Park, however, was immune. Despite the thefts, despite the stares and scoffs, she carried out her duties briskly, even cheerfully. She was happier than she had been in a long time.

Like Keller, she was responsible for making rounds throughout the biodome, documenting the behaviors of the trainees, making herself available to hear out their anxieties and concerns. Most came to her reticently, feigning perfect composure to distinguish themselves as ideal candidates. The ISF predicted that half of them would be sent home before training was over.

Others were more honest. Park had taken part in the initial interviewing process for each candidate. She had doled out the 556-question psychological tests, compiled profiles from the answers, scaled each candidate according to labile-stabile indexes, assigned numbers to their sociability, impulsiveness, changeability. She’d studied their receptiveness to devices like the MAD. Recorded their cortical arousal, the blooms of light that happened in their brains. And yet none of it had quite prepared her for the complexes that unveiled themselves in Antarctica. There was Peter Rochoff, an agriculturalist, who suffered bouts of insecurity that he tried to smother with over-robust laughter, as if everything Park said was a mean joke that he was confident enough to find the humor in. Lucia Van was one of the most efficient flight engineers Park had ever seen, and yet she was so avoidant of authority figures that Park eventually had to send her home. The biodome designer Wan Xu was a narcissist, something he had somehow kept hidden from the tests: he was constantly exasperated by the inferiority of the minds around him, constantly making himself out to be both the hero and the victim of any given situation. It was too bad he was also one of the most brilliant minds on Earth, at least when it came to building extraterrestrial habitats. Park always left their sessions with her eyes watering, as if she had narrowly escaped an accident—the sideswipe of an angry driver.

And then there was Bebe Hill. Initially Park found herself admiring the woman, out of all others in the crew. Not the steady Wick, nor the ingenious Dr. Jain, nor even “Hunter,” who could sprint in an exo-armor suit that weighed over two hundred pounds. No, in the end it was Bebe whom Park found herself in awe of: a pillowy-cheeked botanist who specialized in space-bred plants.

At their first meeting, Park asked the woman what she considered most important to her. Bebe answered without hesitation: “The perfection of my craft.”