There was no privacy, of course; probably one of the maids had been bribed to smuggle in all this crap. Anyhow, she didn’t care. She had only one truly private item to carry.

She lifted up her sport shirt. Pinned on the inside, hidden by the mission logo badge, was the silver rookie pin given her by Ben Priest out at Jackass Flats, all those years ago.

She slipped the pin into the PPK and zipped up the kit.

She hefted the little pack. The PPK was coated with Beta-cloth, a nonflammable synthetic material as tough as a fire hose. The PPK was just a mundane little personal item, but even the PPK was built for spaceflight.

She took a last glance around the room, with its single bed and its little window, and the color TV on the stand. She felt a surprising tug, as if she was leaving a nest. In no way was this her home; she’d been there for only a few days. Nevertheless, it was the last place on Earth she could claim as hers. The last place she had slept before the launch.

She took a pencil and signed her name on the back of the wooden door. A little cosmonaut tradition, shown her by Vladimir Viktorenko.

Then, with determination, she opened the door and stepped out of the room.

BANANA RIVER

Gregory Dana had stayed overnight in the Holiday Inn. He’d been lucky to get a room. Every motel in central Florida had been booked since February. Some of them were even charging overnight rates for the use of poolside deck chairs. But the inn management had remembered Dana and given him the room he habitually used on his working visits to the Cape.

In the motel lobby, Dana bought up bumper stickers, T-shirts, button badges for Jake and Maria. ARES: I WAS THERE. The youngsters, with Mary, were with Sylvia at Hampton; both of them were teenagers — and hauntingly like their father — and they would probably be too cool for all this junk; but Dana didn’t mind. Let them save it for their own kids.

He’d hired a small cabin cruiser for the day, and he picked it up well before dawn. He set off down the river. He was aiming for an anchorage three miles south of the pad.

He could have gotten a pass for a grandstand, or followed the events of the launch from one of the NASA centers, of course. But this seemed more appropriate. He preferred to be alone. He needed the space to remember Jim, today of all days — the day when Jim might have been one of three Mars explorers, wadded into the tip of the huge rocket on Pad 39A.