An old Star Trek rerun was flickering through its paces. The warp engines were in trouble again, and Mr. Scott was crawling through some kind of glass tube with a wrench.

“If only it was as easy as that,” Mike mumbled.

His head was lifted off the pillow, and, bleary, he was squinting at the TV.

“I didn’t mean to wake you, Scotty.”

He reached for a cigarette. “You want something else to drink?”

“No. The brandy is keeping me awake, I think.” The comforting smell of stale smoke reached her; it reminded her of her mother. “It’s times like this I wish I smoked.”

He grunted. “Don’t even think about it.”

She debated telling him about the form in the bedside drawer.

But he was checking the clock. “I think I’d have woken up anyhow. They should be running the latest burn about now. Something inside me, some dumb kind of tinier, wakes me up at moments like this, even when I’m twenty miles away from the facility.”

“The burns. The tests. Always the fucking tests. Mike, unless you can figure out a way to relax, you’ll make yourself crazy.”

He blew out smoke. “I think we’re all a little crazy already.”

The trouble was, driving people like this had become part of NASA culture. We all worked eighteen hours a day for eight years to get a man on the Moon with Apollo, and if we have to do it all over again to get to Mars, well, by gosh, that’s what we’re going to do…. But mistakes had been made on Apollo, and those mistakes had claimed lives.

She put her hand over his; she could feel how it was bunched up, almost into a fist. She stroked his knuckles. “Listen. I’ve been thinking. We don’t see enough of each other.”

“Hell, I know that. But what can we do about it? We’ve always known what the deal would be.”

She sought for words. “But I think our lives are kind of hollow, Mike; we’ve been neglecting ourselves too much. Too many other things to distract us.” She waved a hand at the motel room. “We need something more than patches of neutral territory like this. We need something solid. I think we should get a place to live—”

He snorted out a billow of smoke. “Where? We’re lucky if we’re both in the same state for more than twenty-four hours.”

She was irritated at his dismissiveness. “I know that. ‘Where’ doesn’t matter. Anywhere. Here, or Berkeley maybe. And it wouldn’t even matter if the damn place was empty for three-quarters of the year. It would be ours, Mike; that’s the point. It would be a kind of base for us. At the moment, all we have is this. Holiday Inn. I don’t think it’s enough.” I’m twenty-eight years old, for God’s sake.