“Roger, Phil,” Crippen said. “That’s been observed before. It’s similar to a light shining on a bowling ball. You get this bright spot and the blue of the water then turns into a grayish color.”

“A bowling ball, yeah. Or maybe the top of Phil’s head.” Gershon laughed at his own joke.

It was true, York saw, twisting her head; there was a huge highlight on the blue surface of the ocean. Damn. The thing really is a sphere. Like a ball of steel.

“Thank you, Ares. How about an internal position now, please? Maybe you’d like to talk us through what the TOI is all about, today.”

Gershon passed the camera back along the cabin, and York fitted it to its pedestal, so it had a panoramic view of the three of them. She caught Stone’s face; he rolled his eyes, and pointed to her and the camera.

York was on.

She turned back to her displays and tried not to look up too often at the camera. Her throat felt tight, her face flushed inside her helmet; suddenly she could feel every hot crumple of her pressure suit. She keyed the press-to-talk switch on her headset cable. “Okay, Houston. This is our TOI maneuver: TOI, for Transfer Orbit Injection. Right now, the big engines on our main booster stage, the MS-II, are firing to push us out of Earth orbit. The MS-II is just a version of the second stage of the old Saturn V, modified to serve as an orbital injection vehicle. The S-IIs which took Apollo to the Moon had five J-2 engines. Well, we’ve got just four engines, upgrades called J-2S; the central one was removed to accommodate a lox tanker docking port. The MS-II has more insulation, to stop boiloff, and its own small maneuvering engines, and more docking ports at the front.

“I guess you can say we’re all pretty much relieved that the MS-II is working as well as it is; we’re going to rely on the MS-II not just to leave Earth but to slow us when we get to Mars, and to bring us out of Mars orbit when we’re ready to come home…”

She dried up. She was speaking too fast, waffling.

“Stand by,” Capcom Crippen said. “Okay, we’ve cut the live feed. Ares, you’ve got a pretty big audience: it was live in the U.S., it went live to Japan, Western Europe, and much of South America. Everybody reports good color, they appreciate the great show”

Gershon said, “Keep those cards and letters coming, folks.”

“Missing you already,” said Crippen.

Christ, what rubbish. No wonder they cut the feed.

She hadn’t meant to say any of that; she’d wanted to say something personal.

To say how it felt, to see the Earth fall away.