“When I had to explain to my boy — Billy — that I’m not going to Mars. Damn,” he said, and he gazed out of the window at the muggy Houston sunlight.

She couldn’t think of anything to say.

He ate a little more of his lasagna. Mission Elapsed Time [Day/Hr:Min:Sec] Plus 371/01:32:30

Gershon gave Challenger’s attitude control rockets a final blip, a squirt to make sure they were functional.

Solenoids thumped.

“Everything is copacetic, guys.”

Stone’s face, behind his scuffed faceplate, was set, almost grim. “Good. Then let’s get the hell on with it,” he said.

Gershon grinned.

With a clatter of explosive bolts, Challenger kicked free of the rest of Ares. Then came a brief burn of the retropack, the small solid rocket cluster strapped to the base of the MEM.

The burn knocked Challenger into a new, low orbit around Mars.

York, strapped into her acceleration couch, tried to relax. Challenger would stay in its new orbit for a couple of revolutions, while the two pilots and the controllers back in Mission Control checked out its systems.

The MEM’s ascent-stage cabin, buried within the conical upper heat shield, was more or less a vertical cylinder, rising up above her. The three acceleration couches were crammed into its base, side by side. She could see, at an angle, the navigation and guidance panels with their big false-horizon displays, and the alignment optical telescope thrusting down from the ceiling.

The cabin’s main windows were big triangles, angled to face downward, so the pilots, when they stood up, would be able to see their landing site. And there was a small rectangular sighting window directly above her, with a matching panel cut in the upper heat shield. York stared up at that little window; trapped between the two pilots, she felt like a prisoner, staring up at a small window in the roof of her cell.

Where the interior of the Apollo Command Module had a warm feel to it — all browns and grays and greens — this cabin was mostly unpainted aluminum, thin and delicate and somehow unfinished. She could see lines of rivets, stitching the thing together. To York, the raw look spoke of a hurried development, a less mature technology than Apollo.

Through the window York watched Ares recede from the MEM.