The talk was affecting the astronaut differently. There was a look of hope on Muldoon’s face, Michaels recognized; a delicate, fragile hope, as if Muldoon thought the magical possibility — we might go to Mars — might melt away if he longed for it too warmly.

He wondered how much, if at all, Muldoon was aware of what was really going on, under the surface. Looking at Muldoon’s angry, open face, Michaels felt vaguely ashamed of his calculation. In fact, Muldoon’s presence seemed to be working on him the way he’d hoped it would work on Agronski.

Joe Muldoon felt scared to say anything, to disturb the difficult, mysterious process of negotiation. In case he made it all somehow go away.

Mars. They’re still talking about Mars. If Fred Michaels says and does the right things now, the road to Mars might actually be opening up, for us.

For me.

And Joe Muldoon would have something to do with his life again.

The months since his return from the Moon had been as bad as Muldoon had expected.

His most recent PR jaunt had been to some place called Morang, in Nepal. He’d given his standard-issue schoolkids’ talk. When I was on the Moon…

“When I was on the Moon, I couldn’t see Earth so well. Tranquillity Base was close to the Moon’s equator, and right at the center of the face of the Moon as you look at it. So Earth was directly above my head, and it was difficult to tip back in my space suit to see it.

“The sunlight was very bright, and, under a black sky, the ground was a kind of gentle brown. It looked like a beach, actually. I remember looking at Neil bounding around up there, and I thought he looked like a beach ball, human-shaped, bouncing across the sand. But the colors of the Moon aren’t strong, and the most colorful thing there was the Eagle, which looked like a small, fragile house, done out in brilliant black, silver, orange, and yellow…”

His attention had kept drifting from his words, to the hiss of warm rain on the school’s wooden roof, the coinlike faces of the children sitting cross-legged on the floor before him, the teacher’s odd, suspicious frown.

Once, his brief couple of hours’ walking on the Moon had been the most vivid thing in his mind, colorful as an Eagle on the flat, tan expanse of his memory. But in the endless goodwill tours which had followed the splashdown, he’d given all his little speeches so often, already, that he felt the phrases, the underlying memories, had gotten polished smooth, like pebbles. Eventually the tale would be rendered trivial by the retelling.

Hell, but I’m a long way from the Moon now. And with all these damn cuts I’m never going back. All I can do is talk about it. Damn, damn.