Christ, Michaels thought. We’re in trouble.

He read on. Economies everywhere. One rationalization after another. No money for more lunar flights beyond Apollo 20. The space station projects cut back to little more than Skylab. All decisions on later stuff, beyond Apollo and Skylab, deferred: that is, canned.

The feasibility studies on the Space Shuttle seemed spared, but even that was only because Nixon perceived the Shuttle as saving the bottom line: We should work to reduce substantially the cost of space operations… As we build for the longer-range future, we must devise less costly and less complicated ways of transporting payloads into space…

Michaels put the paper down. So Nixon thinks we can cost-cut our way to Mars.

It wouldn’t have been like this with LBJ.

But Johnson was gone. There was a new breed of shifty Republicans in the White House. And suddenly Michaels, at sixty-one, found that the political levers he was used to pulling weren’t connected to anything anymore. Even his links with the Kennedys didn’t seem as useful as they once had.

Sitting here, he felt old, tired, used up.

Maybe I should retire back to Dallas, he thought. Go work on my golf swing.

He noticed Agronski glancing around at the walls, at the moonwalk maps. “Poignant, isn’t it?” Michaels said sharply.

Agronski didn’t react.

“Leon, why did the President withdraw this draft?”

“Because, frankly, nobody in the White House is sure about the impact Kennedy’s remarks about the Mars option are having on public opinion. And now” — Agronski waved a hand at the curling photographs of Fra Mauro — “now you people have served us up with all this. The public mood is a fragile thing, Fred; after Apollo 13 America may want to go to Mars as fast as it can — or it may want to close down the space program altogether.”

Muldoon’s nostrils went white. “You’re talking about the lives of three men, damn it.”

Agronski studied him, analytically. “You know, you people at NASA have been the same whenever I’ve dealt with you. So emotive, so unrealistic. Even you, Fred. Every time we ask for proposals, back you come wanting everything: look at this Space Task Group report with its ‘balanced programs,’ its ‘wide range of technologies.’ You ask for Mars, but that brings everything else in its wake, it seems: nuclear boosters, a Space Shuttle, huge space stations. The same old vision von Braun has peddled since the 1950s — even though you didn’t need a space station to get to the Moon. Your hidden agendas are not, frankly, very well hidden. Why can’t you learn to prioritize?”

Muldoon said angrily, “The task group is asking for a mandate to begin the colonization of the Solar System. And to secure the future of the human race, just as Kennedy is saying. What could be higher priority than that?”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Agronski snapped. “We’re a country at war, Colonel Muldoon. And the war is a hemorrhage of money, resources, national morale.”

“Sure,” Muldoon said. “And Apollo is going to end up having cost as much as it takes to keep the war going for another twelve months. What a price to pay.”

Agronski ignored that. “The budget just isn’t big enough to do everything you want. You don’t have to be a White House insider to see that. And the public mood is against you, too. I don’t suppose you flyboys have heard of a thing called Earth Day, planned by the environmentalists in a couple of weeks’ time—”

“Yes, I’ve heard of it, damn it.”

“Cleanups. Marches. Teach-ins. That’s where the public is going to focus in the coming decade, Colonel Muldoon: on our problems here on Earth, not more of your stunts in space.”

“Maybe so. But Agnew chaired the Space Task Group, not NASA,” Michaels growled.

Agronski plowed on. “It’s time you people dropped the idea that you’re some kind of heroic superagency. During Apollo you thought you were the Manhattan Project. Well, now you’re a service agency with a limited budget. And that’s what you have to learn to live with…”

Michaels knew Agronski had a point.

In Michaels’s humble opinion, the current NASA Administrator, Thomas O. Paine, was an idiot: a naive dreamer who was pumping Agnew full of grandiose visions, without a thought about how acceptable they would be to the decision makers inside the White House. Paine was a real contrast to his predecessor, Jim Webb, whom Michaels had greatly admired. Webb was a real political operator — he had known where the bodies were buried, up on the Hill — and he had actively avoided long-term planning. NASA was bad at it anyhow — long-range plans always got bogged down in infighting between the centers — and Webb believed that long-term plans were just hostages to fortune, a distraction for budget authorizers and NASA managers.

Paine couldn’t seem to see that the real problem lay in holding NASA together in the tough times to come, not starting up new programs.

It just wasn’t the way Michaels would run things.

Agronski said, “Fred, forget your huge space stations, your fifty men on the Moon in 1980. The President wants what he’s calling, in private, a ‘Kennedy option.’ ” He tapped the document again. “In this statement he was going to pick out one element from the task group’s report, the Space Shuttle, on which to focus. But what if he were to choose something else — a more visible, major goal — to achieve as quickly and as cheaply as possible?”

Muldoon was staring at Agronski, evidently baffled.

But Michaels understood. He’s speaking obliquely. In code. He has to. But Kennedy is evidently making his point. Nixon wants to save money. But he doesn’t want to be the President who killed the space program, not with Kennedy bleating in the background.

“You’re thinking about Mars,” he said to Agronski. “After all that bullshit about the Manhattan Project and Earth Day, you’re here to talk about going to Mars. Aren’t you?”

Muldoon looked startled.

“What does Paine say about this?”

Agronski looked at him carefully. “Let’s think about Dr. Paine later,” he said.

I knew it. They’re forcing Paine out. He’d heard the rumors from within the White House. Not only was Paine not cooperating, he was being seen as undermining the President. We need a new Administrator who will work with us and not against us, and will reflect credit on the President, not embarrass him… Paine was a dead duck. And now — from the way Agronski was studying him — Michaels understood that he, Fred Michaels, was being offered the chance to succeed, in preference to George Low, Jim Fletcher.

Mars, and the post of Administrator, all in one day. Games within games. But I’ll have to give Agronski something to take home with him, the bones of a cheap Mars option. And there is sure as hell going to be a price to pay, and I need to find out what it is.

The talk was affecting the astronaut differently. There was a look of hope on Muldoon’s face, Michaels recognized; a delicate, fragile hope, as if Muldoon thought the magical possibility — we might go to Mars — might melt away if he longed for it too warmly.

He wondered how much, if at all, Muldoon was aware of what was really going on, under the surface. Looking at Muldoon’s angry, open face, Michaels felt vaguely ashamed of his calculation. In fact, Muldoon’s presence seemed to be working on him the way he’d hoped it would work on Agronski.

Joe Muldoon felt scared to say anything, to disturb the difficult, mysterious process of negotiation. In case he made it all somehow go away.

Mars. They’re still talking about Mars. If Fred Michaels says and does the right things now, the road to Mars might actually be opening up, for us.

For me.

And Joe Muldoon would have something to do with his life again.

The months since his return from the Moon had been as bad as Muldoon had expected.

His most recent PR jaunt had been to some place called Morang, in Nepal. He’d given his standard-issue schoolkids’ talk. When I was on the Moon…