Priest guided her through corridors littered with computer cards and printouts. Close-up photographs of the Moon’s surface were casually framed and stuck on the walls. JPL seemed a strange hybrid; this might have been any office complex anywhere, York supposed, except that people were younger than the average — and not one of them wore a suit, or a tie — and there was a lot of hair about, bristling above yellow Smile buttons. Some of the women even wore hot pants. But at the same time the place didn’t have the ragged, laid-back feel of a college; there was too much urgency for that. There was a sense that things happened there.

She remarked on how full the parking lot had been.

Priest said, “You should have been here a week ago, when the first pictures began coming through from Mars. You couldn’t move for press guys, and VIPs, and politicos, and science-fiction writers — anybody and everybody who could scrounge a pass.” He laughed. “You should have seen their faces, when all we got back was a picture of the dust.”

It was odd to be with Priest again. A blast from the past. She hadn’t seen him for more than a year, and she’d been surprised when he’d come through on his old promise to take her there to see the results from Mars come in. He hadn’t changed, as far as she could see: slim, dedicated to his job, easygoing, intelligent.

Fun to be with. Comfortable. Married.

She felt vaguely restless.

She was basically drifting, doing some postdoc work here and there. She was looking for a focus, a topic, trying to figure out what she wanted to do with her life.

And she was still in her mess of a relationship with Mike Conlig, who was so immersed in his NERVA work he barely seemed aware she was there, when she got any time out of him at all. NERVA was the center of Mike’s life; a kind of monomaniacal obsessive seemed to be emerging from inside the gentler, more intellectual outer shell that had first attracted her.

She got the impression that the space program was full of people like that.

The question for York was, did she really want to be a bit-part player in the story of someone else’s goals?

They reached the communications center. The walls were coated with TV screens, all filled with grainy, obscure black-and-white images. Hard copies littered tables, and ribbons of computer printouts trailed across the tables and floor and walls. The workers there — mostly men, mostly shirtsleeved, uniformly hairy — pored over the images and printouts, their security badges dangling from their top pockets. There were cups of stale coffee all over the tables, some perched close to precious printouts, and in one corner she spotted a half-eaten doughnut, the jelly still oozing from its center.

There was a smell, faint but distinctive, of body odor.