But he wasn’t going to give up. The effectiveness of the PR wasn’t really the point. Anyway, maybe he could trade on his old NASA contacts to get closer to the pad than most of the rest. Just a little TV coverage would make his mission worthwhile.

Someone in the wagons began to sing, and the rest took it up, as the mules made their mournful way along the packed road. After a couple of words Seger recognized the song. It was the hymn the astronauts had read out from lunar orbit, to mark the deaths of their colleagues. Abide with Me…

He wondered where Fay was. Maybe she was watching on TV out in Houston. He hadn’t seen her since he’d told her, by phone, he was setting up his church. Maybe she’d forgive him, for leaving her behind like that.

On the horizon the Saturn VB was visible as a finger of white, bathed in light from every angle.

Seger was moved, unaccountably. He grabbed at the crucifix pinned to his lapel, so hard the metal dug into his fingers.

MANNED SPACECRAFT OPERATIONS BUILDING, COCOA BEACH

York reported to the exercise room, where a nurse weighed her, took her temperature, and checked her heart rate and breathing and blood pressure. It was all brisk, thorough, but somehow perfunctory. As if the nurse — a cheerful woman in her forties — wasn’t really interested in the results. After all, NASA knew all about York’s health by then; fragments of her body, scrapings and fluid samples, already lay around a dozen NASA facilities, as prized as bits of moonrock.

But it made sense on another level. It was all just part of the ritual. Like a priest robing up, she thought. Today, I am different from the run of mankind, and must be treated as such.

She made for the mess hall. There she had to sit in line with her two crewmen, at a table which crossed the head of another, longer table. There was a curtain behind her, and on the table was a gaudy flower bowl with a ribbon which read “Ares,” and a little display of silk and bows in the shape of the mission badge. Two rows of people sat down the longer table, looking at her, with a mundane ridge of sauce bottles and pepper shakers between them.

It was like a wedding breakfast, she thought.

The meal was another prelaunch ritual: nothing on the menu but steak, eggs, juice, toast, and coffee. Every astronaut, back to Al Shepard himself, had sat down to the same fare before The Flight.

York tried to eat, but the steak was thick and massive, and tasted like rubber in her mouth.