He’d waited a hell of a long time for this, the crown of his career, and he wasn’t giving up his mission — to be busted down to hole-in-the-sky trash-can Skylab flights — without a fight.

But Deke had just waved him away. “You don’t have a case, Chuck. Listen: Al Shepard is also one of the original batch, in case you forgot that, and he’s been waiting for a lot of years for a second flight after that damn ear illness. And he was the first American in space; Al outranks you, Chuck. But I’m still standing him down in favor of Dave Scott. You’ve got to face it, Chuck. I don’t like this any more than you do, but Scott’s is the best prepared crew I have, for the one mission we’ve got left.”

“Yeah.” Of course Jones understood that. The mission was the thing; nobody within NASA wanted to do anything that carried the slightest risk of a foul-up.

Nobody, that is, save the astronauts who weren’t aboard the last Apollo out.

Understanding it didn’t stop him trying, though; and he had stayed in Slayton’s office for a long time, arguing hard…

There was another piece of the old rock, anorthosite or whatever shit it was, in his way. Jones kicked it aside and stalked on.

The afternoon was to be a simulated three-hour moonwalk. York had to make up the numbers, in the absence of enough astronauts. Jones teamed with Priest, and Bleeker paired off with York. Jorge Romero would stay behind in the truck and act as a capcom. The astronauts wore backpacks, radios, and cameras, and they followed traverses laid out on coarse maps designed to match the quality of low-resolution orbital photographs.

York and Bleeker stopped at the first sample point. There was a large, fractured boulder, shot through with anorthosite. Bleeker set up a gnomon and took a photograph of the rock face. The gnomon was a device for calibration, a little tripod with a color scale for the photography, and a free-hanging central rod to give local vertical. Bleeker hit the rock with his hammer, and broke off a piece the size of his fist. He placed the sample in a small Teflon bag and dropped it into the pack on York’s back. He’d donned lunar gloves to do the work; York could see how stiff and clumsy the gloves were.

“How was that?”

She grinned back at him. “Standard operating procedures, Adam; Jorge will be proud of you.”

They walked on.

Bleeker raised his face to the sun, a vague half smile on his face. Bleeker was pale, freckled — a northern boy — and he wore plenty of sunblock on his exposed skin, there in the California heat. York hadn’t spent any time alone with him before today. He seemed bland, unimaginative, rather empty. Ideal profile for a moonwalker, she thought wryly.