“Two.” Conlig grinned, unselfconsciously. “The baby’s not here; he’s with his grandmother. You didn’t know about the kids either. Hell, Natalie. And to think—”

To think they might have been mine. She turned away from the thought, and Conlig, mercifully, shut up.

She managed to get away fairly easily. Mike had become gracious.

He extracted from her another couple of promises to come visit, to tour his gyroscope plant. They parted with a handshake.

York hurried to her car, confused.

Conlig had been much more in command of himself than she remembered. All that obsessiveness, the single-mindedness, had dissipated. Maybe it had served its purpose in propelling him to where he needed to get, and had been discarded, like a spent booster stage.

Conlig looked like what he’d become, she thought: a prosperous, aspiring forty-year-old.

Mike had started a family. Set down roots. He’d put aside the obsessive, technology-oriented goals of his youth. He’d joined the human race. He’d grown up. He’d become the kind of person she always seemed to look at from the outside, but could never imagine becoming herself.

So where the hell does that leave me?

The existence of the Mars mission had distorted the whole history of the space program, she’d come to see. NASA existed for one purpose only, to land the three of them on the surface of Mars and bring them home again. Nothing else mattered — not even whatever the hell came afterward.

And in the same way, Mars had warped her own life, as if she was a scale model of the greater world.

Hell, maybe I could have been happy, and a lot better off, as a rock hound for some oil company somewhere. But the red glare of Mars had dazzled her, and to reach it she’d sacrificed everything: her career, her science, maybe, probably, her chance of having a family, even her future after the mission.

Mike Conlig was like an image of the adult she might have become. If not for goddamn Mars.

As she got into her car, alone, a black depression settled on her.

Tuesday, February 26, 1985

LYNDON B. JOHNSON SPACE CENTER, HOUSTON

Building 3 was the JSC cafeteria. York, Mars astronaut or not, still queued for lunch with the rest. She took a seat at a small table by the window. The food was sticky government issue — smothered steak with rice — washed down with soda.

The cafeteria was one of the older of JSC’s buildings, a big gloomy room with small windows and ceiling tiles, done in an early-1960s style that reminded her, claustrophobically, of her high school.

Adam Bleeker sat down opposite her. “You mind?”

She forced a smile. She hadn’t seen him approach. Bleeker’s face was calm, as empty of expression as ever. Maybe he really is like that inside. “No. I mean, hell, no, of course not, Adam. Please.”