She stared back, frozen, her mind suddenly empty. Well, you’ve griped often enough about the inarticulate grunts they send into space. Now’s your chance to do better.

For some reason she thought of Ben Priest. What would he advise her?

Just say what you feel, Natalie. Don’t hide behind technicalities. And don’t let it embarrass you.

“Houston, Ares. I guess what strikes me now is that we humans have spawned at the bottom of a hole. A deep gravitational hole dug into space-time by Earth’s mass. And of all the humans who have ever lived, all the billions of them, only the three of us — Phil, Ralph, and I — have ever climbed to the lip of that hole…”

She was aware of Gershon and Stone exchanging doubtful glances; Stone waved Gershon to be still.

York stared back at the receding Earth. She held up her hand, and covered the Earth-Moon system with her palm. “I’m holding up my hand now, and the whole of human history — including even the voyages to the Moon — are hidden from my view by my palm. We’ll spend another year in space before we see Mars loom close, just as Earth is falling away now. A year in this collection of tin cans, with nothing but the stars and the sun beyond the windows. We know it’s going to be difficult, despite all the training and the preparation. But what’s important is that we’ve come out, over the edge of the gravity hole, and now we’re going to see what lies beyond. We have indeed gone up into night, Houston.”

Stone nodded. He was still looking at her, thinking.

York shivered. Suddenly the Mission Module — drifting through space with its ticks and whirs and smells of food and stale farts — seemed like a little home to her, impossibly fragile, the only island of warmth and light in all that dark night.

Sunday, August 15, 1976

BETWEEN EARTH AND MOON

After a couple of days of floating around inside the Command Module in their long johns and jumpsuits, Jones, Dana, and Stone started to help each other back into their pressure suits. To go through the Lunar Orbit Insertion burn they were going to have to return to their couches and strap on their canvas harnesses.

They finished up a meal: soup and cheese and spreads on crackers, with a grapefruit-orange mixture to drink. Dana had a plastic bag of pea soup. He would take a spoonful of the soup, tap the handle, and the glob of soup would float off, still holding the shape of the spoon. But when he poked the liquid with a fingertip, surface tension hauled it quickly into a perfect, oscillating sphere. Dana leaned over to suck it into his mouth, a little green marble of pea soup.

Jim Dana found life in microgravity startling, the endless unexpected details enchanting.

Most of it, anyhow.