“Wow.” Pat realized that for the facts and figures to be coming this quickly, they had to be part of some set piece Borman had recited countless times.

“And the moon is barreling along in its own orbit at twenty-three hundred miles an hour, so you have to aim in front of it to catch it.”

“Did you have computers—”

“I was in charge of twenty-four instruments, forty event indicators, seventy-one lights, and five hundred sixty-six switches.” Borman’s recitation could not be interrupted. Autopilot, Pat thought. “And that’s not including the actual controls to fly and doing some of that with four to five Gs of force coming down on you.”

“I remember following your mission over the Christmas holiday. Did you—”

“It wasn’t Eastern’s first-class to the Bahamas. Oh no . . .”

Pat was now worried Borman was completely deaf and on some sort of broadcast mode. There was no indicator light for that.

“It was more like sightseeing in a Sherman tank. We had this one small window to look out and you couldn’t see the moon on approach because of the sun’s glare. But then we orbited the moon ten times and I was the first man to see with his own eyes the dark side of the moon.”

“Unbelievable.”

“Unbelievable we made it back.” Borman chuckled. So he is hearing me? Unclear. Borman stretched out his arms, his hands falling on the imagined controls of the command module. “Once you escape Earth’s gravity, it’s very quiet. You fire a thruster and there’s just the thump of the solenoids opening and closing. So it’s noiseless and still, and then we got around to the dark side, and it’s just sameness. And remember when you’re behind the moon you lose the radio signal with Houston. So you’re far away and it’s this big battered expanse of nothing. Crater upon crater, hill upon dusty hill. So there I am like Columbus or Magellan, seeing this, and I’m thinking, This is it? There’s nothing there. We go all that way, and then nothing.”

Borman realized he was starting to drift off and turned back to Pat. “So they tell me you’ve put up with Bob Crandall since deregulation.”

“That’s one way to put it.”

“I like Bob, but he reminds me of my mother-in-law’s terrier.” Borman smiled and studied the Earthrise photograph again. “Always barking.”

“Well, you always know where you stand with Mr. Crandall.” Pat wasn’t going to fall into the trap of bad-mouthing him. This is the test to see if you’re loyal. “But he is a terrific leader and I’m proud of my time at American.”

“These classes of kids come in from all across Miami to tour the planes, and they meet me, the astronaut, you know what the question I get most is?”