“How many launches will you need for a Mars program?” Agronski asked.

Michaels blew out his cheeks. “Let’s say, in the next half decade, six Saturn V flights, and perhaps ten Saturn IBs. That should get Skylab well under way, and perhaps take us as far as the first Earth-orbit manned flights of the NERVA, before we get the new launcher. Joe, does that sound reasonable?”

Muldoon grunted. “Yeah. I guess. If you want to cut it to the bone; if you want to run the risk of another Apollo 1 fire.”

“Now, Joe…”

“Six Saturn Vs,” Agronski said. “And there are seven Moon flights left, Apollos 14 through 20.” His lips pulled tight into a thin grin.

So that’s it. Now I know the price, for Mars, for Paine’s job. It was as if Agronski was taking a much-delayed revenge. Agronski had always despised the manned Moon program, opposed it whenever he could. Agronski knows that this is the end of Apollo. Right here and now; right in this room.

Agronski said smugly, “Well. Of course I’m aware that there’s a lot of opposition to further Moon flights, even within NASA. The whole system’s too complex. ‘One of these days Apollo will kill somebody, if it hasn’t already killed Lovell and his crew’ — that’s what is being said, isn’t it? I imagine a curtailment wouldn’t be impossibly difficult to sell, even within NASA, now that the first landings have been achieved. And—”

Muldoon kicked back his chair and stood up. “So we’re cutting the Moon flights,” he said. He was tall, intimidating, his disgust majestic. “Just when we’ve gotten there. Jesus Christ, Fred. The later flights would have been the crown of the program. J-class missions, with advanced LMs, three-day stays on the surface, long-duration backpacks that would extend each moonwalk to up to seven hours, and electric cars. We’d have gone to sites of terrific wonder, and beauty, and scientific interest. We’ve even got a tentative plan to go to the far side of the Moon.”

Michaels stared at Muldoon. He prided himself on being a great off-the-ballot politician, but he found words deserting him, at that moment of all moments.

“I know, Joe. I know.”

Michaels could imagine the attacks he’d suffer from the scientists. It was even possible he wouldn’t be able to sell a deal like this to Paine, and to others in the Agency, such as George Mueller, the great space station proponent. And, looking farther ahead, he supposed there was a danger that a Mars program would keep NASA a single-issue Agency, everything subordinated to one goal, just as in the days of Apollo.

He tried to focus on Muldoon, to handle the situation in front of him.

“It may not be a case of canceling the flights, Joe. Maybe we could stretch out the schedule. Defer some of the flights until later—”

Muldoon faced Michaels; the knotty muscles bunched around his shoulders, under his shirt. “Don’t do this, Fred. Don’t kill the missions.”

From the corner of his eye Michaels could see Agronski’s face, his revulsion at that outburst of monomania.

He knows he’s won. He knows I’m going to have to do more than just defer; that I’m going to agree to make these sacrifices, to sell them within the Agency, then manage them through as Administrator, in order to give us all a future. And there is more pain, much more, to come.

Michaels felt as if all of history, past and present, were flowing through him, in this room, just now; and that whatever he decided might shape the destiny of worlds.

When Jim Dana passed Richmond he turned the Corvette off Route 1 and onto the narrower State Highway 60, heading southeast. The towns were fewer, and smaller. And, at last, after Williamsburg, there seemed to be nothing but forests and marshland, and the occasional farmhouse.

It was a fresh June day, and soon Dana could taste salt and ozone from the coast; the sunlight was sharp on the bare arm he propped in the window frame. The landscape around him seemed to expand, to assume the huge, hollow dimensions of his childhood, echoing with seagull cries.

A little after noon he reached Hampton: his hometown, right at the tip of the peninsula. It was a fishing town, a backwater. He drove down streets so familiar it seemed his memories had reached out to reconstruct an external world. There were the same shabby boatyards, the crab boats lolling in the brackish tidal flow, the gulls: all the symbols of his childhood, still in place. It was as if twelve years had rolled off him, taking away all his achievements — Mary and the kids, the academy, his USAF service — leaving him a scraped-raw ten-year-old again.

Men had walked on the Moon. And the thinkers of the Langley research center, just a few miles to the north, had played a key role in putting them there, Dana’s father Gregory included. But it all seemed to have made damn little difference to Hampton.

Both his parents came out onto the porch to greet him. The house’s windows gleamed, the porch was swept until it shone, and the wind chimes glittered in the fresh blue daylight. But the little wooden-framed house had an air of shabbiness about it, and the downtown neighborhood seemed to have gotten rougher than ever. Dana felt a certain claustrophobia settling over him, like an old, ill-fitting coat.

His mother, Sylvia, was rounder, older, her face more tired and slack than he remembered, but she was lit up by a smile of such intensity that Dana felt obscurely guilty. And there came his father, Gregory Dana, in an old cardigan and with tie loosely knotted, wiping his hands on an oily rag. It was hard to see Gregory’s eyes through his dusty wire-rimmed spectacles — John Lennon glasses, Dana realized suddenly, and he suppressed a grin.

Gregory shook Dana’s hand. “So how’s the great astronaut coming along?”

Gregory had asked that question as long as Dana could remember. The difference now was it looked as if the question might soon have some bearing on the truth.

Lunch was a stiff affair. His parents had always been a little awkward with him, undemonstrative in their affections. So he talked about Mary, the children, how much they’d appreciated the presents they’d been sent for their recent birthdays: the Revell Saturn V rocket kit, which had been much too advanced for two-year-old Jake, the hand-knitted sweater for Maria.

When lunch was done, Gregory Dana tucked his tobacco pouch into the pocket of his shabby gray cardigan. “Well, Jimmy. How’s about a little brain-busting, back in the shop?”

Dana’s mother gave him a glistening nod. It was okay, she’d be fine.

“Sure, Dad.”

The workshop, so-called, was actually a small unused bedroom at the back of the house, filled with tools and books and bits of unfinished models, a blackboard coated with obscure, unreadable equations.

Dana cleared some loose sketches from a stool. His slacks were already coated with a patina of fine dust. Every surface was covered with scraps of paper, chewed-off pencils, shreds of tobacco, bits of discarded models. Gregory had always banned Sylvia from doing any cleaning in there. As Dana had grown little older he’d done a certain amount to keep down the level of detritus and mire; but since he’d left home it looked as if the shop hadn’t been cleaned out once.

His father began to bustle about the workshop, pulling together obscure bits and pieces from the clutter, sorting haphazardly. Gregory puffed at his pipe as he worked, quite content, and the rich, seductive scent of burning tobacco filled the room, evoking sharp memories in Dana.

On Sunday afternoons, Gregory had often taken Dana out to the meadows alongside Langley’s airfield, and there they would join other Langley engineers in flying their model airplanes and rockets — made not from kits, but in ramshackle home workshops just like Gregory’s. It had been terrific for Dana to be out there on a windblown afternoon, with those gangling, noisy eccentrics — the Brain Busters, they called themselves, isolated from the Hampton locals, who scorned them.