Josephson said, “Do you want me to go find Phil and—”

“No. I’m the commander. Here.” He stabbed at a name. “This one.”

Josephson looked at the paper. “Grissom”

“The commander of Apollo 1.”

Josephson studied Muldoon’s face for a moment; then he nodded. He turned and left the room.

Muldoon splashed water in his face. Then he went back to the bar and started working on getting seriously drunk.

Thursday, April 10, 1980

ELLINGTON AIR FORCE BASE, HOUSTON

It took her an hour to get suited up, in the personal gear room.

The safety instructions alone were intimidating enough. Hundreds of facts were thrown at her, about D-rings and lanyards and oxygen bottles and hypoxia and survival procedures… My God. And I’m only going to be a passenger in the damn thing.

But here she was, trussed up in a flight suit, with an oxygen mask, straps everywhere, a parachute, emergency oxygen, intercoms, survival kits for several unlikely environments tucked into her pockets. There was a sick bag in a pouch on her leg. She even had her own flight helmet, a World War I-style Snoopy hat. Look at me, the newest fighter jock hero.

She walked out to the field. There was Phil Stone, the senior astronaut, who was going to take her up today. Stone was tall, proudly bald, the best part of fifty. He grinned and shook her hand with a big gloved mitt. “Welcome to the carny ride,” he said.

She smiled back uncertainly.

Beyond him, a gleaming toy on the tarmac, was the T-38 itself. The trainer was an intimidating white dart. The wings were just little stubs, incredibly short, and the sleek white shape had more of the feel of a rocket about it. It seemed incredible, against intuition, that such a small, compact machine could support itself in the air and fly.

You’re getting down to the wire, Natalie. You say you want to be an astronaut. You mock the hero-pilot tendency. That’s fine.

But it means you have to cope with experiences like this.

Two techs helped her climb up and lower herself into the cockpit. The T-38’s white-painted walls were only just far enough apart for her to squeeze in. She would actually be in a separate cockpit behind Stone’s, under her own little bubble of glass.

Stone clambered aboard, in front of her, and spoke over the intercom. “Natalie, can you hear me?”

“Sure, Phil. Loud and clear. And I—”

He cut her off. “Final safety instructions,” he said. “I’ll tell you when to close your canopy bubble. Do it slowly, Natalie. Now, your parachute is set to open as soon as you eject. That’s appropriate for low altitude. Later I’ll tell you when to change the setting to high altitude, when you need to have a delay between ejection and the chute opening; you do that by fastening the hook to that ring on your chute, and…”