Sitting in the familiar comfort of Ben’s Corvette, she felt a great relief when they got away from the JSC area. And it was a relief to be with Ben.

She turned to him. He drove steadily, not speaking. If he reached out to her -

But he didn’t. He sat stiffly, as if unaware of her. Hell, he probably doesn’t know how to handle this any better than I do.

Her relationship with Ben was an odd thing, she thought. Almost as odd as her long-running relationship with Mike Conlig. Sure. So what’s the common factor, York?

When she and Ben came closer, physically, they talked a lot less. And when they did it was about superficials. Ben didn’t seem able even to contemplate leaving Karen, and as for York, her on-off relationship with Mike Conlig continued its stuttering course, accreting a kind of emotional mass the longer it lasted. Are Ben and I having an affair, then? Just the occasional jump in the sack?

It was as if their two bipolar relationships drew the two of them, Ben and York, apart every time they got close.

She was sure of one thing, though. If her first morning at JSC was anything to go by, she was going to need Ben’s patient company just to keep her sane.

Houston dismayed her. The place sweltered under a layer of air that was hot, laden with humidity, and thick with smog. The land was flat and at sea level, without a hill for a hundred miles, and crisscrossed by muddy rivers and swamps. Out of town, the soil was a gluey mixture the locals called “gumbo,” a mess of mud, clay, and oyster shells; pines and snarled oaks thrust reluctantly out of fields of stiff, bristly grass.

Ben drove her out to the San Jacinto monument, a grandiose 1930s obelisk topped by a Texas star, celebrating the victory of General Sam Houston over the Mexicans. They rode to the observation deck at the top. Around the monument’s landscaped park, square miles of oil refineries stretched away. From here, JSC might not have existed; the oil-price fluctuations of the 1970s had been good to Houston, and to York, looking down at the great spaghetti bowl of pipelines below, it was obvious that Houston was built on oil money, and the space program was no more than just another local employer.

Around the base of the monument, there was a faint reek of petrochemicals.