Beside her, Mike shifted a little, but he didn’t wake up. He was turned toward her, and his hair lay in a dark halo about his head. He slept like a child, she thought: facedown, with his arms up around his head, and his face turned sideways. In sleep the tension had drained out of his face, and he looked years younger than his age of thirty-four.

She’d hardly seen Mike in the last few months. His schedule was grueling. NERVA 2 was only seven months away from the Critical Design Review at the scheduled end of its Phase A development. After that Phase B, production and operations, should be starting up in earnest, with the first unmanned flight tests scheduled for 1978, and the Preliminary Flight Certificate — issued after the first manned flight — to be obtained by mid 1979.

But Mike’s people still hadn’t been able to demonstrate a sustained burn of their huge new engine for more than a couple of seconds.

Mike seemed to be taking it particularly hard. He’d clearly been working fifteen or eighteen hours a day for weeks. He’d become gaunt, his eyes sunk deep in shadows, his clothes and hair rumpled and ill maintained. She wasn’t sure if that reflected the way he was coping personally, or the fact that a lot of the problems seemed to be in the cooling systems for which he was responsible.

Still sleepless, she turned on the TV.

An old Star Trek rerun was flickering through its paces. The warp engines were in trouble again, and Mr. Scott was crawling through some kind of glass tube with a wrench.

“If only it was as easy as that,” Mike mumbled.

His head was lifted off the pillow, and, bleary, he was squinting at the TV.

“I didn’t mean to wake you, Scotty.”

He reached for a cigarette. “You want something else to drink?”

“No. The brandy is keeping me awake, I think.” The comforting smell of stale smoke reached her; it reminded her of her mother. “It’s times like this I wish I smoked.”

He grunted. “Don’t even think about it.”

She debated telling him about the form in the bedside drawer.

But he was checking the clock. “I think I’d have woken up anyhow. They should be running the latest burn about now. Something inside me, some dumb kind of tinier, wakes me up at moments like this, even when I’m twenty miles away from the facility.”

“The burns. The tests. Always the fucking tests. Mike, unless you can figure out a way to relax, you’ll make yourself crazy.”

He blew out smoke. “I think we’re all a little crazy already.”

The trouble was, driving people like this had become part of NASA culture. We all worked eighteen hours a day for eight years to get a man on the Moon with Apollo, and if we have to do it all over again to get to Mars, well, by gosh, that’s what we’re going to do…. But mistakes had been made on Apollo, and those mistakes had claimed lives.