“But not three men.”

“ — and maybe,” he went on doggedly, “we’d never have known what went wrong. And we’d have had to risk throwing three more men up there to try all over again.” He pulled at his beard in quick, nervous gestures. “At the time — it happened so fast — I just wasn’t sure. I thought the situation might stabilize, that we might be able to salvage control of the NERVA. It might have happened that way, Natalie, and saved us risking more lives. As we’ll have to now. It’s a question of cost and benefit.”

She was appalled. “You did kill them.”

“But it isn’t like that.” He sounded querulous, hurt, misunderstood. “Look: NASA is too cautious. Every safety precaution increases the complexity and cost of the mission. With fewer safety precautions we could have reached the Moon a little sooner, done a lot more exploring, learned more, and” — defiantly — “yes, and created a martyr or two—”

“How can you talk about martyrs? If you hadn’t screwed up, Ben might be alive now. And the others, damn it.”

“Oh, sure. Precious Ben. That’s what this is all about, isn’t it?” He was angry.

“What are you saying?”

He snorted. “I know all about you and Ben Fucking Priest, Natalie. Come on. I’ve known for years.”

You, too? She considered protesting, telling him he was mistaken. But Ben was dead. It would be beneath her.

He shook his head. “I don’t want to hear when, or how, or why. I don’t give a damn. And you know what? Right now, I don’t know if I ever did.”

She watched him pace around the room. He was like a stranger, an alien, there in her apartment. “No. You never did give a damn, did you? I can’t believe—”

“What?”

“I can’t believe I ever thought I loved you.”

That took him aback for a moment, and he looked at her; but then his face resumed its mask of anger. “Yeah, well, you can believe what you like.”

“How can you rake up all of this now? Ben’s dead, for God’s sake.”

“I know he’s dead!” he shouted. “As dead as my fucking career!”

“Is that all you care about?”

His anger was consuming him. “Yeah. Yeah, maybe it is. That and the fact that this will probably kill off the nuke program.”

“Get out,” York said.

“Omelets and eggs, Natalie! You don’t get anywhere without taking a few risks! And with what we learned from this flight — if we’re allowed to fly again — we’ll get it right next time.” Under the anger in his voice, she thought she heard vulnerability, still, a plea for understanding. “Christ, Natalie, we could be on Mars by now. But fucking NASA—”

She turned away from him. “Get out. Go, Mike.”

She didn’t watch him leave.

Mike was right, in a way. He spoke a truth, as perceived by many within NASA. If only public sentiment would get out of the way, and let us move as fast as we know we can…

Lower reliability would mean lower development costs, and a faster schedule.

It was an insidious, strangely seductive argument.

The machine is everything! Oh, we have to put men inside those machines, and we have a few problems with that, and some of them are driven crazy by their experiences, and some of them die, in squalid, painful, unheroic ways — as dear Ben had died, decaying in a hospital bed, a month after his flight — but it’s worth it for the goal.

And besides, we’re never short of volunteers.

What made it worse was that NASA — a child of the Cold War — never told the truth about a situation if it didn’t have to. And certainly not if the truth damaged PR. So much was hidden behind the glamour: the dangers, the awful shitty deaths, the almost psychotic desire by some, engineers and crew, to keep on flying.

It isn’t just Mike. There isn’t even a “them” to blame for this.

All the astronauts were implicated: all of those who would volunteer for the most dangerous mission, and go along with the cover-ups. Even Ben himself. He’d worked on NERVA; he must have had a good idea of its lack of flight readiness.

Even me, she admitted at last. Even I am guilty. I agonize about compromising my scientific principles by being here. But it’s more than that.

By being in the program, by giving it my tacit support, I killed Ben, as surely as that failed NERVA.

She sat in a chair and curled over on herself, tucking her arms into her belly, letting her head drop to her knees.

And now I have to decide. Do I get out? Maybe start shrieking the truth to the world?

Or will it make Ben’s death mean something, if I stay?

Something inside her, cold and hard and selfish, pointed out that it was Ben who had died, not her. And Mars was still there, waiting for her.

Maybe she was just rationalizing; maybe she was just trying to find a way to justify staying in the program.

And maybe she’d thrown out Mike and his talk of martyrs so angrily because — somewhere inside her — there was a part of her own soul that agreed with his brutal analysis.

The next day she had the locks changed. She packed up Mike’s stuff and sent it to Huntsville. And she made the Portofino apartment available for sublet.

When the first draft of NASA’s internal report landed on his desk, Michaels called a meeting of Seger, Muldoon, and Udet in his office in Washington.

The three of them sat in a row on the other side of his desk. Muldoon was tense, angry, uncomfortable; Seger seemed eager, energetic, somehow too bright; and Udet was reserved, watching Michaels and the others through his pale blue eyes.

Michaels picked up the draft report and dropped it on his desk. “I’ve tried to read this. I know I’m going to have to answer for it line by line. Gentlemen, I want you to walk me through this fucking blowout. Step by step, over and again, until I understand. You got that? Hans, you want to lead?”

Udet nodded crisply. “Of course, Fred. The malfunction occurred at the time at which we were preparing the S-NB for its restart burn. I will remind you that the rocket had functioned flawlessly during its first burn—”

“I remember.”

“The moderators were adjusted to lift the temperature of the core to its working range of three thousand degrees. The turbopumps were started, and hydrogen began to flow through the cooling jackets and the core. We registered thrust rising to its nominal levels; the cabin transcript indicates the crew was aware of this. Then—”

“And then,” Joe Muldoon observed drily, “we hit a glitch.”

The flow of liquid hydrogen into the coolant jackets became intermittent, Udet said. It turned out later that a flaw was developing in the piping carrying the hydrogen to the engine.

Michaels asked, “Shouldn’t you have shut down the core as soon as that happened?”

“Yeah, that’s standard procedure,” Muldoon put in. “Without coolant, the core is going to overheat.”

“We had a split second to make the decision,” Udet said. “That is all. If we had allowed emergency shutdown immediately, we might have lost the engine altogether, and the mission would have been scrubbed. And perhaps for nothing, if the flow problems had rectified themselves. We were trying to keep options open. The report describes all this.”

“All right, Hans. Go on.”

“We adjusted the moderators to reduce the temperature in the core, short of shutting it down. But we could not reach the target temperature—”

Muldoon said, “And there you have your first basic design flaw, Fred.”

Both Udet and Seger leaned forward to protest, but Michaels waved them silent.

“We only had one control system — the reactor moderator — and so only one shutdown option. When that failed, we had no way to stop the runaway temperature climb.”

Michaels nodded. “Hans?”

Udet spread his hands. “We must balance reliability against weight, Fred. This has been the dilemma of all spaceflight: to carry an additional redundant system, or to add value elsewhere? In our opinion, in this case, the moderator system was sufficiently reliable to justify flying without the weight penalty of a backup.”