Seger fell to his knees, dazzled. It was the first launch he’d viewed since Apollo-N. He let his leaflets fall to the dust, and tears stung his eyes. He could see some of his congregation staring at him, amazed; but it was as if he was back in the MOCR again.

He knew now he’d never left it, really; in fact, he never would.

“This is holy ground,” he said. “Holy, holy ground.”

Gulls wheeled overhead, crying, oblivious to the lethal noise cascading toward them.

JACQUELINE B. KENNEDY SPACE CENTER

Muldoon stayed in the stand until the news came that Ares had reached orbit successfully. When he got to the limousine that had taken him here — in the VAB parking lot, maybe thirty minutes after liftoff — the vapor stack still loomed in the sky above, a man-made column of cloud, miles wide and slowly dispersing.

Book Six
MANGALA

Mission Elapsed Time [Day/Hr:Min:Sec] Plus 374/14:23:48

MANGALA BASE

Through the airlock’s small window, Natalie York could see stars, embedded in a black sky.

There was Jupiter, high in the sky, a good third brighter than as seen from Earth, bright enough to cast a shadow. And in the east there was a morning star: steady, brilliant, its delicate blue-white quite distinct against the violet wash of the embryonic Martian dawn. That was Earth, of course. The twin planet was close to conjunction — lying in the same direction as the sun — and was about as close as it ever got to Mars; just now it was actually a crescent in the Martian sky, with its shadowed hemisphere turned to Mars.

The constellations themselves were unchanged from the familiar patterns of her childhood. It was a sobering reminder of what a short distance they’d come: the stars were so remote that they reduced this immense interplanetary journey — achieved at the very limit of human technology, far enough to turn Earth itself into a starlike point — to a child’s first step.

The MEM had already been on the surface for three days. The crew had had to spend that precious chunk of its stay time adapting from zero G.

As she’d been warned, York had found herself a few inches taller and about fifteen pounds lighter than when she’d left Earth. At first, she’d had trouble walking around the MEM’s tight compartments; she’d kept walking into walls and forgetting which way was down. And she had the scrawniest pair of “chicken legs.” Rapid aging, huh, Adam, she thought. You were right. We’re three old people, stuck here on the surface of Mars. But anyhow, chicken legs were all she needed in Mars’s one-third gravity.

But after three days on the Martian surface, she still felt disoriented, as if the Jupiter-lit landscape beyond the window was just another plaster-of-paris sim mock-up.

When she walked out there, though, it would become real.