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rockets and spaceships …’
    Priest laughed. ‘A holiday resort. I like that.’
    To York, Mars was much more than that. After Mariner she’d become interested in Mars, and its history in the human imagination. She got books from the library.
Mars as the Abode of Life
by Percival Lowell, New York, 1909;
Mars and its Canals
by Lowell, New York, 1906 … She remembered fantastic, gaudy pictures of huge irrigation canals dug across the face of a dying, drying Mars, long descriptions of the waves of vegetation and the herds of animals which must sweep across the red Martian plains.
The Mars Project
: Wernher von Braun, University of Illinois, 1953. It had a big rocket ship on the cover, like a kid’s book. Von Braun wanted to build ten spaceships in Earth orbit, each weighing three and a half thousand tons, and carrying seven men. It would take nine hundred flights to orbit to assemble the fleet. There would be two-hundred-ton landing boats, to take fifty people down to the surface for a year-long stay … These visions, she’d thought, were a boy’s dreams of power, dressed up as serious engineering plans.
    York had put this stuff aside. Even at the age of sixteen, York was hot on science, on the strictness and logic of it; she found herself getting unreasonably impatient at illogic, and wishful thinking, and the emotional coloration of rational processes of all sorts.
    (Actually she was much too severe for most of the boys her mother tried to match her with. You’d think that someone who’dsuffered as messy a divorce as Maisie York would learn not to meddle in other people’s relationships …)
    The fact was, to her, the
real
Mars was a hell of a lot more interesting than Lowell’s anthropocentric dreams.
    Because of Mariner, Mars had turned into a place you could do some geology.
    How would the geology of Mars differ from Earth’s? What would that tell you about Earth, that you couldn’t have learned from staying at home? A hell of a lot, probably.
    Mariner’s thirteenth frame had electrified her.
    The thirteenth picture showed craters with frost inside them.
    My God. Not the Moon, not Arizona. Mars is something else. Something unique
.
    Ben eyed York, interested, speculative. ‘So you’re a closet Mars nut. I ought to take you out to JPL sometime. That’s where they run the planetary probes from … Hey, Natalie. Maybe you ought to apply.’
    ‘What for?’
    ‘The astronaut corps.’
    ‘Me? Are you joking?’
    ‘Why not? You’re qualified. And we need people like you. Even Spiro says so; he thinks people were turned off by Apollo because it was too engineering-oriented.’
    ‘Well, so it was.’
    Priest eyed her. ‘I’m serious, actually, Natalie. It’s a genuine opportunity for you. You could go work for Jorge Romero’s geology boys in Flagstaff, and train the moonwalkers. That’s how Jack Schmitt got into the program, and they say he’ll make it to the Moon.’
    ‘You worry me, Ben. How can a crazy man like you be allowed to drive a car at night?’
    ‘Here.’ Driving with one hand, he reached up, turned back his lapel, and unclipped a silver pin, in the shape of a shooting star trailing a comet’s tail.
    ‘What is it?’
    ‘My rookie’s pin. Some day soon I’m going to get a flight. So you need this more than I do. Take it. And when you’re the first human on Mars, when the
Spiro Agnew
lands in 1982, drop it into the deepest damn crater you see, and think of me.’
    ‘You’re crazy,’ she said again. ‘You should give it to Petey.’
    They fell silent.
    Her thoughts turned back to Jackass Flats.
    They don’t even contain the vented hydrogen. And Mike never thought to tell me about any of this. Why? Because he thought I couldn’t stand to hear it? Or because he can’t even see what’s wrong, here?
    What does that say about us? And – do we really have to do this shit, to get to Mars?
    She closed her fingers around the little pin Ben had given her.
    Ahead of them, the Interstate