Hartle came forward, and rested his thin hand on Deeke’s uniformed shoulder. His face was a mask, the wrinkles in his cheeks pulled straight by his severe frown, and his shock of crew-cut white hair was like a metal helmet. “I think we can stop this before they get to a launch. But we have to plan for the worst. You’re going to be my linebacker. My last line of defense. I want you there in that hole, if that runner tries to break through…”

Deeke thought, Hartle has gone rogue. But he has backers. And a vision.

He felt adrenaline spurt in his system, as if he were once more in the cockpit of a rocket plane, readying for ignition.

Holy God, he thought. I’m going to get to fly again.

Hartle looked into Deeke’s face, and nodded, as if satisfied.

Marcus White wanted to fly himself straight into Edwards for the F-1 test fire. But he couldn’t get hold of a T-38. Like a lot of other NASA resources, the little needle-nosed supersonic trainers, used by the astronauts like sports cars and taxis, were being quietly withdrawn from service.

It was deeply shitty, White thought; there was a stench of decay about the whole enterprise. The sooner we get this damn Titan mission assembled and away the better.

Anyhow he had to get a commercial flight into LAX; from there he hired a car and drove north out of the city. The car was a late-model Chevy with a lot of smartass electronic features he couldn’t switch off; it just seemed to go where it wanted to go, like a dumb old mule.

The F-1 was the big main engine that powered the S-IC, the Saturn V first stage. White knew the F-1 refurbishment program was going badly, and — as Benacerraf had told him when he’d gone along to bitch at her about the T-38s — his presence up there at Edwards would be a morale boost for the guys.

Not that he could do anything constructive, of course. He was an aviator, not a rocket scientist. He was just a kind of symbol, a presence, who still meant something to the guys working on this unlikely project. Maybe. But this was the last of it. After Titan was gone, his usefulness would be done.

He figured he’d have himself stuffed and mounted and stuck in the Smithsonian. Hang me up there with the Wright Flyer, boys.

The evening was coming on. The sky was cloudless, but the horizon was ringed with the sulphur-orange glow of Los Angeles, masking the stars.

At last he reached the desert. He could see it all around him as a flat, pale white crust in the starlight: the salt flats, like an immense runway, where they used to test the X-15.

He spent the night in the bar with Don Baylor, the old-time Rocketdyne engineer who had invited him to Edwards.

He woke up with a banging head. You ain’t got the tanker capacity you used to have, boy.

But he pulled on his shorts and went for a run around the base.

The sun was barely above the horizon, and the cold of the desert night was lingering, making the air sharp as a blade as it cut into his lungs. He used to run until his heart was pumping, burning all the alcohol and toxins out of his system. But today he tired quickly.

He had to walk back to his room, the world greying around him, limping and wheezing like the old geezer he had become.

The test stand viewing bunker was just a couple of rows of seats behind a big picture window, with telemetry on the engine fed into little softscreens. When he arrived the bunker was already half-full, of managers and senior technicians; White knew that this was just a viewing point for the senior staff — managers and VIP types like White himself — and the real work would be done by technicians controlling the test from elsewhere.

It was mostly men in the bunker, mostly in rumpled suits. They were uniformly fat and aged. Many of these guys had been pulled out of retirement, to work on Saturn technology once more. White hair and bald scalps glowed in the low desert sunlight.

We all let ourselves get so damn old, White thought gloomily.

A countdown was proceeding, delivered by a smooth woman’s voice. It sounded like the announcements in an airport departure lounge.

Donny Baylor was sitting in the front row of the stand, pale as a ghost, with his face half-covered by the biggest, thickest pair of sunshades White had ever seen.

White laughed and clapped Baylor on the back; Baylor blanched further.

“Asshole,” Baylor said.

“Not as young as you used to be, Donny.”

“Neither are you.”

White settled into a seat beside Baylor. “I’ll tell you the best damn hangover cure I ever knew. You’d take up your bird after a night of throwing them back, with all that alcohol still sloshing around your system. All you’d have to do was pull a few Gs and suck in oxygen to flush all that crap away…”

Baylor was a short, stocky man, and his face was a round, wizened button. He rubbed his forehead and scratched at the grizzled frosting that was all the years had left of his hair. “Things have changed, Marcus. When you think about it, it was pretty much you and me on our own last night.”

“Too damn true,” White said. In fact, he had a theory you could correlate the nation’s decline with the growing adversity of these younger generations to a few cold ones.

Baylor checked his watch. “Ten minutes to the firing.”

White looked out of the picture window. The sun was low and in his eyes, but the glass was polarized somehow. There was a small pair of binoculars in front of his seat, not much bigger than opera glasses. But when he lifted them to his eyes some kind of electronics in the optics started to work, and the test stand leapt into his view, as detailed as if he was standing next to it, the image as steady as a rock, the glasses somehow compensating for the shake of his hands.

The test stand itself was just a big square block of scaffolding, sitting on concrete trestles over a flame pit, anchored deep in the desert. The stand was maybe forty feet tall, and it was topped off by the two big silvery spheres which held oxidizer and propellant, RP-1 kerosene, for the test fires. There was frost, sparkling over the shell of the liquid oxygen tank.

The single F-1 engine under test today — a complex tangle of feed lines, electronics and gimbal bearings — was pretty much hidden by the test stand structure. But he could see the nozzle, protruding out beneath the scaffolding, and he could see the fat kerosene pipes wrapped around the bell; the fuel passed around the combustion chamber and engine bell, to cool them, before it was fed into the combustion chamber.

That single nozzle was all of twelve feet across. And a Saturn first stage would have no less than five of those mothers, in a neat cluster, all burning at once, every one of them five times as powerful as the Atlas rocket that had thrust John Glenn to orbit.

Even the test stand itself had had to be refurbished for this program, he knew. Most of the Saturn test facilities around the country had long been deactivated or converted to other uses. The Rocketdyne engine stands at Canoga Park had been converted for tests of the Atlas and Delta expendable boosters, for instance, and the stands here at Edwards had been used for Shuttle solid rocket motor tests. The Marshall facilities had been turned over to Shuttle main engine tests. And so on.

Well, to make the schedule, this reverse refurbishment had been brisk, he could see now. The desert sand around the test stand had been churned up, and left in great untidy heaps.

Beyond the stand, a line of worn, rocky hills shouldered over the horizon; the sky was high and blue, with a few wisps of cloud in layers. There was a great sense of emptiness, of bigness; White knew there wasn’t a human being within a mile of that stand.