Stone slapped her on the shoulder. “You did good,” he said.

“I nearly threw up.”

“But you didn’t. I told you you got potential, York.”

“Yeah. Maybe.”

Standing there on the mundane tarmac of Ellington, she looked up at the lidded clouds, remembered how it had been, in those few seconds, to be weightless. She let her hands drift up from her sides.

Stone was watching her, observing, evaluating.

Embarrassed, she tucked her helmet under her arm, nodded curtly to Stone, and headed for the personal gear room.

Thursday, November 27, 1980

TYURATAM COSMODROME, KAZAKHSTAN

The sky was empty, a harsh blue. Beyond the launch facilities, the wind whipped sand across the nude, flat steppe. Bert Seger was glad he was safely tucked away behind the glass of that observation room, three miles from the pad.

Behind him there was a murmur of conversation from the other guests — program managers, minor politicians, academicians, celebrities — who seemed more intent on the food and drink, which was lavish enough, and on pursuing whatever low-level political and diplomatic gains were still to be wrung out of this joint mission.

Seger had binoculars around his neck; he raised them and fixed them on the launch complex itself.

The N-1 booster stood tall on its pad. N for Nosityel — the Carrier. It sat on a porchlike structure at the lip of a flame pit. The mobile service structure had already been lowered; at three-quarters of an hour before liftoff the towers had been swung down through ninety degrees to the ground, leaving the booster exposed. The booster was a vertical line, out of place in the huge, horizontal landscape.

Seger saw propellants vent from the N-1’s multiple stages, and flags of vapor smeared across the still, layered air. The lower three stages made up a slim, truncated cone, flaring at the base, and the upper stages and the spacecraft itself were an upright cylinder stacked on top of that. The upper stages alone were about the size and shape of a Saturn IB. And somewhere inside that complex, Seger knew, the Soyuz T-3 spacecraft was buried; and somewhere within that were two cosmonauts, sitting out the final minutes of their countdown.

The whole thing looked like a piece of the Kremlin. Nobody could mistake an N-1 for an American design. But the N-1 was nevertheless the stepbrother of the Saturn, fathered by a group of postwar German exiles who’d built on the same Nazi technology taken to White Sands by von Braun and his people. Another child of the V-2.

“Here.” Fred Michaels stood at his elbow; he held out a glass of vodka. “You look like you could use this.”

Seger eyed the drink doubtfully. “Thanks, but I don’t encourage drinking on launch days, Fred.”

“Drink. That’s an order. Bert, it’s their launch, not ours.”

Seger forced himself to laugh and took the drink. “You’re right. I suppose I’m a control nut.”