And the noise reached him.

At first there was a deep rumbling which seemed to emerge from the depths of the Earth. And then came a fierce crackling, a pulse of high-frequency sound that was like the tearing of an immense sheet of canvas, a sound that flapped his clothes and blew at his hair. He felt the ground shake, as if suffering repeated blows from a great invisible hammer.

Udet leaned over toward him and shouted. “This is the dream, Dr. Dana.” He stared at Dana, his hair mussed and coated with orange dust. “Zero to twenty million horsepower, in less than a second! This is what I wanted you to see; this is what we are working for, you and I; this is what you must always bear in mind, as you make your studies, and file your reports.”

Dana felt overwhelmed by the man’s intensity. Of course, Udet was right. It was indeed a dream, a dream of rocket light, made real in the deserts of the western United States, before the eyes of two battered old men from Europe. The dream of the Mittelwerk.

The flames from the captive rocket continued to plume, and smoke billowed against the hillside, stained orange and gray by desert dust.

The room was dark and warm. Several of the trainees around York had their feet up on their desks. One — Bob Gold, a big-eared Texan, a few feet ahead of York — had his head resting on the fold of fat at the back of his shaven neck, and he was snoring in a thin, birdlike cackle.

The instructor at the front fumbled another Vu-graph slide onto the projector. The focus of the projector was out, so the image was blurred at the center. The instructor, an astronaut called Ralph Gershon, picked up his extensible pointer and tapped at the projection screen, making it oscillate and blurring the image further.

Gershon didn’t fumble like that because he was nervous, York perceived wearily, but because he didn’t care enough to concentrate hard on what he was doing.

“This here is the ECLSS of your basic MEM configuration,” Gershon said. “Take a good look at it. Maybe your life is going to depend on knowing your way around this baby someday.”

The new slide was a block diagram of bewildering complexity, covered with spidery arrows and puzzling acronyms. The new picture showed no resemblance, as far as York could see, to anything she’d been shown before.

The snoozer ahead of York gulped and chewed on a loose piece of phlegm.

“Now,” said Gershon, tapping the diagram again, “here you have your basic ECLSS concept, which is likely to fly whatever choices we make about the rest of the MEM’s engineering. You have your standard two-bed molecular sieve here for CO2 scrubbing. And the H2O management is by means of this multifiltration unit here.” He pronounced the prefix mult-eye. “That supplements the output of your fuel cells. And your atmospheric gases are cryogenically stored, of course. As opposed to being stored under pressure.” Gershon blinked around the room. “Anybody figure out why that is? Because it’s a better weight-to-volume ratio. And we don’t operate any kind of O2 recovery system here. We take all our breathing air along with us, and just vent the waste. You want to tell me why? Because the MEM is a short-duration craft, and the weight of the recovery systems wouldn’t be justified…”

York realized that this trick of Gershon’s — of asking a question of his class and carelessly answering it before anyone got a chance to speak — was slowly driving her crazy.

Gershon told the class they should complete the copy of the diagram in their books, and he wandered out of the room in the direction of the coffee machine.

Although Gershon clearly knew his way around MEM designs, he was not a trained educator. He was a short, wiry, black man in his mid-thirties. Apparently he hailed from Iowa, but he’d been hanging around Houston long enough for a Texas drawl to color the way he pronounced his vowels, making the acronyms even tougher to cut through; ECLSS came out like “Aye she ale esh esh…” And after so many years here Ralph Gershon was just another rookie astronaut, still waiting for his first flight, plowing through another lousy assignment, lecturing to a new class of bright-eyed hopefuls.

For York, Gershon was a depressing role model.

She flicked desultorily through her coloring book. That was what the students called the volumes that were passed out at the start of each lecture; they were fat books containing diagrams, no text. The diagrams on the Vu-graph charts were supposed to be identical to the diagrams in the books, except for the colors, and the rookies — all of them highly qualified specialists — had to work like grade school students, coloring in their copies of the diagrams with pens. They were supposed to memorize every transistor and valve and duct and pipe and wiring conduit in every goddamn spaceship, planned or actual.

Coloring books were a fantastically dumb way to teach anybody anything, she’d quickly decided. And besides, all the systems knowledge in the world wouldn’t have helped Jim Lovell’s Apollo 13 crew when that oxygen tank blew.

And you also had the problem that the MEM design in particular was a moving target. The MEM was being built in a different, more leisurely manner from previous generations of spacecraft, with the basic research — into biconic shapes, ballutes, plug-nozzle rocket engines — being proved before the first ships were assembled. It was all a marked contrast to Apollo, and, she supposed, a lot more logical; but because of that the ECLSS diagram in her book didn’t match in all its detail the diagram on the screen, which in turn, probably, didn’t match the reality of what anybody would build, one day. So why did she need to fill her head with all this crap?

It was all part of their ascan syllabus, a document that was, incredibly, set out like a flowchart. You followed the flow, doing a one-hour module on subsystems here, a couple of hours of reading on space medicine there, until you passed barriers in the flowchart which proved you’d reached another level of skill. It was formulaic, an education system designed by an engineer, not a teacher.

It was typical NASA, really. Not that she could get anyone to listen to that kind of complaint.

The rookies got to bring in their own pens, though, and York derived some ignoble pleasure in producing books full of Day-Glo orange engine bells, puce oxygen tanks, and electric blue reaction control solenoids.

After the class broke up she ran into Ben Priest. Ben was heavily caught up in the training for his own first flight: Apollo-N, the NERVA 2 orbital proving mission, planned for the end of next year.

Today he was frustrated, too, hot as hell and irritated after spending all day in a niggling integrated sim.

For some reason, the usual silent barrier between the two of them wasn’t working today. They just stood in the corridor, close together, facing each other, Ben’s shirt crumpled and open at the neck. Maybe it was their shared frustration. Anyhow, today she just knew.

They got in Ben’s car and went back to her apartment.

It was their third time, in as many years.

“Those damn coloring books. It’s like learning to drive a car in a classroom,” she growled. She took another mouthful of Coke and rested the chilled, dew-coated can against her chest.

Ben, lying back in her bed, laughed and lifted his own drink, a Budweiser. “Well, if you’re sick of the classroom, grab time in the simulators.”

“Christ, Ben, we can’t get near the sims. That’s another problem. They’re too damn full of astronauts. I mean real astronauts,” she said bitterly. “Dumb fighter jocks like you, who are really getting to fly.”

“Never mind that. Find time anyway.”

“The sims are booked until 3 A.M!”