York was like a lot of professional women Stone had met before, he thought. That is, she had one hell of a chip on her shoulder.

But he envied and admired her inner resources.

To him, Stone was ready to admit, the mission was everything: flying the craft, doing his job when they eventually hit the Martian dirt, getting home again.

York, by contrast, had an awareness of the grandeur of it all: that remarkable experience, the interplanetary flight. There were depths inside her which York was able to tap, and — as she’d come out of her shell during the mission — to articulate to others.

She was almost poetic, at times.

Stone felt he understood how important that was. He’d hoped it would work out that way. And according to Houston, even the ratings for their weekly TV briefings — which had dipped pretty fast after the excitement of the launch — were reviving again, mainly thanks to York.

He dried himself off with a towel, and then he had to suck up stray drops inside the shower with a vacuum hose. It was fiddly and time-consuming.

In the end, as usual, by the time he was able to dismantle the shower and fold it away he felt frustrated and tense once more, the benefits of the shower lost. [Hr:Min:Sec] 13:12:51

Stone set himself at the Mission Module’s control station. He ran quickly through the parameters of the cluster’s operation: consumables usage, attitude control propellant usage, cryogenic store boiloff…

Most of it looked nominal.

But the big solar panels, sticking out like wings from the sides of the S-IVB booster, were getting too hot. The panels could tilt through twenty-five degrees, so that the sun’s radiation would come in on them at a slant, reducing their temperature. Stone put together a recommendation that Mission Control should think about performing the tilt a few days ahead of schedule; minutes later, Houston replied that they would evaluate the proposal.

Then there was a problem with the feed system of one of the steerable dish antennae, which was targeted back at Earth. There was a three-decibel loss in downlink signal strength: maybe some part of the system had cracked under thermal stress. That was a potentially serious problem; it would reduce the bit rate at which high-quality images could be sent back to Earth. The ground said they wouldn’t take any action on that one at this time, but would do some simulations and analysis first.