Beyond the Saturn there was a small rocket garden. York recognized a Redstone, the slim black-and-white pencil which had thrown the first Mercury capsules on their suborbital hops. The Redstone was upright, but held to the ground by wires, like Gulliver. And she saw a Space Shuttle, a wind-tunnel test article, a scale model of a ship which had never been built; it was an airplane shape, upright against the gleaming white of a big external fuel tank.

The Shuttle’s body looked chunky, clumsy. But York was entranced by the curve of the wings, set against the crude cylinders of the throwaway rockets around it; the spaceplane looked elegant, a stranded relic of a lost future.

She was checked into security, in Building 110, and given a photocopied map and directed toward Building 4. She set off on foot.

The buildings were black-and-white blocks. Many of them were clustered around a kind of courtyard, where thick-bladed grass shone in the sunlight, bright green. There were cherry trees, and a duck pond with an attractive stone margin. But no ducks: Ben Priest had told her how they left too much mess, and had been chased away. We’re not here for ducks. There was a flat tropical heat, the air still, suffused by the chirp of crickets. It was hard to move around; she could feel the heat drain energy out of her.

She tried to imagine working here.

Bicycles leaned up against every building, and there were big sand-filled ashtrays by the doorways, with stubs sticking out of them.

There was an air of calm. The blocky buildings didn’t have the feel of most government establishments. It was more like a university, she thought. In fact, Dave, her driver, had called it the “campus.”

JSC had its own Martian water towers. There was an “antenna farm,” a fenced-off field of big white dishes, turned up like flowers. And, here and there, huge tanks of liquid nitrogen gleamed.

Inside Building 4, the air-conditioning was ferocious; it must have been thirty degrees cooler than outside. The building was actually quite gloomy, even cramped; it had small ceiling and floor tiles, and the walls were painted a 1960s corporate yellow-brown. She felt her spirits dip a little. It was like an aging welfare office.

She took the elevator. The interview was in the “astronaut library.”

When she knocked, the door opened, and a man greeted her: tall, wire slim, with gray-blond hair and blue eyes. He wore jeans and a Ban-Lon shirt. He smiled at her easily and shook her hand.

She recognized him. He was Joe Muldoon. A moonwalker was shaking her hand.

It hit her suddenly, a change of perspective, in a surge. It really was the space center. There were astronauts there, for Christ’s sake. Veterans.

She tried to look at Muldoon, but found it impossible to face him directly; her vision seemed to moisten up, and it was as if he was glistening, shining.