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‘You are go for TOI,’ capcom Bob Crippen said. ‘One minute thirty.’

‘Thank you,’ Gershon replied.

York pulled on her helmet and locked it to the neck of her pressure suit. She fumbled slightly, her fingers clumsy inside her stiff gloves. She buckled her canvas restraints around her.

Once more she felt cool, stale air wash over her face.

Ares, assembled, was a slim, fragile pencil of metal. It was a big, bright object, and it would be easily visible from Earth, as a naked-eye star passing over Cape Canaveral.

Stone said, ‘Go for ET H-two pressurization.’

‘Confirm.’

York began closing switches that would raise the temperature inside the booster’s two great External Tanks. Liquid hydrogen would boil and evaporate, and the resulting gas would force liquid propellant through the feed pipes and into the combustion chambers of the MS-II.

York was a geologist, and that was why she was going to Mars. But a crew was only three people. So, if you expected to fly in space, you had to expect to study up on a lot of mundane crap that was necessary just to keep the spacecraft and booster working.

And Natalie York’s specialty was the External Tanks.

She knew enough to give expert papers on External Tanks to the industry. In fact, she had given a paper on them, God help her.

‘One minute,’ Gershon said.

York glanced at the window to her right. She was over the west Atlantic, and it was early morning down there; she could see boats on the Gulf, ribbons of land laid out like a cartoon map.

TOI was Transfer Orbit Injection: it meant departure from Earth orbit, the start of the long transit to Mars. This was a key moment in the mission – in her life, in fact.

But a day and a half here, orbiting Earth, wasn’t enough.

She had tried to fix some of the more memorable scenes of Earth in her head. Night over Africa: the fires of nomad encampments, spread across the desert. Thunderstorms over New Zealand: lightning like flashbulbs, exploding under cottony layers of cloud, discharges sparking each other in great chain reactions covering the country.

November 6, 1986. That was the day when Ares was due to return to Earth orbit. Mission day five hundred and ninety-five. Then I’ll be back; I’ll be seeing you again. A bright Sunday morning, with my crates full of bits of Mars.

‘Ares, you are go for the burn,’ Crippen said.

Stone set the ‘master arm’ switch to ON, and York could see him checking over the rest of the instrument panel. Guidance control was set to primary; thrust control was on automatic; the craft was in the correct attitude; the engine gimbals were enabled, so that the nozzles could swivel, like eyeballs in their sockets, to direct the craft.

Eight seconds before ignition, York felt a push at her back. Ullage: small rockets firing around the base of the stack, settling the propellants before the main burn.

‘99:40,’ the commit code, started flashing up on the small computer screen before Stone. Are you sure you want to do this?

There was a small button marked PROCEED under the screen. Stone reached out a gloved finger, and pressed the button.

Gershon counted down: ‘Five. Four …’

York braced herself.

There was a distant rumble, carried through the stack, as the MS-II’s four huge engines ignited, three hundred feet away from her. The acceleration was low, almost gentle, pushing her into her couch with a soft pressure across her chest and limbs.

After thirty-seven hours of microgravity, she felt enormously heavy. But at least it was smooth: this time, the ride really did feel like the simulator. Later in the mission – when Ares had burned off its fuel, reducing its mass – the acceleration of the MS-II would be a lot tougher.

Gershon read out velocity increments. York could hear how his voice was masked, slightly, by the gum he chewed. Juicy Fruit. How can you eat gum in a spacesuit? Gershon wasn’t above sticking a wad to the inside of his faceplate, with his tongue, for retrieval later. The guy was gross.

‘Ares, Houston, you’re looking good here,’ Crippen said. ‘Right down the old center line.’

‘Thank you,’ Stone said. ‘Things look fine up here too. Rates looking good.’

She looked out her window. The Earth was falling away, visibly; it was a remarkable sight, as if the Earth was a special-effects prop, being hauled away from her window.

The sense of motion, of speed, was remarkable.

‘How’s it going, York?’ Stone asked dryly.

She started. He’d caught her rubber-necking again. ‘Fine. Fine, Phil.’

She turned back to her station. She had her job to do, and she should get to it. It won’t fail because of me. The mantra of everyone involved with the Ares program.

She stole a glance at Stone. He was watching his own readouts, eyes fixed on the goal, apparently oblivious to her again. Stone was in utter control of himself. He always was.

She began to watch the status of the External Tanks in earnest, their brief biographies spelled out by the displays in front of her.

Floods of liquid oxygen and hydrogen, sixty-four thousand gallons a minute, pumped out of the Tanks to be consumed in the engines of the MS-II. Already the pressure in the Tanks was dropping away, she read; to keep the pressure up, there was a complicated backfeed system which took vaporized gases back from the engines into the Tanks. The fuel system was surprisingly complicated, elaborate, a system of huge pipes, fountains of supercold liquid propellants cascading into combustion chambers as hot as the sun …

In the middle of the burn, Crippen said, ‘Okay, Ares, Houston, we’d like to try for the TV request.’

Stone and Gershon both stifled groans. York glanced up self-consciously, at the little Westinghouse TV camera fixed to its bracket above her head.

Crippen said, ‘We would like five minutes’ worth of TV, and we would like an exterior shot, with a narrative if you can give us one.’

‘Copy,’ Stone said.

NASA was following a policy of televising the most dramatic moments of the mission. It was all to drum up interest and enthusiasm for Ares, to allow the great American public to see what they were paying for. A feed from the Command Module to the TV companies had been provided during the launch itself, for example. But York wasn’t so sure that had been a good idea. The launch probably looked too damn comfortable, to a generation that had been brought up on the glamorous pyrotechnics of Star Wars.

Stone nodded to York, and she pushed a button on her console to start the camera.

‘Okay,’ said Stone. ‘Welcome to Ares. You’re looking at us in our Command Module here. We’re in the middle of our TOI maneuver. We see through our windows the sun going by, and, of course, the Earth. We can give you the time of day in our system of mission elapsed time: thirty-seven hours, and fifty-one minutes, and umpteen seconds. Now maybe Ralph can show you the view.’

Stone nodded to York. She reached up to pull the TV camera off its mount. Because of the thrust she couldn’t just float it; she had to pass the camera to Gershon. It felt massy, awkward, in the gentle acceleration of the MS-II.

‘Okay, Houston, here you go,’ Gershon said. ‘Here you see the Earth, falling away beneath us.’

‘Copy, Ares. Fine images.’

‘It really is a fantastic sight,’ Gershon said. ‘We’re somewhere over the Atlantic right now, and I can see the eastern seaboard, from Florida all the way up to Newfoundland, as clear as crystal. I don’t know if that’s visible in your images.’

‘We see it.’

‘And as I look to my right, I can see, just toward the limb of the planet, what must be Western Europe and Africa. I can see Spain, and the British Isles, all kind of foreshortened. The British Isles are definitely a greener color than the brownish-green that we have in Spain. There’s a little haze over Spain, and what looks like cumulus clouds piled up over the south of England.’

‘Copy. That matches the weather reports we have today.’

‘Good to know I’m looking at the right planet, Houston …’

Stone said now, ‘I got a comment about the point on the Earth where the sun’s rays reflect back toward us. In general the color of the ocean is uniform, a rich blue, except for that region – a circle, maybe an eighth of the Earth’s radius. In this circular area, the blue of the water turns to a grayish color and I’m sure that’s where the sun’s rays are being reflected back on up toward us.’

‘Roger, Phil,’ Crippen said. ‘That’s been observed before. It’s similar to a light shining on a bowling ball. You get this bright spot and the blue of the water then turns into a grayish color.’

‘A bowling ball, yeah. Or maybe the top of Phil’s head.’ Gershon laughed at his own joke.

It was true, York saw, twisting her head; there was a huge highlight on the blue surface of the ocean. Damn. The thing really is a sphere. Like a ball of steel.

‘Thank you, Ares. How about an internal position now, please? Maybe you’d like to talk us through what the TOI is all about, today.’

Gershon passed the camera back along the cabin, and York fitted it to its pedestal, so it had a panoramic view of the three of them. She caught Stone’s face; he rolled his eyes, and pointed to her, and to the camera.

York was on.

She turned back to her displays, and tried not to look up too often at the camera. Her throat felt tight, her face flushed inside her helmet; suddenly she could feel every hot crumple of her pressure suit. She keyed the press-to-talk switch on her headset cable. ‘Okay, Houston. This is our TOI maneuver: TOI, for Transfer Orbit Injection. Right now, the big engines on our main booster stage, the MS-II, are firing to push us out of Earth orbit. The MS-II is just a version of the second stage of the old Saturn V, modified to serve as an orbital injection vehicle. The S-IIs which took Apollo to the Moon had five J-2 engines. Well, we’ve got just four engines, upgrades called J-2S; the central one was removed to accommodate a lox tanker docking port. The MS-II has got more insulation, to stop boiloff, and its own small maneuvering engines, and more docking ports at the front.

‘I guess you can say we’re all pretty much relieved that the MS-II is working as well as it is; we’re going to rely on the MS-II not just to leave Earth but to slow us when we get to Mars, and to bring us out of Martian orbit when we’re ready to come home …’

She dried up. She was speaking too fast, waffling. ‘Stand by,’ capcom Crippen said. ‘Okay, we’ve cut the live feed. Ares, you’ve got a pretty big audience: it was live in the US, it went live to Japan, Western Europe and much of South America. Everybody reports good color, they appreciate the great show.’

Gershon said, ‘Keep those cards and letters coming, folks.’

‘Missing you already,’ said Crippen.

Christ, what rubbish. No wonder they cut the feed.

She hadn’t meant to say any of that; she’d wanted to say something personal.

To say how it felt, to see the Earth fall away.

She’d always criticized earlier generations of astronauts, for their lack of eloquence. Maybe it wasn’t so easy, after all.

‘ETs depleted,’ York reported. ‘Ready for sep.’

‘Roger,’ Stone said.

More than two million pounds of fuel, a treasure that had taken five years to haul up to Earth orbit, had burned off in sixteen minutes.

‘Three, two, one. Fire.’

Right now, pyrotechnics would be severing the securing bolts and frames at top and bottom of each Tank, and guillotines should be slicing across the wide feed pipes which had carried fuel from the Tanks into the MS-II’s belly. York half-expected to hear a rattle of bolts, muffled clangs, like the staging during the Saturn VB launch; but she heard and felt nothing.

‘ET sep is good,’ she said.

‘Confirm ET sep,’ said Crippen.

‘Hey, how about that.’ Gershon was looking out his window. ‘I can see a Tank.’

York twisted in her couch, and turned to look. Silhouetted against the gray-blue of Earth, the discarded ET was a fat, cone-tipped cigar case, colored muddy brown and silver. On its flank she could see bits of lettering, and small patches of orange insulation amidst the silver. Propellant dribbled from one of the severed feed pipes, a stream of crystals which glittered against the skin of Earth. The dribble made it look as if the ET had been wounded, like a great harpooned whale.

The Tank rapidly receded from Ares, falling away and tumbling slowly.

Both Tanks were moving quickly enough to have escaped Earth’s gravity field, with Ares. The Tanks would become independent satellites of the sun, lasting maybe for billions of years before falling into a planet’s gravity well.

She waved the Tank good-bye, with a little flourish of her gloved fingers. Good luck, baby.

The engines finally died. She felt it as an easing away of acceleration; a gentle reduction of the subliminal noise and vibration from the remote engines.

‘That’s it,’ Stone said. ‘Shutdown. Everything looks nominal.’

Crippen called up: ‘You got a whole room of people down here who say you are looking good, Ares.’

Gershon whooped in reply. ‘It was one hell of a ride, Bob.’

Stone said dryly, ‘From up here the burn was copacetic, Houston. Thank you.’ He began to uncouple his helmet and gloves.

York watched the receding Earth fold over on itself, becoming a tight, compact ball in space, with the Atlantic Ocean thrust outwards toward her, wrinkled, glistening.

The Ares cluster was only a couple of hundred miles further from the Earth than in its low orbit. But now, it was traveling so fast that Earth’s gravity could no longer hold it. Four hundred miles a minute, York thought: so fast that she would cross the orbit of the Moon in just twelve hours.

Crippen said, ‘Is that music I hear in the background?’

‘No,’ Stone said. ‘Ralph is singing.’