“Oh, much better!”

“Dad, I’ll be all right. Tell Mom I’ll be all right.”

“What good will that do?” he said. “She’s going to be tied up in knots until you’re back home.”

“I know,” Johanssen mumbled. “But…”

“What? But what?”

“I won’t die. I really won’t. Even if everything goes wrong.”

“What do you mean?”

Johanssen furrowed her brow. “Just tell Mom I won’t die.”

“How? I don’t understand.”

“I don’t want to get into the how,” Johanssen said.

“Look,” he said, leaning toward the camera, “I’ve always respected your privacy and independence. I never tried to pry into your life, never tried to control you. I’ve been really good about that, right?”

“Yeah.”

“So in exchange for a lifetime of staying out of your business, let me nose in just this once. What are you not telling me?”

She fell silent for several seconds. Finally, she said, “They have a plan.”

“Who?”

“They always have a plan,” she said. “They work out everything in advance.”

“What plan?”

“They picked me to survive. I’m youngest. I have the skills necessary to get home alive. And I’m the smallest and need the least food.”

“What happens if the probe fails, Beth?” her father asked.

“Everyone would die but me,” she said. “They’d all take pills and die. They’ll do it right away so they don’t use up any food. Commander Lewis picked me to be the survivor. She told me about it yesterday. I don’t think NASA knows about it.”

“And the supplies would last until you got back to Earth?”

“No,” she said. “We have enough food left to feed six people for a month. If I was the only one, it would last six months. With a reduced diet I could stretch it to nine. But it’ll be seventeen months before I get back.”

“So how would you survive?”

“The supplies wouldn’t be the only source of food,” she said.

He widened his eyes. “Oh… oh my god…”

“Just tell Mom the supplies would last, okay?”

• • •

AMERICAN AND Chinese engineers cheered together at Jiuquan Mission Control.

The main screen showed Taiyang Shen’s contrail wafting in the chilly Gobi sky. The ship, no longer visible to the naked eye, pressed onward toward orbit. Its deafening roar dwindled to a distant rumbling thunder.

“Perfect launch,” Venkat exclaimed.

“Of course,” said Zhu Tao.

“You guys really came through for us,” Venkat said. “And we’re grateful!”

“Naturally.”

“And hey, you guys get a seat on Ares 5. Everyone wins.”

“Mmm.”

Venkat looked at Zhu Tao sideways. “You don’t seem too happy.”

“I spent four years working on Taiyang Shen,” he said. “So did countless other researchers, scientists, and engineers. Everyone poured their souls into construction while I waged a constant political battle to maintain funding.

“In the end, we built a beautiful probe. The largest, sturdiest unmanned probe in history. And now it’s sitting in a warehouse. It’ll never fly. The State Council won’t fund another booster like that.”