She’d fought to get this part of the ritual changed. A little muesli and canned milk would do her fine just now. But the doctors had lectured her about the importance of sticking to a “low-residue” diet before the launch. That was to reduce the volume of her solid wastes. Fine in theory, but it turned out to mean, in practice, steak with every meal, big bleeding slabs of the stuff.

She watched the other people in the room. There was Administrator Josephson, and several senior managers from NASA centers, and from the contractors. She recognized Gene Tyson from Columbia, the firm which had built the MEM, fat and corporate and beaming complacently. There were senior astronauts in here too, Bob Crippen and Fred Haise and others. And there were Ted Curval and Adam Bleeker, grinning and wisecracking as if nothing untoward had happened; but York thought she could see the tightness of their grins, a kind of hardness behind their eyes.

Stone and Gershon, sitting alongside her, were in good form, she thought. They were just two Air Force guys joshing with the other pilots, self-deprecating, almost witty. Humble, brave, relaxed. Almost bored with it. Just another day at the office. It was a good performance.

But, under the surface — the studied casualness, the soft clink of cutlery against china, the occasional sharp ripples of laughter — the atmosphere in the mess hall was extraordinary. Strained to the point of breaking.

York couldn’t think of a damn thing to say that wouldn’t sound lame. And as the hideous meal went on she began to develop a fear that if she spoke at all her voice would crack.

She stabbed a fork into her egg, but the yolk had hardened, and only a little yellow liquid oozed out onto her plate.

Fred Haise kept checking his watch. Like every other item today, breakfast was time-lined.

The members of the crew were released to return to their dorm rooms.

York brushed her teeth. She picked up her PPK, her Personal Preference Kit. She checked over the kit. She wasn’t planning to carry much: a calendar, a yellowing Mariner 4 picture. But she found that some extra stuff had been sneaked into the kit while she’d been at breakfast. There was a little card of Saint Christopher which she recognized: her father used to say that card had gone through World War I with his father. And there was a good-luck card from her mother, and a present from her old high school, a brooch in the shape of an orbital ellipse, with a tiny ruby to represent Mars.

And here was a squat, lumpy form: a little cosmonaut, his troglodyte face leering at her from his squashed helmet, a short chain dangling from his skull. She grinned. “Hello, Bah-reess.”