Then, it was said, she’d end up serving as a nonscientific grunt on training trips. Making sandwiches for astronauts. And if she came back into the mainstream of academic science later, she’d have a hell of a gap in her bibliography. She could be blowing a promising career.

Besides, you only have to watch Dallas to see what kind of a cultural desert you’re walking into. And the climate down there in Texas, my dear. Oh, my!

She got stubborn. She even started defending the space program. As an application of government technology, space was somewhere between true science and the opposite. At least it didn’t actively kill people. By contrast she cited Ben Priest as an example of an intelligent, thoughtful adult who was able to survive, precariously maybe, in the dumb-fighter-jock snake pit of NASA.

Anyway, the only way she was going to get to Mars was via Houston. So that settled the argument, as far as she was concerned.

She didn’t see Mike Conlig.

When she’d finally gotten up the nerve to tell him about her application, he didn’t seem surprised. He didn’t even seem to take it seriously, she thought.

He called a few times, from Marshall or Santa Susana. But he wouldn’t come to Berkeley, to talk, or help her close out her life.

Maybe he was being patronizing — maybe he thought she was following a whim, that she wasn’t serious, she wouldn’t see it through. If that was true, he didn’t know her too well after all.

Or — she wondered — perhaps he suspected something about her and Ben Priest. She’d fallen into bed with Ben only once more since that time at Pasadena all of two years ago. But she was no actress; she knew she couldn’t help showing what had happened, in her voice, her eyes, her body language… that is, if Mike was perceptive enough to see, caring enough to devote the attention.

Which, she figured sadly, he wasn’t.

But their conversation was too stiff, too many things left unspoken, for her to tell for sure.

There were a lot of details.

She got another letter. It said she was to report to Houston to start her ground training in just six weeks, which was a ludicrously short period of time for any working scientist to disengage herself from her commitments. She entered into a regime of eighteen-hour days. She tried to close out her research work with final papers and draft contributions to joint work, and she reassigned the graduate students who were working with her, and she disengaged herself from her teaching commitments.