“And now you may be going to the Moon! You must grasp this opportunity, and go there with open hearts and minds. Believe me when I say that I would give anything to exchange places with you.”

Chuck Jones stepped forward and spit a piece of gum onto the dusty ground. “Yeah, well, we won’t be going either unless Dave Scott and Jim Irwin drive their Lunar Roving Vehicle over a goddamn cliff on one of these dumb jaunts. They’ll be taking the last Apollo to the Moon, and not us. So I think you should cut the speeches, Prof, and let’s get on with the checklist, and get this over.”

He kicked a piece of ancient anorthosite out of his way and stalked out of the valley.

There should have been four astronauts on the field trip. But the good old guys seemed to have lost heart in what they saw as pointless training exercises, after the program cancellations Fred Michaels had announced earlier in the month. At least these three had turned up, but Jones’s attitude was turning the whole thing into a walk through Purgatory.

York was pretty uniformly appalled by the astronauts she’d met so far. Ben was clearly atypical. And she couldn’t believe guys like Jones; they were like relics from some grisly Flintstones version of the 1950s. To her, the whole bunch of them seemed utterly self-obsessed.

Well, screw them.

She and her friends at Berkeley had done little, over the last couple of months, but follow the fallout from the events at Kent State in May. Some of them were preparing their own demonstrations in support and sympathy. She was prepared to bet Chuck Jones — probably Bleeker, too, even Ben — hadn’t even heard of the Kent State trouble, the way it was tearing the country apart. They were so cocooned inside their precious programs.

She felt blind, unreasoning anger, almost a hatred of astronauts and the system that had produced them.

As he stumped over the landscape, Chuck Jones could barely see the rocks around him. He just kept on going over and over the events of the last few days.

Fred Michaels, associate administrator, had come to the Astronaut Office in Building 4 personally to wield the axe. He’d stood there in his waistcoat, plump as a seal, in front of a room full of sport shirts and crew cuts.

Michaels’s personal presence wasn’t much consolation for Chuck Jones.

Michaels was there to announce, tersely, that the bean counters were cutting all the remaining Moon flights — save only for one more, Apollo 14, which was due to fly early in 1971.

Jones couldn’t believe it; in a few words, Michaels was shredding his, Jones’s, one-and-only chance of a Moon flight.