“I guess this training is very different from what you’ve been used to,” she said.

“Oh, you bet. Especially compared to my assignment before joining the Astronaut Office.”

“What was that?”

“Five-ten Squadron. That’s a fighter-bomber squadron, based in Virginia. Beautiful part of the country. Do you know it?”

“No…. What kind of bombs?”

He glanced at her, professional reserve coming down behind his eyes. “Special weapons.”

Oh. Nuclear.

“We were trained to deploy out of West Germany. We’d have flown low, a hundred feet, under the enemy’s radar.” He mimed the maneuver with a dusty hand. He pulled his hand so it soared straight upward. “The idea was to let go of the payload at just the right moment. The package would follow a two-mile arc to the target.” He grinned again, almost shyly. “While it was falling I’d be hightailing it out of there, as fast as I could go, before the detonation.”

“I’ll bet. It sounds risky.”

“All flying is risky,” he said levelly. “But the F100s we flew were beautiful ships…”

He waxed lyrical about the F100 for a while: the “Super Saber,” the world’s first fighter capable of sustained supersonic speed.

York tuned out.

The F100 had been produced by Rockwell: the company which had built Apollo, and was bidding to go to Mars. Given where the bulk of the money went, it was as if the space work of companies like Rockwell was a thin, glamorous patina on the surface of their real mother lode, military development.

“The part I didn’t enjoy so much was ejecting.”

“Ejecting?”

“It was a one-shot mission. The planes didn’t carry enough fuel to make it to their targets and back. We had to eject hundreds of miles short of home, let the planes crash, and then survive as best we could.”

“Christ,” York said. “Walking home, through a nuclear battlefield?”

“I was trained for it,” he said. “I was part of a global strategy. The weapons are new, so you need new strategies to use them. It’s all about mutual deterrence. ‘Safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation…’ ”

She was startled by the quote. “That’s well expressed.”

“Winston Churchill.” His eyes were like blue windows.

He wasn’t unintelligent, she realized. Just — different, from her and the people she mixed with. A Cold Warrior. She shivered.

He glanced at his checklist. “Hey, look; we’ve missed our last stop.”

They turned and retraced their footsteps, reaching for fresh sample bags.

At the end of the afternoon, they met up back at the truck. Romero was still grinning, even joking with Jones, but York thought she could see a strain around Romero’s eyes, under the dust and sunblock.