Santa Susana was operated on behalf of NASA by Rockwell International. It had been built as part of the development program for the old S-II, the Saturn V second stage. There was still some S-II development work going on there, in fact. The whole site was a swarm of activity, with technicians — some of them in flameproof or radiationproof gear — crawling all over the rig. To York, they looked like ungainly insects.

The NERVA 2 engine stood upended at the heart of the facility, surrounded by a wire-mesh safety fence. Glowing in powerful floodlights, the broad engine bell flared toward the sky.

When they got close to the rig, technicians came up to Conlig. Mike managed one last, apologetic glance back at York, and then he was lost.

Alone, she began to walk slowly around the rig.

“Hi. You look like you need this.”

She turned. A man was at her elbow, grinning; he was tall, pale, with blond hair; he wore grimy coveralls. He looked as if he had been up all night. He bore two plastic cups of a brownish liquid. “It’s from a dispenser. It’s supposed to be coffee,” he said, “but I wouldn’t bank on it without a full chemical analysis.”

“I know you. Don’t I?”

“Yup. Adam Bleeker. We took a field trip together a few years back, in the San Gabriel Mountains.”

“Oh.” The Cold Warrior astronaut. “With Ben and Charles Jones. What a disaster that was.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that. You did your job well. And everyone calls him Chuck, by the way.”

“Whatever.”

She took the coffee gratefully and sipped it. It was warm, but almost flavorless.

Bleeker told her he was the Astronaut Office representative on the project there. Ben Priest had covered the same assignment some years before.

“It’s kind of an odd time of day to run an engine test,” York observed.

“Well, we’re so far behind schedule. Every hour counts.”

“Tell me about it. I came out with Mike. Do you know him? — Mike Conlig—”

“Sure.”

“Nothing was going to keep him away from here, once the call came.”

They started to walk around the test rig, slowly. Technicians were everywhere, arguing desultorily. There was an almost tangible air of tension, of depression; it was Mike’s mood writ large.

The contrast to Jackass Flats — to the raw enthusiasm Mike had represented to her there — was marked.

In the middle of it all, the huge NERVA 2 engine stood erect and silent, aloof, remote behind its safety cordon. That motor, Mike had told her, was the “Integrated Subsystems Test Bed Engine”; it was a complete, more or less operational machine, but it was trapped in that ungainly test rig, and, when it fired, it could only drive itself into the solid Earth.

Just looking at the rig, York could tell that NERVA was still years away from flight status, from delivering its promised two hundred thousand pounds of interplanetary thrust.