Some of the results were unexpected.

* * *

Paula Benacerraf worked through her EVA suit checklist.

She connected her Snoopy hat comms carrier to the suit’s umbilical. She set the sliding oxygen control on her chest pack to PRESS. She put on her gloves and snapped home the connecting rings.

Then she lifted her helmet over her head. The suit built up to an overpressure, and she tested it for leaks.

The ritual of checks was oddly comforting. It took her mind off what she was about to do.

Tom Lamb rapped on her backpack.

Paula Benacerraf turned, awkwardly. Foot restraints held them both in standing positions, packed in head-to-toe. In her EMU — her suit, her EVA mobility unit — she felt ludicrously bulky, awkward in the confines of Columbia’s airlock, which was just a cramped, cylindrical chamber in the orbiter’s mid deck.

“That’s it, Paula. I think we’re go.”

She said, “Already?”

“Already.” Lamb grinned out of his helmet at her, and she could see silvery stubble in the creases of his leathery cheeks. “You’re an independent spacecraft now.”

Her heart was hammering under the tough surface of her HUT, her hard upper torso unit. “Spaceship Paula. It feels good.”

Tom Lamb had once been the youngest Moonwalker. Now, at sixty-two, he was one of the oldest humans to have flown in space.

And Benacerraf, forty-five, a grandmother, was one of the oldest rookies.

Benacerraf disconnected her suit from the wall mount.

Lamb said, “Houston, we’ve got the hatch closed and we’re waiting for a go for depress on time.” His native Iowan twang was overlaid with a Texan drawl acquired over long years at Houston.

“Affirmative, EV1; you have a go for depress.”

Lamb turned to the control panel and turned the depress switch to position 5. Then, with the pressure down to five psi, Lamb turned the switch to its second position. “Depress valve to zero.”