Josephson opened up a folder. “The call sign for your Apollo on the Moonlab/Soyuz flight. As you know, at the instigation of Congress, we’ve been holding a competition for elementary and high-school students to come up with a name.” He began shuffling pieces of paper in the folder. “We had seven thousand entries, submitted by teams totaling seventy-one thousand schoolchildren. Each name had to be backed up by a classroom project. The judging criteria were 80 percent for the quality and creativity of the project, and 20 percent on the name’s clarity during transmission and its ability to convey the American spirit. And—”

“Oh, give me a break, Josephson. For Christ’s sake.”

“I have a short list of the twenty-nine finalists here. We’re behind schedule with this already. I thought if you and the crew could get together tonight on this, and—”

Muldoon threw back another vodka. “Fuck off,” he said.

Josephson, behind his glasses, looked shocked. He opened his mouth, then closed it again. He looked down for a minute, as if composing himself.

Then, when he looked up, his face was hard.

“Colonel Muldoon. Perhaps we could discuss this elsewhere. Your room?”

Michaels looked furious, thunderous. Vladimir Viktorenko winked at him.

Ah, hell. “Sure. Let’s go.”

Muldoon drained his vodka.

“Listen, Josephson. I—”

“You listen to me.”

Josephson was still just a skinny streak of piss, but he was in absolute control of himself, Muldoon realized; and, in the confines of Muldoon’s room, he had suddenly become genuinely intimidating. “I’m tired of your drama-queen incompetence, Colonel, the way you’re prepared to embarrass yourself, the Agency, and the government, even here. You and those other space cadets of yours are damn lucky to have gotten this flight at all. We’ve heard your public pronouncements. We know you were pissed at the cancellation of the last Moon landings. We know you think the joint flight is just a PR stunt. We know you think you’re stuck here working on creaky Soviet technology.”

Muldoon had a deepening sense of danger. “Look—”

“I had to go in front of Congress because of the way you mouthed off against the Agency. You, Muldoon. The astronauts go in there and they’re treated like heroes I went in and I was totally humiliated. That is never going to happen to me again. Is that clear? Now take this list.”

Staring into Josephson’s narrow, calculating eyes, Muldoon saw everything — his whole life, all his aspirations — narrow into that one moment. The road to Mars lies through this bottleneck, this piece of paper, the seventy thousand high-school kids and their seven thousand fucking names, in this shitty room on the wrong side of the planet. I really have to do this.

And the lightness of the Moon was, after all, a long time ago.

He took the list from Josephson. He looked at the names on it. Adventure. Blake. Eagle. Endurance.