York braced herself.

There was a distant rumble, carried through the stack, as the MS-II’s four huge engines ignited, three hundred feet away from her. The acceleration was low, almost gentle, pushing her into her couch with a soft pressure across her chest and limbs.

After thirty-seven hours of microgravity, she felt enormously heavy. But at least it was smooth: this time, the ride really did feel like the simulator. Later in the mission — when Ares had burned off its fuel, reducing its mass — the acceleration of the MS-II would be a lot tougher.

Gershon read out velocity increments. York could hear how his voice was masked, slightly, by the gum he chewed. Juicy Fruit. How can you chew gum in a space suit? Gershon wasn’t above sticking a wad to the inside of his faceplate, with his tongue, for retrieval later. The guy was gross.

“Ares, Houston, you’re looking good here,” Crippen said. “Right down the old center line.”

“Thank you,” Stone said. “Things look fine up here, too. Rates looking good.”

She looked out of her window. The Earth was falling away, visibly; it was a remarkable sight, as if the Earth was a special-effects prop, being hauled away from her window.

The sense of motion, of speed, was remarkable.

“How’s it going, York?” Stone asked drily.

She started. He’d caught her rubbernecking again. “Fine. Fine, Phil.”

She turned back to her station. She had her job to do, and she should get to it. It won’t fail because of me. The mantra of everyone involved with the Ares program.

She stole a glance at Stone. He was watching his own readouts, eyes fixed on the goal, apparently oblivious to her again. Stone was in utter control of himself. He always was.

She began to watch the status of the External Tanks in earnest, their brief biographies spelled out by the displays in front of her.

Floods of liquid oxygen and hydrogen, sixty-four thousand gallons a minute, pumped out of the tanks to be consumed in the engines of the MS-II. Already the pressure in the tanks was dropping away, she read; to keep the pressure up, there was a complicated backfeed system which took vaporized gases back from the engines into the tanks. The fuel system was surprisingly complicated, elaborate, a system of huge pipes, fountains of supercold liquid propellants cascading into combustion chambers as hot as the sun…

In the middle of the burn, Crippen said, “Okay, Ares, Houston, we’d like to try for the TV request.”

Stone and Gershon both stifled groans. York glanced up self-consciously at the little Westinghouse TV camera fixed to its bracket above her head.

Crippen said, “We would like five minutes’ worth of TV, and we would like an exterior shot, with a narrative if you can give us one.”

“Copy,” Stone said.