Stone just hoped enough insects of some sort had survived the various sterilization checks to make it into the module to sustain Arabella. Gershon was all for shaking out the fruit fly pupae for her.

Flying to Mars, bound up in spiderweb. It was a beautiful image, Stone thought. [Hr:Min:Sec] 23:32:37

When he slept, Stone had his usual space dream.

Oddly, he was vaguely aware of the causes of the dream, even while he slept: the breeze from the wall fan, the falling sensations of microgravity, maybe a subconscious realization of the speed with which he was traveling.

All of it merged into a dream of flying.

He was surrounded by woods and rivers and blue skies, and he was flying, low like a bird of prey.

June 1978

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY

Sometimes the prospect of starting at Houston seemed attractive to York, compared to the clique-ridden, insulated world of the universities. She was moving to a place where people were doing great things: working on stuff of more substance than the next grant application, a place where achievement was measured by more than just the number of journal citations per year.

At other times, though, she couldn’t believe she was doing it.

She was offered plenty of advice against NASA, from senior staff on down. For example, she was told, the center of gravity of space science was not at Houston, but at the universities: like Cornell, where Sagan was based. Would her own work on Martian outflow channels have been improved if she’d pulled up stakes and moved to Texas?

In fact NASA seemed to be actively antiscience. In the wake of the Apollo 11 landing a shoal of scientists had abruptly quit: Bill Hess, Houston chief scientist; Elbert King, lunar samples curator; and Eugene Shoemaker, Apollo field geology principal investigator. Shoemaker talked about his concern for the direction of the space program, and what a poor system Apollo was for exploring the Moon: nothing but a rope and pulley, for instance, to haul surface samples into the LM’s cabin! And what evidence was there that things had gotten any better? Was the Mars program going to be any different?

It was depressing. If those eminent men couldn’t cut it inside NASA, what chance did she have?

Earnest friends shoved newspaper stories under her nose. The Tennessee Valley vs Hill case had just concluded, with the Supreme Court ruling that the new Tellico Dam couldn’t be built, because it would drown the only known habitat of a three-inch fish called a snail darter… People were dead against big, mindless technological stunts — hell, she was herself — and what could be bigger, more mindless, than NASA?