It probably meant, too — it occurred to her suddenly — that she wouldn’t have any kids.

Did she really want to sacrifice all that, to go through so much shit, just for an outside chance of walking on the slopes of Tharsis?

But her fingers itched to get into that dirt, to dig around, to get beyond the loose surface crust of Mars.

The very next day, she was supposed to meet Mike. She’d booked them into a hotel in downtown L.A., so they could spend some time together.

After last night she felt truly shitty about going ahead with the meeting, or date, or whatever the hell she was supposed to call it at that point in her relationship. But she decided to go anyhow; she didn’t see much choice.

Before they parted, Ben dug a leaflet out of his jacket pocket. “Here,” he said. “For you.”

Eighteen hours later, in their L.A. motel room, York rubbed the tension out of Mike’s shoulders, and at last he slept.

After that it was York who seemed to be stuck awake.

She was stiff and a little cold, and the sheets beneath her were crumpled, digging into her back as she lay there. The mellow feeling from the minibar brandies had worn off, leaving her feeling stale, her heart overstimulated.

And besides, she had something she needed to talk over with Mike.

She opened the drawer of the bedside table and pulled out Ben’s leaflet.

In the soft glow of the splinters of light on the ceiling she couldn’t read any of it, but she could make out some of the images: the famous photograph of Joe Muldoon standing on the Moon with his hand across his chest, little schematic diagrams of spacecraft flying around the Solar System. At the back there was a tear-off application form; she ran her fingertip along the perforation.

Issued by the National Academy of Sciences on behalf of NASA, the leaflet was tided “Opportunities for Scientists as Astronauts.” It set out a glowing future in space: expanded laboratories in Earth orbit, more stations around the Moon, even semipermanent scientific colonies on the surface to follow the preliminary toe-dips of Apollo. And then there were NASA’s goals beyond cislunar space: the first manned Mars mission, orbital surveys of Venus — and even, more ambitious still, manned flights to the asteroids and the Jovian system. All within the lifetimes of the scientists it was meant to enlist.

It was an application form to be an astronaut.

She’d been tempted to throw the leaflet into the trash. She was immensely disappointed by that garbage: typical NASA dreaming, predicated on an unwavering expansion of funding and an unrelenting political will. For that, she should sacrifice her career, throw away a decade of her life? After all, none of that astounding program was real…

None of it. Except, maybe, Mars.