He stepped to the edge of the tank. It was a big blue rectangle, like a swimming pool. T-shirted divers were already moving through the water, playing around the sim like dolphins; cables trailed through the water, around the blocky white shape of the sim itself.

It’s like a fucking kid’s game, Jones thought. Sims. How I hate sims.

He turned to see his partner, Adam Bleeker. Because his suit was so stiff, Tones had to hop around like a rabbit. “You okay, kid?”

Bleeker seemed to start. “Sure. Yeah, sure, Chuck.”

Jones snickered to himself. He knew he could put a bug up the ass of a raw kid like Bleeker, just by smiling at him. “Good boy. Welcome to the Weightless Environment Training Facility, here in sunny Texas. Beautiful sight, isn’t it?”

Bleeker turned to the water. “I think I’ve got a kind of Monday-morning feeling about this, Chuck.”

“So do I, Adam; so do I. I hate this fucking fish tank. But we gotta go through with crap like this, or they won’t let us fly their beautiful birds. You all set?”

“Let’s do it.”

His breath loud in his ears, Jones stepped onto the white platform before him. He was suspended over the pool. With a whine of hydraulics, the platform lowered his clumsy, umbilicaled bulk into the water.

The divers loaded him up with weights that would neutralize his buoyancy, and so simulate weightlessness. Then they got hold of Jones’s suited arms, and began to drag him through the water toward the sim. The water was hot, for the benefit of the divers.

The WET-F, pronounced “wet-eff,” was one of the largest simulator facilities there at MSC. The pool was set at the center of Building 29, a big circular building that had once served as a centrifuge. A sleek ambulance stood beside the pool, and there was a decompression chamber nearby. Big clunky white pieces of kit, simulators for other exercises, stood beside the water; cranes running along the roof would lower them in when required.

Jones hated the WET-F. He could never forget the presence of the water around him: the resistance to every movement, the clammy light, the glopping of bubbles, the shadowy forms of the divers.

Conditions more different from the ice-cold stillness of space it was hard to dream up.

Looming ahead in the water he could see the sixty-foot-long hulk of a mocked-up S-IVB, a Saturn third stage, with the mouth of its single engine bell gaping at him. The Multiple Docking Adapter was a squat cylinder fixed to the front of the S-IVB, and a crude, open-ended mock-up of a docked Apollo Command Module was fixed to the front of that.