In the course of a healthy life, York had had hardly any experience of hospitals. The doctors here were Air Force, specialists in aerospace medicine. In her ignorance, she had expected the tests to be tough. In fact what they hit her with was so far beyond her experience that it scared the hell out of her. The tests struck her as ordeals: barbaric, brutal, often ridiculous, barely scientific.

The final test, on the Friday, was a sigmoidoscopy. She had to give herself an enema. Then she lay on a bench while a woman doctor shoved a rod up her rear, straightening out the intestines, probing farther and farther.

York was exhausted, angry, humiliated, frightened. It took a powerful effort of will to submit herself to this last invasion.

Before San Antonio, she’d treated the whole thing casually. An indulgence for Ben, maybe. An adventure. An amusing battle of wits between herself and NASA, in which she would see how far she could get before they found her out.

Now, all that had changed. She didn’t want the investment in pain and humiliation to be wasted.

Withdrawing her application became unthinkable.

Her test results, when they came, showed her medical history to be “unremarkable.” She was “in no apparent medical or psychological distress.”

Comforting, she thought. Well worth a week in medical hell.

Then she was called to Houston itself for an interview.

The plane landed at Houston Intercontinental. York made her way into the terminal, and, as she’d been instructed, found the Continental Airline Presidents’ Club. She faced a plain glass door with a one-way mirror. When she knocked, the door was opened by a NASA protocol officer, a short, dapper man in a blazer. She identified herself, and he hurried her inside — out of sight of the press? — and offered her a diet soda.

When all the candidates had arrived — it was the San Antonio group — they were to be taken in a limousine to the Nassau Bay Hilton.

When she stepped out of the air-conditioned airport building the August heat hit her in the face, moist and enclosing, as if the ground was steaming. Although the afternoon was well advanced, the sun seemed to be directly overhead.

The limousine worked its way south, toward downtown, on I-59, and then east and south around 610, the Loop. The Nassau Bay Hilton was close to JSC, more than twenty miles from the city center, out on I-45.

Houston was hot and flat, sprawling, evidently very new. The roads were well maintained and modern. Huge, colorful billboards battered at her eyes, lining the interstate. Many of the signs and ads were in Spanish; after all, Texas had nearly been part of Mexico.

There were few indications of the presence of the space program here: inflatable rockets in the used-car lots, a “Tranquillity Plaza” shopping mall, the basketball team called the Rockets.