To Dana as a boy of eight or nine, to be able to work at Langley on airplanes and spaceships had seemed the best possible future in the world.

“So,” Gregory said without looking at him, “where’s the next assignment?”

“I’m not sure. It’s most likely going to be Edwards.” Down in the Mojave Desert, the USAF’s top flight test station.

“Will you fly there?”

“Maybe. Well, probably. But not the most advanced planes.”

“And,” Gregory said levelly, “is that likely to be your long-term posting?”

“Nothing is long-term, Dad. You know that.” It was a question he was asked every time he came home.

Gregory’s face was soft, round, a little jowly; his thin hair was plastered over a dome of skull. “It’s your mother. She gets concerned. I—”

“Dad,” Dana said, “I’m not a combat pilot. You shouldn’t worry about such things. I’m not going to Nam. I’m aiming for the space program, not Nam. I don’t know how many times I have to—”

“Can you get to be an astronaut, out of Edwards?”

Dana took a breath. “Sure. In fact, Edwards’s day might be coming,” he said. “The studies are coming in for the Space Shuttle. That will lean heavily on the old lifting-body research that was performed at Edwards. And there is talk or having the Shuttle land at Edwards. Gliding down from space, to land right on the old salt flats.”

Gregory grunted. “If the Shuttle goes ahead. The studies are also going ahead for Mars landing missions. And there we are looking at more big dumb rockets. More V-2s.”

Dana grinned. “Those Germans, Dad?”

“It’s the crudity of their approach that galls me. Von Braun’s designs have always looked the same. For thirty years! Immense, overpowered machines! Leaping to the stars, by the most direct route possible!”

“The Germans got a man on the Moon,” Dana said gently.

“Of course. But it’s not elegant.”

Not elegant. And that’s not the Langley Way.

Gregory was saying, “Even the basic thinking about interplanetary travel has hardly advanced since Jules Verne.”

Dana guffawed. “Oh, come on, Dad; that’s hardly fair.” The lunar voyagers of Jules Verne’s nineteenth-century science fiction had been fired at the Moon out of a huge cannon, situated in Florida. “Even Verne could have worked out that the gun’s acceleration would have creamed his travelers against the walls of their projectile.”

Gregory waved his pipe. “Oh, of course. But that’s just a detail. Look — Verne launched his travelers with an impulse: a shock, a blow, imparted by his cannon. After that brief moment, the spacecraft followed an elongated orbit about the Earth, without any means of directing itself.

“And just so with Apollo. Our great rockets, the Saturns of von Braun, work for only minutes, in a flight lasting days. Effectively they apply an impulse to the craft. Even the Mars studies follow the same principles. Here — look here.”

Gregory walked to the blackboard and wiped it clean with the sleeve of his sweater. He rummaged in his cardigan pocket until he dug out a fluff-covered piece of chalk, and he drew two concentric circles on the board. “Here are the orbits of Earth and Mars. Every object in the Solar System follows an orbit around the sun: ellipses, flattened circles, of one eccentricity or another.

“How are we to travel from Earth, on this inner track, to Mars, on the outer? We do not have the technology to fire our rockets for extended periods. We can only apply impulses, hopping from one elliptical path to another, as if jumping between moving streetcars. And so we must patch together our trajectory, to Mars and back, from fragments of ellipse. We kick and we coast; kick and coast. Like so…”

Dana watched as his father sketched, and thought about Langley.

The Samuel P. Langley Memorial Laboratory was the oldest aeronautical research center in the U.S., and it was father to all the rest. It had been founded during the First World War, conceived out of a fear that the land of the Wright brothers might start to fall behind the European belligerents in aviation. It had been a different world, a world in which the individualistic traditions of old America were still strong, and there was a great suspicion of falling into the emerging technocratic ways of the totalitarian powers of Europe.

Langley stayed poor, humble, and obscure, but it succeeded in keeping abreast of the latest technology. And back then — Gregory had told Jim — Hampton was a place where people still referred to the Civil War as “the late war.”

Gregory had often taken Jim around Langley. The research center was a cluster of dignified old buildings, with precise brickwork and extensive porches, that looked almost like a college campus. But, set among the neatly trimmed lawns and tree-shaded streets, there were exotic shapes: huge spheres, buildings from which protruded pipes twenty or thirty feet wide. They were Langley’s famous wind tunnels.

Jim Dana had come to identify the layout of Langley — the odd mixture of the neatly mundane and the exotic — with the geography of his father’s complex, secretive mind.

Hampton was so isolated that a lot of bright young aeronautical engineers didn’t want to come within a hundred miles of the place. Those who did come to Langley tended to be highly motivated, and not a little odd — like Gregory himself, Jim had come to realize ruefully. And the local Virginians hadn’t thought much of the “Nacka Nuts” — as they still called them — arriving in their midst. So the Langley engineers had kept themselves to themselves most of the time, on and off the job, and Langley had evolved into its own peculiar little world.

As Dana had grown and moved away, he’d become aware of the bigger world beyond Virginia.

“I don’t know why you stay here,” he’d once told his father. “All the real action in NASA is at other sites. Why don’t you ever think about moving away?” He couldn’t figure his father’s lack of ambition.

“Because things don’t get any better for people like me than they are here,” Gregory had replied. “The press don’t care much about Langley. Even the rest of NASA doesn’t care much. To the outsider, the place is just a set of gray buildings with gray people working slide rules and writing out long equations on blackboards. But if you’re in love with aeronautical research, it’s a kind of heaven — a unique and wonderful place.”

Jim knew that Langley had made immense contributions to the U.S.’s prowess in aeronautics and astronautics. It had gotten involved with the development of military aircraft during the Second World War and then in the programs which led to the first supersonic airplane, the Bell X-1. Langley staff had formed the task force which had been responsible for the Mercury program, and later it became involved with studies for the optimal shapes for the Gemini and Apollo ships…

Gregory never talked about his past. Dana knew he’d suffered during the war. Maybe, he thought, Langley was kind of a refuge, after all that. It buffered him from the pressures of the competitive aircraft industry, and on the other hand from NASA politics. It was as if the men of Langley — and they were men, almost exclusively — had made a kind of unconscious decision that their site and budgets and scope should remain small, even as the space program Langley had spawned had grown like Topsy.

Gregory was still only forty-one. But Dana could see, having grown a little more, that Gregory had found a place that suited him; and there he was going to stay, getting older and slower, charming everyone with the lingering traces of his French accent, working at his own pace inside that peaceful, isolated cocoon. Staying at Langley meant, though, that Gregory and Sylvia were more or less stuck, here in downtown Hampton, on Gregory’s plateaued-out salary; and here they’d probably have to stay, despite the inexorable decay of the neighborhood…