Lee, lying there helpless, seethed. There’s nothing wrong with the goddamn program. They’re pulling my organization apart for nothing. This is a witch-hunt.

And all of it while Lee was conveniently out of the office. All his people were worried about their own positions, and about the future of Lee himself.

So Lee called up Jack Morgan and told him he wanted out.

Morgan protested, of course. Lee had been in the hospital little more than two weeks.

Morgan came to the hospital, and he brought Jennine, to try to persuade him to stay.

“JK, you’re stuck here for another two weeks at least, maybe a month.”

Lee was furious. His anger at the betrayal by his own body seemed to course through him like nitrogen tetroxide, a volatile substance that was burning him up. He got out of bed and started doing push-ups again. “See?” he gasped. “For Christ’s sake, what is wrong with you people? Can’t you see—”

But Jennine was screaming. She had her hands clasped to her cheeks, so that her face was a thin, moist ribbon, compressed between the palms of her hands.

“Stop it. Stop it, JK.”

They came to a compromise. He was out of there three weeks after the attack.

The deal was that he was supposed to stay at home, working if he really had to, for another couple of weeks at least.

He tried to watch TV. There was some god-awful depressing thing called The Day After, about a nuclear attack on Lawrence, Kansas; everyone said he should watch it.

After the first hour he threw the remote across the room. He’d always hated Jason Robards, anyhow.

After two days he couldn’t stand the isolation anymore, and he got the T-bird out of the garage.

Jennine didn’t try to stop him. She just watched him preparing to go. It made him uncomfortable to look her in the eye, to meet that bruised look there.

When he got to work the plant was in chaos. It was worse than he had expected, with NASA people still crawling all over the goddamn place, and Art Cane bouncing off the walls of his office, convinced he was going to lose the MEM contract.

So Lee tried to get a hold of his program again.

First he kicked out all the outsiders, the NASA people and the rest, whom he regarded as not strictly necessary for the progress of the MEM. It took him a day just to do that, and he had a lot of opposition from the NASA bigwigs, of course, but he did it anyhow.

Still, it worried him a little that Art Cane’s backing in this was muted.

Then he spent a couple of days working through the two audit reports, and blue-penciling the politics and the waffle and the ill-informed and the downright goddamn stupid. And there was a hell of a lot of that.

The auditors, both internal and external, had gone for what he considered to be easy meat: schedule delays and paperwork snarl-ups and procedural problems. To Lee, schedules on paper were all very well — you had to produce them for senior management, and they were always the best guess you could make, and you had to keep a weather eye on them — but the fact was, half the time Columbia didn’t know what they were trying to build here, or what the latest batch of test results would throw at them, or what the latest flood of changes from the design teams at Marshall, Houston, and elsewhere would bring. In a program like the MEM you couldn’t expect actually to stick to a schedule. The delays certainly weren’t a question of his people’s competence, as far as Lee was concerned; they were more a measure of the inherent complexity of what they were trying to do.

Columbia was building a spacecraft, for God’s sake; and you only had to walk through the Clean Room, to see the four beautiful test articles emerging, to understand that basically, at the heart of all the paper storms, JK Lee was succeeding.

He tried to distill the reports down to what he considered to be the elements of common sense, of valid criticism, and then act on them. For instance the auditors had found poor demarcation of work areas, and sloppy handling of materials, and so forth. Well, he wasn’t going to argue about that kind of thing. Lee fired off memos, and called in people to chew ass, and demanded some fixing.

After a few days of this he went to see Art Cane, and he was able to throw the two fat audit reports across the desk at Art. Every paragraph of each report had been blue-penciled by Lee, either as completed, with a fat tick, or as irrelevant bullshit, in which case he’d just scribbled it out.

Cane leafed through the stuff, looking a little dubious; but he accepted what Lee had given him, and told him to write up his responses to the reports formally.

Next, Lee got everyone at the plant involved in the MEM program — there was almost a thousand of them — to come squeezing into the big, roomy old canteen. The room was still used as the main conference room, and its walls were lined with multicolored schedule boards and progress charts. Lee got a photograph of their prime MEM, Spacecraft 009, blown up so it covered the wall behind him — the great complex silver pyramid made a beautiful image — and he stood on a table in front of his people. He put his hands on his hips, and glared out at the sea of pinched-up, worried faces around him.

“Now, I know times have been tough for you guys. I know you’ve got a lot of people crawling all over you saying you don’t know your butts from third base. And we did get some things wrong. But now we’re fixing them, and that’s healthy. And I know, deep down — and you know — that there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the way we’re working here. And I know there’s nothing wrong with the spacecraft, either. If NASA wants to fly in April” — the target date for the D-prime mission, the first manned flight — “then we’ll be ready for them.

“I want you to forget about everything else, now, except that first flight. We’re going to focus on this one spacecraft here, and make it work; because if we can complete that flight well, believe me, all the rest of the program is going to slot into place, bang bang bang, just like that.

“And I know one thing more.” He looked around at their faces, all somehow smoothed out by the way they were tilted up at him, made to look younger; he felt a surge of protectiveness. “One thing more. I know I couldn’t ask for a better group of people to work with. Now, let’s get back to work, and let’s make history.”

Well, this was a standard spiel for Lee, a version of a talk he’d used at tough times on many projects. A standard-issue motivator. On the B-70, it had even gotten him a cheer.

But this time, although there were a lot of nodding heads, nobody cheered; and when he was done, they just turned away, and drifted back to their workstations.

He got down off the rickety table with a hand from Jack Morgan. He had a sick feeling, deep in the pit of his stomach. He felt isolated, somehow vulnerable.

Maybe it was his heart, letting him down again.

The hell with it. Leaning a little on Jack Morgan, he started prowling around the plant, trying to pinpoint problems, bawling out technicians, riding herd on his program managers as hard as he could.