So that’s it. This is the carefully designed screwup. The Soyuz is supposed to come down on land…

“Fuck,” said Gershon.

“Welcome to Ozero Tengiz,” Viktorenko said. “Tengiz Lake, a salt lake all of twenty miles wide, and less than a hundred miles from—”

York groaned. “Do we really have to go through with this? I mean, rehearsing for an emergency water landing? After an emergency retrieval from orbit by a Soyuz?”

“Would you rather endure such an occurrence without preparation? All of your training has a context. You must understand that. Our cosmonauts are trained to handle all conceivable survivable emergencies.”

“Not the unsurvivable ones,” York said.

“But few points in a mission are true dead zones; in most situations there are options. The present exercise covers just one contingency. Of course for this particular exercise you must thank my old friend, Joseph Muldoon.”

Gershon retrieved his wad of gum from the base of his chair, mashed it in his gloved hand to make it soft, and pushed it back into his mouth. “Fuck Muldoon,” said Gershon. “And fuck you.”

The Russian watched with appalled fascination.

York said, “All right, Vladimir, we’ll play ball. What’s the drill?”

“Survival gear,” Viktorenko said. He unzipped his pressure suit.

York felt enormously weary. But she didn’t have a choice.

She took off her helmet and jammed it behind her seat.

The outermost layer of her suit was a coverall of a tough artificial fabric, with pockets and tool-loops and flaps. It opened up at the front, revealing the flaps of cloth called the “appendix,” bound up with rubber bands; when York slipped off the bands the bunched material unfolded.

With the outer suit layer lolling around her like a deflated balloon, York went to work on the inner layer, of an airtight, elasticized material.

In the restricted space, with the ceiling of the cabin just inches from her nose, movement was virtually impossible, and she kept catching at controls and switches with her feet and hands. The interior of the cabin was becoming chaotic, with the squirming bodies of the three of them and discarded bits of equipment sloshing back and forth in the confined, rocking space.

“It is easier if you help each other!” Viktorenko called cheerily.

“Fuck off,” York said.

When her pressure garment was off, she was down to her long thermal underwear. She started to pull on her survival gear: a red sweater, a jumpsuit, a jacket, thickly padded trousers, an outer jacket…

“But this is poor,” growled Viktorenko. “Poor! You must work as a team. On Mars, forty million miles from Earth, there are only your crewmates. You must turn to each other for aid as a child might turn to his mother, instinctively, without asking. Do you understand? And that aid must be offered without calculation or hesitation. It is the way you must adopt. Tomorrow we will do this better.”