And here was she, Natalie York, the great skeptic about space, being transformed into one of the great icons of the deadly space glamour business.

She looked up at the screen, at a thousand reproductions of her own face, and shivered.

The tours, the press conferences, the photo opportunities continued.

Her message was formulaic, coached by the Public Affairs Office people. I need you! Do good work!

Everywhere she went, there were people: thousands of them, all gazing at her, smiling, with an odd pregnant distance about them. As if they longed to touch her. And always, they applauded her.

She hadn’t thought much about the future. To her, “after the mission” was so remote it might as well not exist; it was as if her whole life was going to end at the moment she stepped into the Command Module.

But her life afterward would, inexorably, go on. And in a sense nothing she actually did on Mars — not even her precious geology — would matter so much as the simple fact that she’d been there.

She thought of the looks on the faces of the press and public, as they gazed on people who had been into space, to the Moon. When I get back they will look at me in the same way. They do even now. And they’ve a right to; it’s their money.

And what about herself? Would she become like Joe Muldoon, a kind of walking ghost, her life transformed by her brief, dreamlike — and forever unrepeated — interval on Mars?

She began to see a darker side to the fascination with which people regarded her. Sure, they wanted to witness that woman — that otherwise ordinary person — who might walk on Mars, take an unimaginable evolutionary step on their behalf.

But they also thought she might die.

Monday, February 18, 1985

MARION, OHIO

The little cemetery struck York as classic small-town: neat, well tended, the white marble gravestones gleaming in their rows. The open grave was like a wound in the cultivated soil, waiting to be healed.

Somehow, the astronauts, current and former, among the mourners at the graveside — Joe Muldoon, Phil Stone, others — didn’t look out of place, in their crisp black suits, their military bearing. Astronauts were small-town heroes to perfection, nothing more, nothing less.

The day was glorious, the sky an infinite blue, the sunlight sharp with the edge of early spring.

York felt numb, empty, unable to mourn.

Peter Priest had died a squalid death, of a cocaine overdose, at age twenty-five. He’d pissed away his life, she thought brutally, and achieved nothing; what the hell was there to mourn in that? And she shouldn’t feel guilty for her absence of feeling. The kid would probably have opposed this heavyweight turnout for his funeral anyhow; it was all his mother’s idea.