Now she had to massage her backside with a salve before she slipped on her fecal containment bag, a large plastic diaper with a pee-hole in the base. It was humiliating, but mandatory. If something went wrong in orbit it could be five or six days before she could be brought back to Earth. And you’ll be stuck inside this suit for that whole time. You’re going to have a bowel movement in that time, no matter how much steak you’ve shipped. So wear the goddamn diaper.

So here was York, beginning her journey to Mars by rubbing zinc cream over her own skinny butt.

After the diaper she slipped her legs into a kind of jock strap, and then came a tough, comfortable sports-style brassiere, and then a set of underwear, wrist and ankle length.

She was fitted with a catheter, which led to a tube attached to a urine collection device, a thing that looked like a hot water bottle.

Next two suit techs came toward her, carrying her pressure suit. It was a pristine orange carapace in human shape, its arms and legs dangling, emblazoned with the NASA logo and the mission patch. The techs sat her down and began to load her into the suit.

The suit had three layers. The inner layer was five-ounce Nomex, soft and satin-smooth against her flesh, and the outer layer was tough Beta-cloth. The middle layer, the pressure garment assembly, was a bladder of neoprene laced with a network of hoses and valves; when inflated it would compress her body with a quarter-G pressure. The suit was fitted out with pulleys and cables and joints, to help her move around when the thing was pressurized.

To York it was like climbing inside a second body, with veins of rubber, pulleys for joints, cables for muscles.

She was led out from behind the screen to the reclining couches. Stone and Gershon were already sitting there, side by side. Evidently it didn’t take as long to fit a condom as a catheter.

Six techs attended her. Two led her to her couch and sat her down, and plugged tubes from metallic blue and red connectors in her chest into a small couch-side air supply console. They lifted black rubber pressure gloves onto her hands and heavy boots onto her feet. A second pair of techs lifted her Snoopy skullcap into place, fiddling with the microphone under her chin.

It was like an extended grooming, she thought. All the touching. Maybe there was a subtext to the preparation, something deep, something reaching back to primate history; she needed to be handled, stroked, before being sent off to impossible danger.

The last two techs approached with her helmet. It was a big goldfish bowl with a thin metal rim.

She took one last sniff of the antiseptic air, listened to the murmurs of the techs, felt the faint air-conditioned breeze on her face.