Dawn Chapman

We were discouraged from having pets—or, for that matter, husbands or even boyfriends, and the same went for the men, none of whom were married as far as anybody knew. I think Mission Control would have been happier if we didn’t have parents or siblings either, but all of us did, with the exception of Ramsay, an only child whose parents had been killed in a head-on collision when he was in the fourth grade. I often wondered if that had been a factor in the selection process—in his favor, I mean—because it was apparent he was lacking in certain key areas and to my mind, at least on paper, he was the weakest link of the crew. But that wasn’t for me to say—Mission Control had their own agenda and for all our second-guessing, we could only put our heads down and hope for the best. As you can imagine, we all sweated out the selection process—during the final months it seemed like we did nothing else—and though we were a team, though we pulled together and had been doing so through the past two years of training, the fact remained that of the sixteen candidates only eight would make the final cut. So here was the irony: while we exuded team spirit, we were competing to exude it, our every thought and move duly noted by Mission Control. What did Richard, our resident cynic, call it? A Miss America pageant without the Miss and without the America.

I don’t recall the specific date now, and I should, I know I should, just to keep the record straight, but it was about a month before closure when we were called in for our final interviews. A month seems about right, time enough to spread the word and generate as much press as possible over the unveiling of the final eight—any earlier and we ran the risk of overkill, and of course Mission Control was sensitive about that because of what fell out with the first mission. So it would have been February. A February morning in the high desert, everything in bloom with the winter rains and the light spread like a soft film over the spine of the mountains. There would have been a faint sweetness to the air, a kind of dry rub of sage and burnt sugar, something to savor as I made my way over to the cafeteria for an early breakfast. I might have stopped to kick off my flip-flops and feel the cool granular earth between my toes or watch the leaf-cutter ants in their regimented march to and from the nest, both inside my body and out of it at the same time, a female hominid of breeding age bent over in the naturalist’s trance and wondering if this earth, the old one, the original one, would still be her home in a month’s time.

The fact was, I’d been up since four, unable to sleep, and I just wanted to be alone to get my thoughts together. Though I wasn’t really hungry—my stomach gets fluttery when I’m keyed up—I forced myself to eat, pancakes, blueberry muffins, sourdough toast, as if I were carbo-loading for a marathon. I don’t think I tasted any of it. And the coffee. I probably went through a whole cup, sip by sip, without even being conscious of it, and that was a habit I was trying to curtail because if I was selected—and I would be, I was sure of it, or that was what I told myself anyway—I’d have to train my system to do without. I hadn’t brought a book, as I usually did, and though the morning’s paper was there on the counter I never even glanced at it. I just focused on eating, fork to mouth, chew, swallow, repeat, pausing only to cut the pancakes into bite-sized squares and lift the coffee cup to my lips. The place was deserted but for a couple of people from the support staff gazing vacantly out the windows as if they weren’t ready to face the day. Or maybe they were night shift, maybe that was it.

Somewhere in there, mercifully, my mind went blank and for maybe a split second I’d forgotten about what was hanging over us, but then I glanced up and there was Linda Ryu coming across the room to me, a cup of tea in one hand and a glazed donut in the other. You probably don’t know this—most people don’t—but Linda was my best friend on the extended crew and I can’t really explain why, other than that we just happened to hit it off, right from day one. We were close in age—her thirty-two to my twenty-nine—but that didn’t really explain anything since all the female candidates were more or less coevals, ranging from the youngest at twenty-six (Sally McNally, who didn’t stand a chance) to forty (Gretchen Frost, who did, because she knew how to suck up to Mission Control and held a Ph.D. in rain forest ecology).

Anyway, before I could react, Linda was sliding into the seat across the table from me, gesturing with her donut and giving me a smile that was caught midway between commiseration and embarrassment. “Nervous?” she said, and let out a little laugh even as she squared her teeth and flaunted the donut. “I see you’re carbo-loading. Me too,” she said, and took a bite.

I tried to look noncommittal, as if I didn’t know what she was talking about, but of course she could see right through me. We’d become as close as sisters these past two years, working side by side on the research vessel in the Caribbean, the ranch in the Australian outback and the test plots here on the E2 campus, but the only thing that mattered now was this: my interview was at eight, hers at eight-thirty. I gave her a tight smile. “I don’t know what we’ve got to be nervous about—I mean, they’ve been testing us for over a year now. What’s another interview?”

She nodded, not wanting to pursue the point. The buzz had gone round and we’d all absorbed it: this was the interview, the one that would say yea or nay, thumbs-up or thumbs-down. There was no disguising it. This was the moment we’d been waiting for through all the stacked-up days, weeks and months that seemed like they’d never end, and now that it was here it was nothing short of terrifying. I wanted to reach out to her and reassure her, hug her, but we’d already said everything there was to be said, teasing out the permutations of who was in and who was out a thousand times over, and all we’d done these past weeks was hug. I don’t know how to explain it, but it was like a coldness came over me, the first stage of withdrawal. What I wanted, more than anything, was to get up and leave, and yet there she was, my best friend, and I saw in that moment how selfless she was, how much she was rooting for me—for us both, but for me above all, for my triumph if she should fail to make the grade, and I felt something give way inside me.

I knew better than anyone how devastated Linda would be if she didn’t get in. On the surface, she had the sort of personality they were looking for—ebullient, energetic, calm in a crisis, the optimist who always managed to see her way through no matter how hopeless the situation might have looked—but she had a darker side no one suspected. She’d confided things to me, things that would have sent the wheels spinning at Mission Control if they ever got wind of them. It would be especially hard on her if she didn’t make it, harder than on any of the others, but then I wondered if I wasn’t projecting my own fears here—we all wanted this so desperately we couldn’t begin to conceive of anything else. To make matters worse, Linda and I were essentially competing for the same position, the least technical aside from Communications Officer, which we both agreed Ramsay had just about locked up for himself because he was a politician and knew how to work not just both sides but the top, bottom and middle too.

I watched her face, the steady slow catch and release of her jaw muscles as she chewed. “Stevie’s a shoo-in, isn’t she?” she said, her voice thickening in her throat.

I nodded. “I guess.” Linda had tried to make herself indispensable, the generalist of the group, looking to fit into one of the four slots that would most likely go to women. She put everything she had into it, not only with extra course work in closed-systems horticulture and ecosystems management, but especially in marine biology. She’d logged more hours underwater than anybody else during our dive sessions off Belize and she was a champion recruiter of invertebrates, and yet to my mind Stevie van Donk had the inside track on the marine ecosystems. For one thing, she had an advanced degree in the field, and for another, she looked great in a two-piece.

“She’s such a bitch.”

I had nothing to say to this, though I privately agreed. Still, bitch or no, Stevie was in.

It got worse yet: Diane Kesselring looked like a lock for Supervisor of Field Crops, and Gretchen was first in line to oversee the wilderness biomes. What was left, when you conceded the Medical Officer, Director of Analytic Systems and Technosphere Supervisor—all male-oriented at this point—was really a caretaker position: MDA, Manager of Domestic Animals, the pygmy goats, Ossabaw Island pigs, Muscovy ducks and chickens that would provide the crew with essential fats and animal protein.

“Dawn, what’s the matter?” Linda leaned across the table and took hold of my hand, but I didn’t respond. I couldn’t. I was a mess. “You’re not going to break down on me, are you? After all we’ve been through together? You’re going to make it. I know it. If one person’s going to make it, you are.”

“But what about you? I mean, if I’m in—”

Her smile was the saddest thing, just a quiver of her lips. “We’ll see.” She looked away. The room was empty now, the people at the far table either gone off to work or home to bed, depending on their shift. My stomach felt bloated. I could feel the blue vein at my hairline pulsing the way it did when I was overwrought. Linda’s parents had kept horses, as well as chickens and Vietnamese potbellied pigs on their property outside Sacramento, and she knew barnyard animals like a veterinarian—but she wasn’t a veterinarian, only a B.S. in animal sciences, and forgive me for saying this, she was maybe a bit chunkier than the ideal and not really all that pretty, looking at it objectively, that is. Not that it should matter, but it did, of course it did. Mission Control was looking for the same thing NASA was, people who fit the “adventurer profile,” with high motivation, high sociability and low susceptibility to depression, but all of us fit that description, at least the ones who’d made it this far (to what Richard called the “Sweet Sixteen,” a sports reference I didn’t get till someone explained it to me). Beyond that, beyond the factors they ticked off on the barrage of tests they’d subjected us to, from the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory Questionnaire to what they’d observed when we worked as a team under stress, I’d have been lying to myself if I didn’t think they wanted a candidate who looked good, someone pretty, prettier than Linda anyway.

Am I out of line here? I don’t know, but sometimes you do have to be objective, and when I looked at myself in the mirror—even without makeup—I saw someone who’d represent the Mission to the public better than Linda. I’m sorry. I’ve said it. But it’s a fact.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes. Yes. I’m praying you get in, I really am—as much as I’m praying for myself. More, even. Imagine the two of us in there, the two Musketeers, right?” I tried to smile, but I couldn’t. I felt my eyes fill with tears. The thing was—and I’m ashamed to admit it—they weren’t just for her.

Linda set down the donut and licked her fingertips one by one. It took an eternity. Then she lifted her face and I saw that her eyes were swimming too. “Hey,” she said, sweeping the hair off her shoulder with a flip of her chin, “no worries. Whatever happens, there’s always Mission Three.”

We all essentially wore the same outfit to work, male and female alike—jeans, T-shirt and hiking boots, with a hooded sweatshirt for the cool of morning or the winter days when it could get surprisingly brisk—but on this particular morning I’d opted for a dress. Nothing too showy, just a pale-green tank dress I’d worn once or twice when a couple of us had gone out barhopping in Tucson, and I’d put on makeup and swept my hair back in a ponytail. My hair is one of my best features, actually, so thick you can’t see a trace of scalp even when it’s dripping wet from the shower—and it’s got body to spare, despite the low humidity. Stevie’s a blonde, part in the middle, no bangs, as if she’s trying out for a part in a surf movie, but her hair’s a lot thinner than mine and it just hangs limp most of the time, unless she puts it up in rollers, and who’ll have time for that after closure? But, as I said, she was in and Linda was out, or that was my best guess anyway, and it had nothing to do with the fact that Linda was Asian, but only how she looked in a two-piece. And the degree, of course. It might have hurt to admit it, but Stevie had her on both counts, and if I was going to get in, it would have to be over Linda’s back and not Stevie’s or Gretchen’s or Diane’s because I couldn’t begin to match their qualifications. My own degree was in environmental studies, which pretty well matched Linda’s B.S. in animal sciences, so that was a wash. As for the other three women on the extended crew, they weren’t really in the running, or not that Linda or I could see.

Eight, that was the number. Eight slots. Four men, four women. And if we’ve been criticized for lack of diversity, just think about it. In the history of the planet, only twelve astronauts have walked on the moon, and all of them were men. Counting the second mission, we would number sixteen, and fully half that number would be women. Including, I hoped, me.

By the time I’d finished up in the cafeteria, hugged Linda goodbye and whispered luck in her ear, I was running late and that just ramped up my anxiety one extra degree I didn’t need at all. I hurried across the courtyard, dodging the odd tourist, slammed into my room and stripped down for a quick two-minute shower (of which I was a past master, training myself for the mission, when we’d be limited to just seventy-five gallons of water apiece each day—for all purposes). I’d washed my hair the night before and laid out the dress, a pair of Mary Janes and the coral necklace I was going to wear, so it didn’t take me long. Lipstick, eye shadow, a dab of highlighter, and I was out the door.

The air held the same faint sweetness I’d noticed earlier, though now it carried a taint of diesel from the pair of bulldozers scooping out the foundation for a new dormitory that would house visiting dignitaries, scientists and any friends of the project willing to contribute at one of three levels—brass, silver, gold—to its success. I didn’t run into anybody I knew on my way over to Mission Control, which was just as well given the way I was feeling. The tourists were gathered round in clusters, sprouting cameras, binoculars and daypacks, but none of them gave me a second glance—and really, why would they bother? I was nobody. But tomorrow—if things worked out the way I envisioned—they’d be lining up for my autograph.

I took the stairs up to the third floor of Mission Control and if I broke out in a light sweat, so be it: the exercise calmed me. A simple thing: foot, ankle, knee, hip joint, breathe in, breathe out. I was in reasonably good shape from working the test plots and the Intensive Agriculture Biome and taking extended walks in the desert when I got the chance, but I wasn’t a runner and didn’t train with weights like so many of the others. No need, that was my thinking. The Mission One crew experienced rapid weight loss, the men averaging an eighteen percent drop in body weight, the women ten percent, and it was probably healthier to put on a few pounds before closure—Linda and I had gone over this time and again. The trick was, you had to distribute those extra pounds in the right places, because Mission Control was watching and Mission Control definitely did not want to present fat Terranauts to the public.

Josie Muller, the secretary, waved me in with a smile, which I tried to return as if everything was normal, as if what was going to transpire in the next few minutes in the control room with its dull white plasterboard walls, oatmeal carpeting and panoptic views of E2 itself was the most ordinary thing in the world. “Just take a seat,” she said, “—it’ll be a minute.” We both looked to the polished oak door that gave onto the inner sanctum.

I hadn’t expected this—a wait. I’d assumed my eight o’clock must have been the first interview of the day and I’d timed it to the minute, thinking to walk right in and let the tension flow out of me like water down a drain. “Is there somebody in there?”

She nodded.

“A seven-thirty? I didn’t know they’d scheduled that early?”

“Well, there are sixteen of you and they want to give everybody a full half hour at least—you know, for . . . well, final things. To wrap things up.”

“Who is it, just out of curiosity?”

Early on, in the first or maybe second week after I’d been selected to join the project, Josie and I had shared a pitcher of mango margaritas at El Caballero in downtown Tillman and after that I’d always thought she was on my side. Or at least sympathetic. More sympathetic to me, I mean, than to some of the others. She was in her late forties, her hair already gone gray and her face composed around a pair of tortoiseshell frames that pinched her temples and marginalized her eyes—and she leaned now across the desk to mouth the name: “Stevie.”

Stevie. Well, that was all right. Stevie was in and I’d already accepted that. At least it wasn’t Tricia Berner, one of the three women both Linda and I had agreed didn’t stand a chance, even though, when I lay awake nights staring at the ceiling till the darkness pooled and dissolved into something darker still, I could see that she did. She was attractive in her own way, if you discounted her style, which was right off the street, short skirts, too much makeup, jewelry that might as well have been encrusted on her, and she was the best actress, hands-down, among the crew. And that meant more than you might think—from the start, right from the building phase to Mission One closure and on through the course of our training, the project was as much about theater as it was science, and even more so now, with Mission Two, and the pledge we’d all taken. But more on that later. Suffice it to say that that closed door, no matter who was behind it, made my stomach clench till I could taste the pancakes all over again.

It was ten past eight and I’d already been in and out of the easy chair in the corner half a dozen times and studied the framed photos of the Mission One crew that lined the walls till I could have reproduced them from memory, when the door swung open and there was Stevie, in heels no less, giving me a blank stare as if she didn’t recognize me, as if we hadn’t hauled lines together and shoveled cow dung in hundred-ten-degree heat and crouched elbow to elbow over one table or another through too many meals to count. I saw that she’d highlighted her hair and layered on enough makeup to be clearly visible from the cheap seats, but I couldn’t tell yet whether she was playing comedy or tragedy. They had to have taken her, hadn’t they? For a fraction of a second I let myself soar, seeing Linda in her place and both of us in, a gang of two, bulwark against the autocracy of Mission Control on the one hand and the tyranny of the majority on the other, but then Stevie’s eyes came into focus—hard blue, cold blue, blue so dark it was almost black—and I saw the triumph there. Her lips curled in a smile that showed off her flawless dentition and firm pink gums and then she was giving me the thumbs-up sign and it all came clear. We might have embraced—we should have, sisters in solidarity, the mission above all else—but I stiffened and the moment passed and she was by me, cranking her smile to the limit and gushing over Josie and Josie gushing right back.

The door stood open before me. I didn’t even have to knock.

There were four people inside, seated casually, two on the couch and two in a pair of Posturepedic office chairs, three of whom I’d expected and one whose presence came as a total surprise. And, to be honest, something of a shock. They’re not leaving anything to chance here, that was my first thought. And then I was thinking, Good sign or bad?

But let me explain. The two seated on the couch were a given: Jeremiah Reed and Judy Forester, the visionary who’d dreamed up the project and saw it through its creation and his chief aide and confidante. Privately we called Jeremiah G.C., short for God the Creator, and Judy, in keeping with the religious theme, Judas, because she was a betrayer, or at least that was her potential. We all felt that. It was just the way she was wound, a hair’s breadth from turning on you, the kind of person who would have gone straight to the top in the Stasi, but by 1994 the Stasi was no more, so here she was, among us. Lately, Linda and I had been calling her Jude the Obscure, given some of her counterintuitive pronouncements from on high. She wasn’t much older than I, but she was Jeremiah’s right hand—the right hand of God—and that gave her a power over us that was out of all proportion to who she was. Or would have been, if it weren’t for the fact that she was sleeping with the deity himself. Did I toady up to her though I hated myself for it? You can bet I did. And I wasn’t the only one.

The third person in this trinity was newly anointed, brought in from outside to oversee day-to-day operations by way of cost-cutting and efficiency. His name was Dennis Roper and he affected a ducktail haircut and slash sideburns, à la 1982. We called him Little Jesus. About a month after they installed him at Mission Control, he hit on Linda, which to my mind was not only unprofessional but sleazy too, given the power he wielded. Linda slept with him a couple of times, though it was wrong and we both knew it whether there was a quid pro quo involved or not—especially if there was a quid pro quo—and when he was done with her he came on to me, but I wasn’t having it. I wouldn’t sink that low even if he was halfway good-looking, which he wasn’t. I never liked short men—and beyond that, short or tall, I liked them to have personalities.

Anyway, there I was, hovering in the middle of the room, the door standing open behind me because I’d been too agitated to think to shut it, and the four of them (I’ll get to the fourth in a minute) gazing up patiently at me, as if they had all day to do whatever they were going to do, though by my accounting they were already running ten minutes late. “Hi,” I said, nodding at each of them in turn, then motioned to the straight-backed chair set there facing them and murmured, “you want me to sit here?”

“Hi, Dawn,” Judy said, giving me a big smile that could have meant anything, and the others smiled in succession, everything as routine and amenable as could be, no pressure here, all for one and one for all.

No one had answered my question so I took it on my own initiative to ease into the chair—was this part of the test?—gazing straight into their eyes as if to say I’m not at all intimidated because I’m one hundred percent certain I’m as vital to this crew as anybody out there walking the planet today.

“Don’t worry, we won’t keep you long,” Dennis said, getting up to tiptoe across the room and ease the door shut before sitting back down. He drew in a deep breath and let it out again, then bent forward in the office chair so that his elbows rested on his knees and he could screw his eyes into mine. “I know it’s a big day for all the candidates and we’re all looking forward to finalizing things and moving toward closure, so all we want really is to ask you a few things, little details, minor things, that’s all, just to set the record straight—you on board with that?”

The fourth person in the room, and he didn’t say a word or unfreeze his face or even shift in his seat to relieve the tension in his buttocks and hip flexors, was Darren Iverson, the millionaire—billionaire—who’d financed the project from its inception to the tune of something like a hundred fifty million dollars and picked up the operating costs too, which were in the neighborhood of ten million a year, a million of that for power alone. He was a few years younger than Jeremiah, which would have put him in his mid-fifties, and he didn’t really look like a billionaire—or what I suppose anybody would have expected a billionaire to look like. He wore matching shirt and pants combinations he might have picked up at Sears, in desert brown, with waffle-tread workboots, also in brown. His eyes were brown too and so was his hair, or what was left of it. We called him Mr. Iverson to his face. Otherwise he was G.F., short for God the Financier.

I looked to G.F., then to G.C. and Judy and finally came back to Dennis. “I feel like I’m on Star Trek or something,” I said, but nobody laughed. Star Trek was one of our touchstones, as was Silent Running, for obvious reasons. “You know, ‘Where No Man Has Gone Before’?” Still no reaction. I was feeling giddy, maybe a bit light-headed from the tension and all the energy my gastrointestinal system was putting into digesting breakfast, and whether it was ill-advised or not, I couldn’t help adding, “Or no woman.”

Dennis pushed himself back up to a sitting position. “Great, but we just want to ask you a few things that really haven’t come up, to this point, that is”—and here he made it a question—“about your personal life?”

If this caught me by surprise, I didn’t let it show. I’d assumed they’d be asking me about food values, estimated crop yields, milk production and minimum protein requirements, that sort of thing, the technical aspects of the job I’d be expected to fill, but this came out of nowhere. I just nodded.

“Are you currently seeing anyone?”

“No,” I said, too quickly, and that was because I was lying. Despite myself, I’d been drawn into a relationship—or no, I’d fallen, full-on, no parachute—with Johnny Boudreau, who’d been second boss of the construction crew when E2 was in the building stages, and who played guitar and sang in a bar band on weekends.

Dennis—Little Jesus!—flipped a note card in his hand and made a show of squinting at the name written on the back of it. “What about John Boudreau?”

I wanted to say, Are you spying on me now?, but I kept my composure. I couldn’t summon Johnny just then, couldn’t picture him or take a snapshot in the lens of my mind, and I realized that if he really did mean anything lasting to me we’d have this month to make our peace with wherever that was going to go, and then there’d be closure, 730 days of it. I shrugged.

Into the incriminatory silence Judy said, “You are using birth control, right?”

I nodded.

“And—forgive me, but you do understand how vital this is, don’t you?—have you had multiple partners in recent months, anything that might endanger . . . or, what do I mean?” She looked to Dennis.

“E.,” he said, using my crew sobriquet, E. being short for Eos, rosy-limbed goddess of dawn, which I took to be a compliment even if it came by way of left field, “what we mean is we can’t risk any sort of infection arising after closure—”

“You mean STDs, right?” I wasn’t angry, or not yet—they were just doing what was best for the mission and what was best for the mission was best for me. “You don’t have to worry,” I said, and I gave Dennis a meaningful look. “It’s been only Johnny, Johnny and nobody else.”

Judy: “And he’s, uh—?”

“Clean? Yes, as far as I know.”

Dennis: “He does play in a band, doesn’t he?”

“Listen,” and here I shot a look past the two of them to where G.C. sat there on the couch like a sphinx and then to the brown hole of G.F., “I don’t really see the point of all this. The medical officer, which I assume is going to be Richard, right?” Nothing. Not a glimmer from any of them. “The medical officer’s going to do a thorough exam, and even if I had gonorrhea, syphilis and chlamydia—or if any of the men had it—it’d just be treated, right?”

There was a silence. Distantly, as if it were being piped in over a faulty sound system, there came the muffled clank of the bulldozers going about their business across campus. G.C.—lean, pale as a cloud with his fluffed-up hair and full white beard—uncrossed his legs and spoke for the first time. His voice was a fine tenor instrument, capable of every shading and nuance—when he was younger, long before the project, he’d performed on Broadway in things like Hair and Man of La Mancha. “But the issue is birth control,” he said. “You do understand, don’t you, that we can’t risk having any of our female crew getting, well, knocked up. To put it bluntly.”

It wasn’t a question and I didn’t answer it. “I’ll take a pregnancy test, if it’ll make you rest easier. Believe me, it won’t be a problem.”

“Yes,” he said, tenting his fingers to make a cradle for his chin so he could stare directly into me, “but what about post-closure?”

And now—I couldn’t help myself—I gave each of them a smile in turn and said, as sweetly as I could, “You’ll have to ask the men about that.”

I don’t remember much beyond that though I’m sure my face must have been flushed and the vein on my forehead pulsing like heat lightning. I felt so grateful—and relieved—I could have kissed them all, but I didn’t. Or at least I don’t think I did. Dennis later told me I’d practically bowed my way across the floor before pausing at the door to give them all a broad valedictory wave, as if I were ducking into the wings after an ovation, but I don’t remember that either. It was heady, at any rate, even if I can’t say for sure what was true and what wasn’t. And it didn’t really matter. Not anymore.

Unfortunately—and here you had to appreciate the subtlety of their scheduling—the first person I saw on coming through the door was Linda. She was seated in the chair I’d vacated, head down, studying her notes on closed systems, group dynamics, technics, Vernadsky and Brion and Mumford, boning up, though there was no point in it now. I saw that she’d put on a dress—a bronze rayon shift that only managed to look dowdy on her—and pinned up her hair, which was usually such a mess. What did I feel? Honestly? Sad, of course, but in that moment it was no more than a fluctuation in the flight I was on, the first stage of the rocket falling away while the payload hurtles higher and ever higher.

She didn’t notice me. Didn’t lift her head. I could see her lips moving over the phrases we’d chanted together like incantations—Thought isn’t a form of energy. So how on Earth can it change material processes?—as if the people inside that room would care. They’d asked about my sex life. Asked things like, “How do you feel about Ramsay? Gretchen? Stevie? You think you can work with them inside?” And what did I say? Of course, I said. Of course. They’re the best people in the world. I look forward to the challenge. We’ll make it work, make it click, everything. It’s going to be awesome!

I could feel Josie’s eyes on me, but I didn’t turn to her, not yet. I glided across the room as if I were riding a conveyor belt and then I was right there in front of Linda and I said her name, once, very softly, and she looked up. That was all it took. I didn’t have to say a word. I watched the new calculus flicker like a current across her face and saw her put it all behind her and with an effort raise up her arms for a hug. “Dawn,” she murmured, “Dawn, oh, Dawn, I’m so glad, I am—”

It was an awkward embrace. I was standing and she was sitting, the notebook spread open in her lap, her feet planted on the carpet, and I could feel the strain in the muscles of my lower back. Her grip was fierce, almost as if we were wrestling and she was trying to pull me down. I couldn’t say anything because there was nothing to say that wouldn’t sound like I was congratulating myself—and I couldn’t do that, not at her expense.

“Dawn,” she said, “Dawn,” and drew it out till it was a bleat even as Josie moved forward to get into the act and Judy appeared at the door of the control room. I let go then and Linda sank back into the chair.

“Congrats,” Josie mouthed for me alone, an expert at conveying meaning without sound, and then Judy was saying, “Linda? Linda, come on in. We’re all ready for you.”

I waited there the full half hour, settling myself into the chair and chattering away at Josie as one thought after another came cascading into my head, already wondering about the closure ceremony and measurements for our uniforms and whether we’d have our choice of living quarters or if they’d been pre-assigned (if Josie knew, she wasn’t letting on). At nine, on the stroke, Ramsay appeared, in T-shirt and jeans, a baseball cap reversed on his head and the fingers of his right hand rooting at the beginnings of a shadowy growth of beard. I hadn’t seen him the last couple of days, our schedules at odds, and the beard surprised me. If I’d assumed he was in, Dennis’ question had pretty well confirmed it—pointedly, he hadn’t asked how I felt about any of the men or women Linda and I had relegated to the second tier but only the ones we’d handicapped as the front-runners—and if that was the case he’d have to shave before we were presented to the press or Mission Control would have something to say about it. Beyond that, the way he was dressed—his whole attitude, from the minute he slouched in the door, flashed a grin at Josie and me and perched himself on the corner of the desk as if it belonged to him—bespoke a level of confidence that verged on arrogance. Or inside knowledge. Maybe that was it. He’d been chummy with G.C. and Judy from the beginning, all in the name of public relations, of course, and I realized how naïve I’d have to have been not to understand that there was a pecking order here.

“Hi, girls,” he said, “what’s happening? Everybody feeling just unconquerable this morning? But wait, wait, wait—E., let me be the first, or maybe”—here he snatched a look at Josie—“the second to congratulate you. Well done! All for one and one for all, right?”

I just stared at him in astonishment. “But how did you know?”

“How did I know? Just look at your face. Quick, Josie, you got your compact? Here, come on, take a look at yourself.” Going along with him, Josie fished her compact out of her purse and handed it to him so he could snap it open and bound across the room to hold the little rectangular mirror up in front of my face. “See? See there?” He swung his head round comically to where Josie sat at her desk. “Look at the way the zygomaticus muscles are stretching that smile, and wait a minute, the risorius too, which, in laymen’s terms is called the look-how-proud-I-am muscle.”

I couldn’t help myself: I felt dazzled. And all his cutting-up, which I might have found sophomoric and more than a little annoying in another place or time, seemed witty and genuine, touching even. “What about you?” I asked. “You hear anything yet?”

“I’m the nine o’clock,” he said, giving nothing away. He snapped the compact shut and gestured toward the door with it. “Who’s in there now?”

“Linda.”

“Oh,” he said. “Oh, Linda, yeah. Of course. Linda.” He was watching me closely—he knew as well as I did that if I was in, Linda was out, or that was how it looked, unless Mission Control relented and decided to send all sixteen of us inside.

I didn’t have a chance to say anything more, either in her defense or my own, because the door swung open then and Linda was coming through it and you didn’t have to be clairvoyant to see the way things were. She was trying to control her face—there was no love lost between her and Ramsay and he was probably the last person she wanted to break down in front of, especially if he was in and she was out. Behind her, at the door, an expressionless Judy was beckoning to Ramsay, who flipped the compact back to Josie and exclaimed, to no one in particular, “What, am I up already?,” and walked right by Linda without even glancing at her.

I might have hesitated for just an instant before I rose from the chair to go to her, ready to wrap her in my arms and murmur whatever needed to be said by way of consolation, though there could be no consolation and we both knew it. I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t anticipated this moment, rehearsing it in my head over and over, but in every scenario I’d come up with I saw her giving in to the inevitable the way I would have if I were in her position and then the two of us regrouping and fighting through the storm together. She surprised me, though. She made straight for the door without raising her eyes, her shoulders slumped and her feet digging at the carpet as if the room had somehow tilted on her and she was climbing the side of a mountain. By the time I caught up with her she was already out in the hallway, heading for the stairs. “Linda!” I called sharply, more stunned than anything else. “Linda!”

She didn’t turn to acknowledge me, just started down the stairs, her pinned-up hair shining like cellophane under the overhead lights. She was short—five-two to my five-eight—and looking down on her from that angle she seemed so reduced she might have been a child clacking down the stairs after a bad day at school. And it had been a bad day, the worst, and I needed to talk it out with her—for my own sake as well as hers.

“Linda!”

Still she didn’t turn and I think she would have made it all the way down to the first floor and out the door and into the heat if it weren’t for the fact that she was wearing heels (and that was another thing: we’d discussed how inappropriate it would be to wear heels, tacky even, because this wasn’t a beauty contest, and here she was in a pair of pumps in the same shade as her dress). I hurried down the steps and actually took hold of her arm in mid-stride so she had no choice but to stop and turn her face to me. “I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s horrible. It’s shit. I mean, how could they?”

“You’re sorry? What have you got to be sorry about? You’re in.” She shot me a furious look and snatched her arm away.

“I know, I know. It’s wrong. Way wrong. They’re idiots, G.C., Judy, all of them—we knew it all along. I mean, how many times did we say how out of touch they were, how they wouldn’t recognize true merit, if, if—”

“They picked you, though, didn’t they?”

I ducked my head as if to acknowledge the blow. Two people we both knew, support staff, made their way past us, heading up to the second floor. They knew what the score was as soon as they caught a glimpse of Linda’s face and they went on by without a word. I waited till they reached the next landing, struggling with myself. What I said next was false and we both knew it the minute it was out of my mouth: “They should have taken you instead.”

“Don’t make me laugh. You know what this is all about, and so what if I have the qualifications—better than yours, if you want to know the truth. I’m Asian, that’s the fact. And I’m fat.”

“You’re not fat,” I said automatically.

“Fat and short and not half as pretty as you. Or Stevie. Or even Gretchen.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“Blondes, that’s what they want. Or what?” She gestured angrily in my face. “Redheads. Or is it strawberry blonde? Isn’t that what you’re always calling it?”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Did she really think hair color had anything to do with it? When I’d put all that time into food production while she was flapping around in her flippers and wet suit trying to go head-to-head with Stevie? “Come on, Linda,” I said, “this is me you’re talking to. I know you’re hurting right now, but we’ll get through this just like we got through everything else they tossed at us—”

“Screw you,” she said, and then she was clattering down the stairs, unsteady on the heels, which I realized she must have bought just for the interview since I’d never seen them before. It made me sad. I didn’t want this. I wanted to go someplace, anyplace, shout out the news, phone my mother, phone Johnny, but Linda was dragging me down. I called her name again and she swung round abruptly. “What?” she demanded.

I was still poised there on the third step from the bottom. “Don’t you want to go someplace and talk things over? I mean, for coffee. Or maybe a drink?”

“A drink? At five past nine in the morning? Are you out of your mind?”

“Why not? They gave us the day off, right? Why not do something crazy, like go shoot pool and get plastered?”

“No,” she said. “No way.”

“Coffee then?”

She made a face, but she was standing there motionless now, the heels thrusting her up and away from the gleaming surface of the floor and the shift bunched across her midsection, half a size too small. (The whole outfit was wrong, too blocky on her, which was typical of Linda, whose style sense was always a bit off, and why she hadn’t shown it to me beforehand I couldn’t imagine. Or maybe I could.) I came down the steps and crossed the lobby to her and she let me loop my arm through hers and lead her toward the door. “Tell you what,” I said, “let’s go into town to that place with the napoleons. Your fave? Okay?”

She didn’t answer but I felt some of the rigidity go out of her and we kept on walking.

This was better, much better, and I suppose I never should have said what came next, but I was trying to be positive, you can appreciate that. “Listen,” I said as we stepped through the door and into the glare of the sun, “I know how you feel, I do, but like you said, there’s always Mission Three.”

We drove the forty miles to Tucson with the radio cranked and the windows down, our hair beating round our heads in the old way of freedom and the open road, the way it had been before I’d met Johnny and we’d go off on day trips whenever we could just to get away from E2 and all the focus and pressure surrounding it. The car was a hand-me-down from my mother, a Camry in need of tires and paint, with a hundred thousand miles on it, but good still, solid, and it came to me then that I didn’t know what I was going to do with it. Put it up on blocks? Isn’t that what people did with cars? But where? There was no way I’d have time to drive across country and leave it at my parents’ house. Mission Control would give us a stipend to store our personal things, furniture, clothes and whatever, but they hadn’t said anything about cars—would they let us leave them on campus? The more I thought about it the more I realized they wouldn’t—the cars would just deteriorate and become an eyesore and nobody wanted the press or the tourists to see that. And it wasn’t as if I could just park the car someplace and expect it to be there when I got back. But then maybe I was worrying over nothing. Who knew, by the time the mission was over, cars might be obsolete—or mine would be, anyway.

I turned to Linda, who understandably hadn’t had much to say since we’d got in the car, which, I suppose, was part of my strategy though I hadn’t been aware of it till now—let the wind and the music stand as an excuse while we both privately took the opportunity to sort out our feelings—and had an inspiration. “Linda, I was just thinking,” I said, and I had to shout to be heard over the noise of the wind and the radio, “do you want a car? I mean for like when it’s too hot to bicycle? Or when you need groceries?”

She was staring straight ahead, her hair down now and floating round her face as if we’d been plunged underwater. “What, you mean this one?”

I nodded, though she wouldn’t have seen it since she still wouldn’t look at me. The radio was playing a tune by a singer who would kill himself a month after closure, not that the two were related in any way, just that it helps put the time in perspective for me. Here we are now, entertain us. That was the lyric. And it droned through the speakers as I stole a glance at Linda, then flicked my eyes to the rearview—trucks, eternal trucks—and back to the road ahead of us.

“You want me to car-sit, is that what you’re saying?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I guess. If you think you can get some use out of it, I mean. Otherwise, it’ll just sit there and rust. Or not rust—dry up, right?”

“And when Mission Three comes around and it’s my turn—if it’s ever going to be my turn—then what? You’re going to want it back?”

I shrugged. The singer droned, soon to be dead, though he didn’t know it yet—or maybe he did. There was hair in my mouth. A truck swung out to pass and I winced at the intrusion. I was feeling generous—feeling ecstatic, actually, and what I was doing here and would do for the next four hours on the road and in the pastry shop and the handbag store we both liked was feeling more and more like a duty—and I said, “You can keep it. I’ll sign it over and everything. For nothing, gratis, free, it’s yours. And when you go in, I’ll watch it for you—change the oil, keep it washed and waxed, everything. Deal?”

She shook her head in denial. She didn’t want a car. And she didn’t want to be here pretending any more than I did. What she wanted, she wasn’t going to get. Not now—and I think I knew it even then—and not two years from now either.

When I got back it was past two, the message light was blinking on the phone and I needed to call Johnny and my mother, in that order. I’d already tried Johnny twice, once from the phone in the hallway of the pastry shop and once from a gas station on the way back while Linda was getting us Diet Cokes, and both times, as I’d expected, I got his answering machine. He was at work, obviously, and he’d get the message when he got it. The thing was, how would he react? He’d be happy for me, or make a show of being happy, but then he’d drop the pose and let his sarcasm take over and that could be harsh. Lately he’d been calling me his girlfriend in a bottle and introducing me around as the woman going into stir. And my mother. She’d go gaga because now she could tell people her daughter wasn’t just breaking her back doing menial labor in a greenhouse in the Arizona desert for less than minimum wage, but getting somewhere, getting famous, making use of her degree and participating in a project Time magazine had proclaimed to be as significant for the future of humanity as the Apollo missions to the moon. Of course, that was back then, before Mission One soured, and yet it wouldn’t make an iota of difference to my mother: Time had proclaimed and that was enough for her. And if you want to know the truth, it was enough for me too.

Anyway, there I was, standing in the middle of the room, sweating rivulets, my hair a tangle, the endorphin high of the morning still lifting me right up off the ground and the sugar rush (we’d shared a napoleon and a cream puff) running like rocket fuel through my veins, staring at the pulsing yellow button on the phone console as if I didn’t know what it was for. Add to that the fact that I was feeling light-headed from caffeine overload because I’d wound up having two cafés au lait at the pastry shop while Linda and I tried to talk things through. Not to mention the Diet Coke. I was rattled, flying high, but in the best possible way. The message would have been from my mother, I was sure of it, because she was as keyed up about the interview as I was—Just be yourself, that was her advice—and I was about to press “play” when the phone rang.

All that caffeine, all that sugar—the sound startled me and it wasn’t till the third ring that I picked up.

It was Johnny. “Hey, you hear anything yet?”

“Yes,” I said, “I’m in.” I’d anticipated this for a long while, weighing the pros and cons, thinking of what I’d say, but now that the moment had come, now that I’d said it, I was surprised at how neutral my tone was. This was dancing-around-the-room news, shouting-it-out-the-windows, but I just dropped it there like a stone.

There was a pause. I could hear sounds in the background, an engine straining against the gear, the clank of metal on metal. When he finally spoke, if anything his voice was even less inflected than mine. “That’s great,” he said. “I’m happy for you, I really am.”

“But not so much for yourself, right?”

“What am I supposed to do while you’re in there, get an inflatable sex doll?”

“Dream about me.”

“If only. Girlfriend in a bottle. Bottled girlfriend. Girlfriend under glass.”

“Sealed-in sweetness,” I said.

“What about the four guys—you know who’s in?”

“Ramsay for sure. And Richard Lack. The other two I haven’t heard yet—the interviews are still going on. Linda’s out. But you probably guessed that. She’s taking it hard.”

Another pause. “So you expect me to wait for you? And what about you—you’re going to be locked up in there with four guys and you tell me nothing’s going to happen?”

“I never said that. You knew from the beginning—”

He cut me off: “I don’t want to bicker. This is a day for celebration, right? When we going to get together—five okay?”

“Five’s perfect.”

“Dinner at the Italian place, maybe. Or if you want a steak—you won’t be getting many of those, will you? Then drinks and dancing, and after we’ll go back to my place and talk this over like sensible adults—with our clothes off.”

“Sounds like a plan,” I said.

“Five,” he said, and hung up.

The minute I set the phone down it rang again, the very instant, as if it had been timed to go off like a bomb fabricated of dynamite and a ticking clock. The voice that came at me, high-pitched and demanding, was Judy’s: “Jesus, Dawn, where have you been? I’ve been ringing the phone off the hook for the past three hours now. Don’t you realize how short the time is? We need you over here right now for your fitting—now, do you hear me?”

I don’t know if I’d call myself overly apologetic, but when I’m in the wrong I’ll admit it, and here I was in the wrong already (though if they wanted me on call, they should have said so, or that was how I felt anyway). “Sorry,” I said.

“What were you thinking? From now on we’re going to need you available twenty-four/seven. We’re counting down to closure, don’t you realize that?”

“Sorry,” I repeated. And then, before she could go on I said, “Who’s in? Who made it? Who am I going to be living with?”

“You’ll find out when you get here—”

“Stevie I know—and Ramsay, right? Richard, I presume, because—”

“One other thing, and we’ll fill you in when you get here, there’ll be a dinner tonight, five o’clock, at Alfano’s, just Mission Control and the final eight, and I’ve asked two or three journalists—and a photographer—to join us, nothing official, that’ll come tomorrow at the press conference—”

From where I was standing, if I tugged at the phone cord and canted my head to the right, I could see out the window to where E2 caught the sun in its glass panels and showered light over the campus, the white interlocking struts of the spaceframe like the superstructure of a vast beehive—honeycomb, that was the term that came into my head just then in all its sweetness, a sweetness so intense it cloyed.

I blocked out Judy for just a moment there, adrift on the future and what it meant and what was happening to me in the here and now. “Yes,” I said, “yes, okay,” though I didn’t know what I was agreeing to.

“So we’ll brief you on all this, of course—this is just the beginning, believe me. But for now, for tonight, just remember you’re representing the mission from here on out and that means you’re going to want to look your best . . .”

“What about the dress I was wearing this morning, would that be okay?”

“What dress?”

“For the interview? You know, it’s like a light green, almost a mint?”

“I’m drawing a blank here.”

“You know, the tank dress?”

I watched a sparrow clip its wings tight and plummet from the balcony to the lawn below. And what was that? A cloud in the cloudless sky, dragging a moving shadow across the courtyard. Dark, then light, then dark again. “Oh, yeah, yeah, of course,” Judy said. “A tank dress, right?”

I didn’t say anything.

“I don’t know.” She let out a sigh. “Haven’t you got something with maybe a little more style?”