Anyway, he liked to be on the water. It was a reason for staying in Hampton as long as he had. And he’d always been struck by the siting of this spaceport there at the border of land and ocean. It was as if three elements — land, sea, and space — had come together in one place, there where the long line of stark ICBM gantries challenged the erosion of the flat landscape.

So it was appropriate to be on the water. And besides, he knew he’d have a better view of the launch at his planned anchorage than from the VIP stands.

He began to thread his way up the channel through the thousands of yachts, houseboats, dinghies, catamarans, and kayaks. The waterway was almost as choked as the roads. It was going to take him a couple of hours to get to his vantage spot, but he had the time.

The sun was coming up, through the low clouds out over the Gulf Stream.

MANNED SPACECRAFT OPERATIONS BUILDING, COCOA BEACH

The Suit Room was about the size of a large hotel suite: white-walled, windowless, surgically sterile. There were three reclining couches in the middle of the room. Three orange pressure suits, their empty helmets like gaping mouths, lay on the floor. The white light was dazzling; the room looked like a futuristic laboratory, and the suits were like the cocoons of gigantic, dissected insects.

Suit techs, in their white coveralls, caps, and surgical masks, approached the crew, applauding. Some of the techs wore that gentle, misty look that had followed York around her tours of the country in the last few months.

After her dorm room and the mess hall, it was the first truly inhuman environment York had entered today.

She felt her blood pool in her stomach.

She didn’t want her step to falter. She was grateful for the calm, purposeful stride of Phil Stone, just ahead of her; all she had to do was follow Phil and she’d be okay.

She was taken behind a screen by a couple of nurses. She had to strip down. Her own warm clothes were taken away from her; she watched the little bundle being packed away, and she wondered if she’d see the clothes again.

For a moment she stood naked, bereft of all possessions, poised between the ground and the sky.

Her chest was swabbed and a biomedical instrument belt was buckled around her waist, with wires snaking up to four silver chloride electrodes that were plastered to her chest. The little electrodes were cold and hard.