“No?”

“No. Clear Lake is a kind of academic community. That’s because of JSC, and also the chemical industry in the area. It’s got more Ph.D.s per square yard than most places outside of the university towns. I figure you might feel at home here.”

“Stop trying to cheer me up, damn it, Ben.”

“I’m not! Believe me. Anyhow things could be a hell of a lot worse. Starry Town in Moscow, where the cosmonauts have to live, is more like a military barracks…”

The apartment complexes Ben showed her were called The Cove and El Dorado and Lakeshire Place and The Leeward. A lot of them looked good, and the more expensive had access to the water. But they were all depressingly similar within: boxy, with inefficient air-conditioning, plainly furnished, and with unimaginative prints hanging on the walls.

She settled on a place called The Portofпno. The architecture was as dull as everywhere else, but it did have a large, clean-looking swimming pool which she was anxious to try out.

When she’d settled terms, the landlady — a compact, knowing woman with an incomprehensibly thick Texas accent, and wearing a T-shirt saying “Kiss Me, I Don’t Smoke” — left the two of them alone in the apartment.

York sensed Ben move away from her, subtly.

She went to the window. The air was so thick it was hard to breathe. There were thick gray clouds overhead, threatening rain and trapping even more of the heat.

She felt a dumb misery envelop her, as dense as the air. What am I doing here, in this lousy apartment, working in this goddamn Boys’ Town?

Out back of the apartment building, she spotted a car that had gotten mildewed from the moisture in the air.

As he flew into Salt Lake City Gregory Dana got a spectacular view of the lake. Feeder streams glistened like snail tracks, and human settlements were misty gray patches spread along ribbons of road. The morning was bright and clear, the sky huge and transparent and appearing to reach all the way down to the desert surface far below the plane.

Dana allowed himself briefly to imagine that he was landing on some foreign planet, a world of parched desert and high, isolated inland seas.

To most people, he reflected, the complex world of human society was the entire universe, somehow disengaged from the physical underpinning of things. Most people never formed any sense of perspective: the understanding that the whole of their lives was contained in a thin slice of air coating a small, spinning ball of rock, that their awareness was confined to a thin flashbulb slice of geological time, that they inhabited a universe which had emerged from, and was inexorably descending into, conditions unimaginably different from those with which they were familiar.

Even the view of the air traveler gave a perspective that hadn’t been available to any of the generations who went before. If spaceflight gives us nothing else than an awareness of our true nature, he thought, then that alone will justify its cost.

He glanced back into the cabin. Most of his fellow passengers — even those attached to NASA and the space program, as he was — had their faces buried in documents, or books, or newspapers.

Morton Thiokol sent a car to meet him at the airport. The driver — young, breezy, anonymous behind mirrored sunglasses — introduced himself as Jack, and loaded Dana’s bags into the trunk, although Dana kept his briefcase with him.

Jack drove onto the freeway heading north, toward Brigham City. The driver told him that he was to be taken straight to the first test firing of the SRB, the new Saturn VB-class Solid Rocket Booster.

Dana grumbled, but saw no option but to submit.

Dana had been asked by Bert Seger to participate in the Critical Design Review of the new SRB, the formal checkpoint that marked the end of that phase of the rocket’s development. The use of solid rockets in a man-rated booster stack was one of the most controversial elements of the whole Saturn upgrade program, and it was one on which NASA was determined to be seen to be absolutely clean.

But Dana had been uncertain about working with Udet, about his own ability to get the Marshall people to listen to him. And anyway, such an assignment was well outside his own area of competence.

Seger had insisted: “You can inspect what you like, and recommend what you like, and I’ll make sure you get a hearing. We have to get this right, Dr. Dana…”

But what was he to learn from viewing a test firing? It was a stunt, obviously, designed to impress and overwhelm him. It was typical of Hans Udet; Dana felt immediately irritated at the waste of time.

He opened up his briefcase with a snap; as if in revenge he turned away from the landscape unrolling beyond the car windows and buried his attention in technical documentation.

The car delivered him to the Wasatch Division of Morton Thiokol, a few miles outside Brigham City. With a touch of Dana’s elbow, Jack led the way to a small prefabricated office module set on trestles a little way from the dusty road.

The test site was a bleak, isolated clutter of buildings, cupped by a broad crater-shaped depression in the desert. Low hills peppered with green-black vegetation rimmed the site. To the east, blue mountains shouldered over the horizon.

Jack pointed to a test rig a couple of miles away. Dana squinted to see in the brilliant light; he made out a slim white cylinder laid flat against the ground.

The office module, surprisingly enough, was air-conditioned, equipped with a refrigerator and some coffee-making equipment, and Dana breathed in its warm, moist air with relief. Inside, Hans Udet was waiting for him.

“Dr. Dana. I’m delighted to see you here today.”

Really? Quite a contrast to the last time we were up against each other, Hans, at the Mars mission mode presentations in Huntsville…

Dana shook the German’s hand, warily, and glanced around the office module. There was a cutaway model of the SRB, and artists’ impressions executed in the compelling, visionary style which had, Dana thought, become so much of a clichй from NASA in recent years. A loudspeaker taped high on one wall carried muted commentary on the progress of the test.

Obviously the office was a honey trap, designed to impress visiting decision makers. Like me. I suppose I should be flattered.

“We’re alone here?”

“Dr. Dana, this is a big day for us — the first integrated test firing — and I particularly wanted you to be here to see it. As my guest. Come; sit down. Let me take your briefcase. Would you like some coffee? — or perhaps cold beer—”

Dana accepted a glass of orange juice — chilled, it felt like, almost to freezing — and sat on a stackable chair.

Udet was already moving into what appeared to be a standard sales pitch. “I want you to be aware of the full background of our SRB project,” Udet said smoothly. He pointed to a chart showing the intended launch profile. “The Solid Rocket Boosters will stand 150 feet tall from engine bell to nose, and will be twelve feet in diameter; in the Saturn VB’s launch configuration four of them will be strapped to the core MS-IC first stage. The SRBs will supplement the MS-IC’s thrust with more than five million pounds of thrust combined, making the VB capable of raising more than four hundred thousand pounds of payload to low Earth orbit: that is, twice as much as the base Saturn V. The MS-IC itself features many upgraded features, including the new F-1A main engines, manufactured with new techniques and materials. The SRBs will be the largest solid-fueled rockets in the world — and, for economy, the first designed for reuse…”

“And the first used on a manned booster.”

“Yes, that is so.”

Dana opened his briefcase and spread a briefing document across his lap. “Dr. Udet, our time is limited. Can we get to specifics? It is the launch sequence which particularly concerns me.”