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nearest co-ops. Bob Musgrove was welcoming the students one by one as they entered the auditorium. But other than to Musgrove, Thad was an unknown here—and in many ways, that thrilled him even more than the Saturn V rocket outside.
    He was so caught up in thoughts of his own reinvention that it took him a moment to notice that the girl in front of him had turned half toward him, smiling. She was blond and tan, only a few inches shorter than Thad; her surfer-esque body looked fantastic beneath a white T-shirt and tight designer jeans. In fact, most of the co-ops were above average in looks; there was a preponderance of blondes with good figures.
    The blonde in the T-shirt introduced herself as Sally Bishop, and after shaking Thad’s hand, she pointed toward the wall behind him.
    “That pretty much says it all, doesn’t it?”
    Thad wasn’t sure how he’d missed the mural before, because it was utterly enormous. It took up an entire section of the lobby wall, painted in such bright colors that it competed with the near-nuclear glow of the high Texan sun streaming through the skylights above.
    “I read about that mural in the orientation booklet,” the girl said. “It’s got some stupid name, Opening the Next Frontier—The Next Giant Step , but it’s all right there. Instead of the orientation lecture, they should just have us look at the mural all morning.”
    Thad laughed. He’d also read about the sixteen-by-seventy-foot mural, painted by Robert McCall back in the seventies. It was supposed to tell the entire story of the JSC, from its birth in 1960 to the space shuttle program. The painting seemed a bit tacky, if not outright kitsch, but it did a pretty good job of graphically recognizing the space agency’s accomplishments. From the first manned spaceflight of Alan Shepard in 1961, through the Gemini, Apollo, Skylab, and shuttle programs—Thad didn’t think anyone who cared about space could stand in front of that mural and not get goose bumps. Especially with the air-conditioning system blasting frozen air from every direction . The thing that Thad liked most about the mural was where it ended; there was plenty of space along that vast wall for whatever came next.
    “Maybe your picture is going to be hanging there one day,” Thad replied. “I think you’d look pretty good in a space suit.”
    “It’s going to be a while before any of us are wearing space suits. I’m just glad I made it here at all. Two days ago I was in Mexico with my boyfriend, and I forgot my passport in the hotel. I had to talk my way across the border. Good thing I had a bunch of mechanical engineering textbooks with me. The border guards had a weakness for a couple of NASA nerds.”
    “Your boyfriend is a co-op, too?”
    “He’s coming in later this afternoon, from Dallas. We’re hoping to get assigned to a project together. Although I’ve asked around, and it seems like nearly everyone here is engineering.”
    Thad nodded. He was going to be in the minority, especially because he had listed geology as his main interest in the acceptance letter. He knew that after the orientation lecture, the co-ops were going to be assigned projects in areas as close as possible to their interests. It was just another thing that set him apart—hopefully in a good way. After all, how many engineers did it take to fly a spaceship?
    As the line of co-ops slowly progressed into the auditorium, the girl continued her slightly flirtatious conversation. She told him about her wild trip to Mexico, about how awesome her freshman year at the University of Texas had been—UT being one of the five schools where most of the co-ops had come from—about how she’d fallen in love with the idea of working at NASA as a kid because her father, an ex–air force pilot, had forced her to go to space camp the summer after her sophomore year of high school.
    For his own part, Thad began his reinvention by giving her only the abridged version of himself. He