“Pat?”

“Yes, sir. It’s a pleasure—”

“Great to have you here. Come in, come in.”

He had cut off Pat, but that was to be expected. Pat had heard through the rumor mill that Borman was near deaf. His old buddy at American Jack Crowdus claimed all the spacemen were hard of hearing from sitting on those Saturn Fives. But Doug Dorsey at Delta had told him that Borman busted his eardrums while dive-bombing with a head cold. Uncomplicated.

Pat walked a perfect line across the tangerine carpet into an office that had the aesthetic appeal of a shoe box wrapped in green vinyl. The intercom chirped, and a call came in. Borman frowned and asked Pat for thirty seconds.

“It’s our friends in New York. Look around while I take this.”

“New York” for Eastern meant Chase bank, a “Rockefeller and Rickenbacker” airline since they bought it outright from Alfred Sloan at GM. As Borman murmured into the phone, Pat wandered the perimeter of the office. There were three oil paintings of fighter planes streaking across the American West and photos of Borman’s two sons, both square-headed blonds like him, both cadets at West Point in their parade uniforms. Then Pat came upon a large framed invitation:

You are cordially invited to attend

the departure of the

United States Spaceship Apollo 8

on Its voyage around the moon,

Departing from Launch Complex 39 Kennedy Space Center

with the launch window commencing at

7 a.m. on December 21, 1968

To the right of the invitation was a portrait of Borman and his crew, Bill Anders and Jim Lovell, in their white nylon space suits, the famous shot of Earthrise from above the charcoal lunar desert, and the mission patch, which was a red figure eight looped around the Earth and the moon.

“Checking out my greatest hits over there, huh?” Borman hung up the phone.

“Just glad you made it back in one piece, sir.”

Borman smiled, and Pat was unsure he had heard him. The colonel pointed at the next frame, which offered a schematic of Apollo 8. “You hear folks now saying how they put us there in a tin can, but let me tell you, the rocket and this command module were made out of five point six million parts. Even if NASA got ninety-nine point nine percent of everything right, that meant fifty-six hundred defects. When you think about the risk involved in that, we were very lucky. But more than lucky, we were good.”

The nod to actuarial appreciation impressed Pat. “That’s amazing to think about, sir.”

Borman squared his shoulders and pointed at another photo. “So you’re sitting on this rocket that’s taller than the Statue of Liberty. You’ve got to get her up to twenty-four, twenty-five thousand miles per hour and travel two hundred thirty-nine thousand miles to the moon. The first stage gives you a hundred sixty million horsepower.”