Beyond the heat haze of the freeway, the downtown skyscrapers thrust out of the plain like a collection of launch gantries, isolated, crowded. There were water towers, big oval tanks, like the Martian fighting machines from The War of the Worlds. They passed roadside neon thermometers, which read high nineties or low hundreds, even so late in the day.

Houston was going to be very different from the older cities she’d grown used to. Do I really want to live here?

All the other candidates were talking about the death of Elvis, a few days earlier. She had nothing to say to that — in fact the endless, obsessive coverage bored her — and she was glad when they got to the hotel.

The Nassau Bay Hilton was a tower block by the shore of Clear Lake, a few minutes from JSC. The receptionist’s voice contained a strong Texas twang, and there was a gift store in the lobby, with ten-gallon hats and cowboy boots. Her room, a single, was plush. It had a view of a marina, and a bright blue swimming pool, which she wouldn’t have time to use.

In the morning she was up at five-thirty. Three-thirty, Berkeley time. The sun was already high.

Her interview was directly after breakfast. And so there she was, with the time not yet seven-thirty, being driven in a limousine west along NASA Road One.

The cow pasture to her right, along the north side of the interstate, had been fenced off. Blocky black-and-white buildings were scattered across the plain, each numbered with big black round figures, like toys from some giant nursery.

The driver — a beefy, sweating man called Dave — took a right into a broad entrance. On the right was a granite sign saying “Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center.” And on the left a Saturn V lay on its side, its stages separated and mounted on wheeled trailers.

Dave grinned when he caught her gawping at the Saturn. “That’s just a test article,” he said. “The first one built. The story is that when it looked as if we might be canning Apollo altogether, there was talk of taking one of the flight articles and putting it on display here, or maybe at the Cape. A man-rated moon rocket as a lawn ornament.” He chuckled and shook his head. “Can you believe it?”

It seemed to take forever for the limousine to drive past the grounded Saturn. The booster was aging. York could see corrosion around its big rivets, cobwebs on the big A-frames which supported it, and some of the fabric parts around the engine bells were stained with lichen. The Stars and Stripes painted on the flank of the fat second stage was washed out, the red of the stripes running down toward the ground.