There is no answer. This feels inevitable to Joan now, even though just one second ago she would have said it was nearly impossible. Losing all three in the cabin was something to pretend was a real fear, but it would never actually happen.

Joan leans forward. “Navigator, this is Houston, come in.”

Ray: “Flight, this is Surgeon. Given the rate the pressure has been dropping, Hagen, Redmond, and Danes are certainly unconscious, suffering from the bends. But, given the length of exposure, I believe they may be dead.”

Joan can feel the mass of this moment as it takes hold in her brain stem, making her neck stiff, her head heavy.

Greg: “Flight, EECOM—the cabin pressure is rising.”

Jack: “Rising? Confirm you said rising.”

“Rising, sir. PSIA returning to normal levels.”

“Danes found the hole,” Jack mutters.

Joan gets back on the loop. “Navigator, this is Houston. Can you confirm you have found the hole and patched it?”

Ray: “She’s not going to be able to answer.”

“Lydia, come in,” Joan says again.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

And then Vanessa’s voice.

“Houston,” she says. “I think I am the only one left.”

Seven Years Earlier

Joan’s younger sister, Barbara, had called her one morning to tell her about a commercial she’d seen on TV late the previous night.

“It said, ‘This is your NASA.’ ”

“What?” Joan said. She was in her kitchen, pouring herself a cup of coffee, the phone held between her shoulder and her ear. She was about to head to the car. Her first class of the day at Rice University was a survey course on the cosmos, offered to freshmen of all majors. Although she had a PhD focusing on an analysis of magnetic structures in the solar corona, she was spending her expertise teaching eighteen-year-olds the definition of a parsec. But, as her department chair had pointed out when she’d gently asked for a different assignment, “someone has to do it.” Apparently that someone just so happened to be the only woman in the department.

“What do you mean, ‘This is your NASA?’ ”

“That’s what she said, the woman from Star Trek. Hold on, I wrote it down somewhere. I saw the commercial just before putting Frances to bed, but I was able to grab a pen before it was over. Here it is: ‘This is your NASA, a space agency embarked on a mission to improve the quality of life on planet Earth right now.’ It was Nichelle Nichols—that’s her name! That was driving me crazy. They are recruiting astronauts. Scientists. To go up into space. They specifically said they wanted women.”

Joan put the lid on her coffee. “They said female scientists?”