The suit techs fussed around the three of them, checking things, smiling through the glass, their faces broad and unreal. The techs moved through an intricate, silent choreography. They were like workers around three queen ants, she thought.

Ralph Gershon had a suit tech drape a towel over his helmet, and he lay back in his reclining chair with his gloved hands folded over his chest. He showed every sign of taking a nap.

When the waiting period was done, the suit techs covered her boots with yellow overshoes and lifted her up out of the chair. They swapped her air hoses over to a suitcase-sized portable unit and handed the unit to her to carry.

The three of them formed up in a line — Stone first, then York, Gershon last — for the short walk out of the MSOB to the transfer van.

It was an effort just to walk. The weight of the suit would have been bad enough, but she had to fight with every step against the grip of the inflated garment around her legs and waist; it was like trying to walk against elastic rope. It was confining, alienating.