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.