The astronauts eyed him coldly.

He wondered what to say. “I’m grateful.”

None of them was comfortable. He sensed anger. Frustration. Henry could see conflict in Geena’s face, and Frank Turtle’s.

It wasn’t hard to understand why.

NASA tended to think of itself as a heroic agency, capable of taking on whatever challenges were thrown at it. But the truth was, all the way back to Mercury, they had never launched a manned mission without every aspect of it being timelined, checklisted, simulated and rehearsed, over and over, until every possible glitch had been identified and contingency-planned, until the crew knew the mission so well they were actually desensitized to its dangers.

Running a mission like this — making it up as they went along — was alien to a NASA culture that went back half a lifetime. Culture shock for us all, he thought, with a certain relish.

Geena was still talking. “Your suitability training will be performed here, in the US. Your crew training will take place in Star City. The generic training will be at a mixture of locations; we’re agreeing the objectives with the Russians now, and—”

“Woah. Star City? Isn’t that Moscow?”

Turtle said, “Our launch manifest is full, in the window we have. You’ll be taken to orbit in a Russian Soyuz.” He smiled, weakly. “The Russians are working with us. Planet in peril. Hands across the sea. All that stuff.”

“Oh.” Oh, shit.

Geena grinned, with relish of her own. She said sweetly, “Didn’t anyone tell you? And by the way.”

“What?”

“I’m running your training.”

He was to be flown to Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio, to report to the School of Aerospace Medicine there. And Geena was going to take him there, in a T-38, flying from Ellington Air Force Base close to JSC.

The T-38s were supersonic jet trainers which the astronauts used to maintain their flying proficiency, and they used them as personal taxi cabs, taking themselves and their colleagues back and forth between NASA sites at Houston and the Cape and Alabama and elsewhere. The pilots had been flying the little planes since the 1960s, and they were a familiar sight in the skies over Houston.

But Henry had never flown one before. And certainly not one piloted by his ex-wife.

It took him an hour just to get suited up, in a flight suit, helmet, boots, parachute, survival kit. The tech had to walk him from the personal gear room to the runway, because Geena was already in the cockpit.

Close to, the T-38 was, he conceded, an elegant piece of engineering, a sleek white cylinder with a vanishingly small wingspan, barely wide enough to accommodate two adult human beings under tiny blister canopies.

Geena didn’t acknowledge him as he walked up. The tech helped him climb into the cockpit, and he closed his canopy, and found himself staring at the back of Geena’s helmeted head.

As soon as he was aboard she taxied the jet to the end of the runway. Dials and sticks moved back and forth in his cockpit, a baffling choreography. The jet roar was too loud for him to hear anything through the intercom, if anybody troubled to speak to him, and in his helmet he was sweltering in the cockpit, trapped in a bubble of Houston heat.

When he breathed through his oxygen mask he could smell burned rubber.

The jet accelerated suddenly, throwing him back into his seat. The T-38 was in the air in seconds, and then took off like a dart, tipping itself up and rising almost vertically. The needle nose shot through thin cloud, and when he looked back the ground was turning to a faint grey-green, interspersed with cloud shadows. Ahead, the sky was fading to a rich purple, and — if he read the dials right — they were already at forty-five thousand feet, higher than any commercial jet.

Geena levelled off, and looked back at him.

Suddenly, unexpectedly, exhilarated by being hurled up here, into this bowl of height and speed and light, he gave her a jaunty thumbs-up.

Her voice crackled in the intercom. “So you haven’t upchucked yet.”

“I won’t upchuck.”

“There’s a bag in your flight suit leg pocket.”

“I won’t upchuck.”

“We ought to be sending pilots to the Moon, not scientists with their heads up their backsides. It’s an old argument.”

“Geena, all our arguments are old arguments,” he said.

“This flight is part of the training. Part of your familiarization with the forces you’ll be experiencing during the launch and reentry. Did they tell you?”

“Geena, there is no they. You are they.”

“Remember where that bag is.”

And she threw the plane into a snap roll, a one-hundred-eighty-degree turn in seconds, and then barrel rolls and a parabolic arc and a steep dive over the Gulf of Mexico. Henry’s helmet was bumped against the canopy, and his body strained at the harnesses restraining it, and sunlight and shadows wheeled around him.

Ultimately, he was proud he lasted all of ten minutes before using the bag.

The medical testing, run by Air Force and NASA doctors, struck Henry as brutal and invasive. Hospitals were mostly a mystery to Henry, who had been spared illness save for popped shoulders and busted fingers, the work hazards of the field geologist. Now he found that such exotica as barium meals and enemas and endoscopic probes of the intestines were not just exquisitely painful but also utterly humiliating.

It wasn’t even as if he was genuinely ill, in which case he’d have to endure one or two such tests, and even then they’d be spaced apart. Henry was hit by one after another.

For instance the endoscopy was going to be so painful, he was told, he’d normally be given a shot of Valium in advance. But he’d already had Valium for the gastroscopy, so he had to do without it. And when he went in for his chest X-rays he still had the electrodes over his chest which had been fixed there to monitor his heart, and so the X-rays were marked by small black dots. And so on.

Some of the tests were more relevant to spaceflight. The medicos checked the balance mechanism in his ears, by pouring hot water into one ear, or cold water, and then swapping over. By watching his eyes, seeing if they flickered, the doctors claimed to be able to tell if the temperature differential made him dizzy, and how much.

He was put into a spinning chair, and told to close his eyes and tip his head up and down, from his knees to the head rest. A few minutes of this was enough to make him want to throw up, which, it turned out, was the idea.

Back at JSC, he was put through altitude chamber tests.

The chamber was a big metal box with thick glass portholes, through which protruded TV lights and cameras. It turned out that some of the cameras belonged to the doctors, and some to the press; such was the public interest in the mission he was already a reluctant media star.

He was taken up to a simulated forty-four thousand feet, and the air bled out of the chamber slowly. When the air was down to a quarter sea-level pressure, his lung sac expanded so much it ached; his bowels distended, making him fart explosively. Eventually the air pressure got so low he was forced to pressure-breathe into his oxygen mask: when exhaling, he had consciously to force air out of his lungs.

He had never in his life had to control, consciously, his breathing. It scared him.

They took him back to sea level. And then, without warning, they hit him with a rapid decompression test.

Suddenly he was at twenty-five thousand feet, and in the middle of a simulated bail-out. The air was sucked out of his lungs, and pain stabbed in his ears; when they returned the air, the room filled up with a cloud of condensed vapour.

He wasn’t sure what the surgeons were learning from such things. But he was learning, brutally, a lot more respect for his ex-wife and the other pilots.