But such occasions, when JK took the trouble to share his work with her, were the exception, not the rule. Mostly she had to endure his absences, silently hostess his business meetings.

Jennine had married JK back in 1955.

At the time he had been working for a master’s in aeronautical engineering at Caltech, the California Institute of Technology, out in Pasadena.

They got married in a Catholic church close to Jennine’s parents’ home in New Orleans. She had been starting to make her way as a secretary in a large law practice in the city. But she gave it all up to go with JK, to support him and his career a thousand miles away. That was what you did in 1955.

Jennine’s parents gave them money to rent a car for a couple of weeks, and so they drove back east, through Vermont, to watch the fall coloring the leaves. Whenever the fall came she thought of that honeymoon.

After the honeymoon they flew west, and JK drove her out to Pasadena, to the little house he’d rented.

When they arrived, there was a group of JK’s pals waiting there. She thought it must be some kind of welcome home party. But no; it turned out there was a problem in the Caltech wind tunnel.

So JK had kissed her and gone off to the lab, leaving her standing in the driveway with all her luggage. JK didn’t get home until dawn.

As it turned out, that honeymoon in Vermont, twenty-seven years ago, had been the last holiday Jennine and JK had taken together.

And this damn Mars program was the toughest project JK had ever worked on. JK was at heart a technician, and a hands-on manager, at his best — so Jennine thought — when working with comparatively small teams, at one site. But now he was running a national effort, one of the most complex engineering projects ever undertaken.

Even beyond the complexity of what was going on at Columbia itself there were all the subcontractors Columbia had to deal with: Honeywell working on stabilization and control (not Hughes, JK would point out with relish), Garrett Corporation on the cabin environment, Rocketdyne, a subsidiary of Rockwell, providing the main propulsion systems, Pratt and Whitney developing the fuel cells, and so on.

JK wanted to avoid the thousands of uncoordinated changes that had pretty much paralyzed Rockwell’s development of Apollo for a while in the 1960s. So he had instigated a change control mechanism. And that had brought him endless conflict with the astronauts — including Joe Muldoon — who, in the Apollo days, had gotten used to ruling the roost.

And on it went.

Once, JK showed her a PERT chart for the MEM development, a project plan with all the tasks linked together in their logical order. It was just a mass of computer printouts, little boxes, and spidery connecting arrows.

“What do you do with all this?”

JK laughed and tipped the plan toward a waste bin. “Nothing! Haven’t got time to read it!”

The project was a monster, and JK was trying to wrestle it to the ground.

She could see that the whole damn thing was bending Lee in half. But to relax, he generally wouldn’t think of coming home to her. Instead he would go out with Bob Rowen or Jack Morgan or some such, out to some Newport Beach hot spot like the Balboa Bay Club, and he’d come home in the small hours roaring drunk and sleep it off. He wasn’t an alcoholic, she believed; the drinking was just one more example of the way JK’s life was never stable, never routine, but swung constantly between crazy extremes.

And the next morning he would be back at his desk, hungover or not, with his two cups of sugary coffee inside him.

The night was so quiet that she could hear both halves of the phone conversation.

“JK, you’d better get down here,” Julie Lye’s insect voice whispered. “I’m at the pressure test of the oxidizer tank. We’ve had a failure. Catastrophic. I’m looking into the test pit right now. We had seven tons of nitrogen tet down there. Now, all we’ve got is a few fragments of titanium stuck in the walls.”

“All right. I’ll be straight over.” JK began to rattle out instructions while he hunted for his pants. Lye was to begin with a scrutiny of the evidence of the explosion. Just by looking at the distribution of the pieces it was possible to figure out the order in which the tank had come apart. Then there would have to be more structural tests. They should pressure up other test tanks with plain water instead of the nitrogen tet. That way, they could tell if the failure was due to something mechanical — like a faulty weld — or some kind of chemical reaction to do with the propellant. And Lye should get onto the tanks’ manufacturer, a division of General Motors out in Indianapolis. The manufacturers should run identical tests. That way, they could see if the failure had been caused by damage in shipment, or some kind of local phenomenon…

He was still barking out instructions as he left the bedroom. He threw the phone back on the receiver cradle, and left the house at a run.

He didn’t say good-bye to Jennine.

Jennine lay there, trying to summon up sleep. It didn’t work.

She felt as if something was cracking inside her, as if she was one of JK’s goddamn oxidant tanks, pumped full of pressure.

She got out of bed and walked barefoot to the bathroom. She had a couple of bottles of tranquilizers there.

She looked at herself in the mirror. She saw a slack, sagging woman, with worry lines etched into her face and tired, graying, mousy hair.

She took the pills, popping them into her mouth like jelly beans. Viewing the image in the mirror, the little pills pushing into the small sour-looking mouth, was like watching somebody else, someone on TV maybe. She couldn’t feel anything.

When she’d done, she threw the empty bottles into the trash and went back to bed.

Even then, sleep wouldn’t come.

After a time, she reached out for the phone and dialed Jack Morgan’s home number. By a miracle he was there, and not throwing rum down his throat in some bar. She told him what she’d done.

At around 6 A.M., JK came running in, with his hair mussed and no tie and his shirt sticking out of his pants.

Jack Morgan was sitting on the bed, with an overcoat thrown over his pajamas, rubbing Jennine’s limbs. “Where the hell have you been? I called you an hour ago.”

JK started talking about the oxygen tank, and batches of contaminated nitrogen tet, and all the rest of it; but Jack just glared at him.

So JK broke off, and then he started trying to take command. “Have you called a hospital? What about a stomach pump?” It was typical JK. Arrive too late, then order everyone else around.

“She doesn’t need a pump,” Jack snapped back at him. “But she’s going to sleep for a hell of a long time. She should be asleep now. And then I want her to go into the hospital, for observation.” He nodded at the bedside table. “I’ve left a number there.”

JK, looking restless and bewildered, sat on the bed. Then he took Jennine’s hand and began to rub, as Jack had been doing, along the length of her forearm. His hands were warm, but they were trembling, and his touch was uncertain, wavering between too hard and too soft. She managed to smile at him, and he seemed to get a little confidence, and the strokes evened out.

“This is a hell of a thing,” he said, his voice thin. “A hell of a thing.”

“Listen to me,” Jack Morgan said. “You’ve got to get your head out of your ass, JK. You’ve got to start paying some attention to your family. And yourself, come to that. Or Jennine is going to walk out on you, and nobody’s going to blame her. In fact, I’ll be here to drive her away.

“I’ll come back in a couple of hours. You take care, Jennine.” And he went to get his coat, and she heard the door bang behind him.

JK looked devastated. He really hadn’t seen this coming, she realized.

“So,” he said stiffly. “I guess it was a cry for help, huh.”