“I didn’t know there was one.”

“Well, there you are,” he said heavily.

“Goddamn it, Ben, I hate it when you give me advice.”

He laughed. “Only because I’m right.” He checked the time on his Rolex, which he’d put on her bedside table. “Shit. I’ll have to go. Classroom work for me, too, now. The latest modifications to the NERVA control systems.”

“So,” she said. She stroked his back. “We’ve still got unfinished business, huh?”

“Yeah. Unfinished business. We’ll talk.”

He swung his legs out of the bed.

A couple of weeks later, life got more interesting.

York’s cadre was moved on to systems training. York worked her way up through the hierarchy of training systems, at first paper-based, later electronic and computer-driven, heading toward a more complete representation of the spacecraft she would fly.

There were single-systems trainers — fragments of Apollo control consoles — set up in offices scattered through Building 5, with computers running simple simulations behind them; and there were integrated trainers for each of the three crew stations in an Apollo Command Module.

Finally she was taken into Building 9, the Mock-up and Integration Lab. Full-size training mock-ups of spacecraft littered the floor of the hangar-sized building. The equipment was for generic training, to develop skills applicable to any flight; the more elaborate simulators were assigned to specific missions.

This was a low-tech place, the trainers scuffed and scarred, visibly aged. There were chalked graffiti on the wall, and the workbenches scattered around the place were littered with mundane items: paper towels, a big pail full of empty Coke cans. No astronaut on the active roster came down here. If she came in on a weekend, the place was generally deserted; after so many years of routine, long-duration missions, there was pretty much a nine-to-five atmosphere about much of JSC.

Building 9 made her feel her place, she thought; as an ascan she was a long way down the food chain.

She tried out the air-bearing facility, an office chair suspended by a hovercraft-like cushion of downward air jets. She floated over the epoxy-resin floor like an ice-hockey puck, pulling her way around a mocked-up Skylab workstation, learning about action and reaction in an environment that simulated zero G, if only in two dimensions.

At last she clambered into the Crew Compartment Trainer, a full-scale mock-up of an Apollo Command Module, which sat like a metal teepee in the middle of the floor of Building 9. The hatch was incredibly small, and she had to swing herself in feetfirst. The three couches were just metal frames slung with canvas slings, constricting, jammed against each other. Under the couches, in the fat base of the cone, was a storage area called the lower equipment bay.