They reached T minus five minutes, and the controllers moved into the final pre-automatic check.

“Guido?”

“Go.”

“EECOM?”

“Go.”

“Booster?”

“Go.”

“Retro?”

That was Donnelly.

He glanced at his console. His vision was misty. “Go,” he said.

Go, by God. Go!

Helicopters flapped over the pads: that was Bob Crippen and Fred Haise, Muldoon knew, checking out the launch weather conditions.

At T minus ten minutes, the countdown went through the last of its planned holds. After that, there were no more holds; and for Muldoon, events unfolded with the inevitability of falling off a cliff.

At thirty seconds, Muldoon stood with the rest, and faced the Saturn. Save for occasional flags of vapor from the cryogenic tanks, the pad was still static, like a piece of a factory.

There was a moment of stillness.

Plumes of steam — from the sound-suppression water system — squirted out to either side of the slim booster. Muldoon could see the last umbilical arms swinging aside. Main engine start.

Then a bright white light erupted from the base of the Saturn.

The Saturn lifted from the ground, startlingly quickly, trailing a column of white smoke which glowed orange within, as if it were burning. The booster was a splinter of bone white riding on a lozenge of liquid, yellow-white light — the fire of the Solid Rocket Boosters — light that was stunningly bright. This, the brilliance of rocket light, was what the pictures never captured, he thought; at this moment the TV images would be stopped down so much they would tame the rocket light, turn the sky dark blue, make the smoke a dull gray.

The stack arched over, following a steep curve away from the tower: the pitchover maneuver, violent, visible. Already the gantry was dwarfed by the smoke column; it looked denuded.

The Saturn punched through an isolated thin cloud, threading it like thread through a needle. The surface of the barge canal rippled, glaring with the reflected rocket light.

Then, after maybe ten seconds of the flight, the sound reached him. There was a deep reverberation that he sensed in his gut and chest, and then a clattering thunder which rained down from the sky above him, in sharp multiple slaps: that was shock waves from the booster engines, huge nonlinear waveforms collapsing and battering at each other. Through this bass pounding he could hear the people around him whooping and clapping.

Before him, silhouetted in rocket light, JFK raised up a wizened fist.

Muldoon could feel that he was in the presence of a huge release of energy: it was like being close to a huge waterfall, maybe. But this energy was made and controlled by humans. He felt a surge of triumph, a deep exhilaration… a huge outpouring of relief.

It was done. And after this last effort, he thought morbidly, he could get to work on pickling his liver seriously. It was a kind of release. No more goals.

The Saturn arced upward, its vapor trail leading right into the sun; Muldoon, dazzled, couldn’t see the first staging.

His vision was blurred. He was crying, damn it. “Go, baby!” he shouted.

Seger had been leading his group in hymns, and handing out leaflets about how Ares was carrying plutonium casks, for its SNAP generators, into space. ST. JOSEPH OF CUPERTINO IS THE PATRON SAINT OF ASTRONAUTS. JOIN WITH US IN PRAYER…

But they were mainly ignored by the crowds around them on the road, with their cameras and binoculars, their eyes shaded by hands against the sun.

When the Saturn light burst over the road, the hymn dissolved, as the members of the group turned to look.

The white needle, clearly visible, had lifted off the ground on a stick of fire. There was no sound yet.

Seger fell to his knees, dazzled. It was the first launch he’d viewed since Apollo-N. He let his leaflets fall to the dust, and tears stung his eyes. He could see some of his congregation staring at him, amazed; but it was as if he was back in the MOCR again.

He knew now he’d never left it, really; in fact, he never would.

“This is holy ground,” he said. “Holy, holy ground.”

Gulls wheeled overhead, crying, oblivious to the lethal noise cascading toward them.

Muldoon stayed in the stand until the news came that Ares had reached orbit successfully. When he got to the limousine that had taken him here — in the VAB parking lot, maybe thirty minutes after liftoff — the vapor stack still loomed in the sky above, a man-made column of cloud, miles wide and slowly dispersing.

Through the airlock’s small window, Natalie York could see stars, embedded in a black sky.

There was Jupiter, high in the sky, a good third brighter than as seen from Earth, bright enough to cast a shadow. And in the east there was a morning star: steady, brilliant, its delicate blue-white quite distinct against the violet wash of the embryonic Martian dawn. That was Earth, of course. The twin planet was close to conjunction — lying in the same direction as the sun — and was about as close as it ever got to Mars; just now it was actually a crescent in the Martian sky, with its shadowed hemisphere turned to Mars.

The constellations themselves were unchanged from the familiar patterns of her childhood. It was a sobering reminder of what a short distance they’d come: the stars were so remote that they reduced this immense interplanetary journey — achieved at the very limit of human technology, far enough to turn Earth itself into a starlike point — to a child’s first step.

The MEM had already been on the surface for three days. The crew had had to spend that precious chunk of its stay time adapting from zero G.

As she’d been warned, York had found herself a few inches taller and about fifteen pounds lighter than when she’d left Earth. At first, she’d had trouble walking around the MEM’s tight compartments; she’d kept walking into walls and forgetting which way was down. And she had the scrawniest pair of “chicken legs.” Rapid aging, huh, Adam, she thought. You were right. We’re three old people, stuck here on the surface of Mars. But anyhow, chicken legs were all she needed in Mars’s one-third gravity.

But after three days on the Martian surface, she still felt disoriented, as if the Jupiter-lit landscape beyond the window was just another plaster-of-paris sim mock-up.

When she walked out there, though, it would become real.

Stone joined her at the port. Stone, like York, was wearing thermal underwear, with his Cooling and Ventilation Garment over the top. The cooling garment was a corrugated layering of water coolant pipes. York had her catheter fitted, and Stone wore his own urine collection device, a huge, unlikely condom. The two of them looked bizarre, sexless, faintly ridiculous.

“Pretty view, huh,” Stone murmured. “You know, Ralph claims he can see the Moon with his naked eye.”

“Maybe he can. It’s possible.” The Moon ought to look like a faint silver-gray star, circling close to its master.

Stone had brought over York’s Lower Torso Assembly; this was the bottom half of her EVA suit, trousers with boots built on. “Come on, York; enough rubbernecking.”

She stared at the suit with a feeling of unreality. “That time already, huh.”

“That time already.”

She hooked the sleeves of the cooling garment over her thumbs; the hook would stop the sleeves from riding up later. She looked at her hands, her own familiar flesh, with the plastic webbing over the balls of her thumbs; it was the first step in the elaborate ceremonial of donning the suit, and the simple act had made her heart pump.