Briskly, Seger summarized his own view of the various problems. “Tim, I don’t know what the hell shape our schedule for NERVA is going to be in when we get through the current replan. What’s hamstringing us is the safety precautions; we have to drown and dismantle each damn rig after every bitty problem. I’m not saying we should skip the safety stuff; of course not. But we’re going to have to plan realistically for every milestone in the program from now on. More realistically than we have up to now. But—” A pause.

“Yes, Bert?”

“You’ve got some good people out there, Tim. Both ours and the contractor’s; some of our best. And they’re doing their damnedest to make this thing fly. I recommend we stay with this horse, Tim; don’t think about backing another.”

Josephson listened in glassy silence. “All right. Thank you, Bert, gentlemen. You’ve said pretty much what I expected you to say. I think I have to back your judgment, your faith in this balky machine of yours, this NERVA. I’ll keep on going in to bat for you. But I hope you’ve heard what I’ve told you today. Bert, I want you to pull together a coherent status summary I can pass up the line. And I want to see a new schedule out of your people, Hans: a credible schedule. And I want to see you adhering to it, from now on.”

Those tough words, delivered in a flat monotone, seemed at odds with Josephson’s dry, file-clerk appearance. Conlig felt restless, eager to get out of here.

As they were walking out of the door, Josephson called Bert Seger back. Conlig could hear Josephson distinctly. “I want you to ride herd on these assholes, Bert. Don’t take any more bullshit. Ride herd, and make them fix this nuclear skyrocket of theirs…”

We don’t need to be told, Conlig thought, as he followed the others through the carpeted corridors.

When he got out of the building, despite the humid heat outside, Conlig felt a surge of relief; prickles of sweat broke out over his forehead. It was like being let out of school. Fucking bureaucrats.

Now, at any rate, he could get back to work: start expending energy once more, and relieve the huge anxiety that was knotted up inside him. January 1977-January 1978

Her application to NASA took a full year to resolve itself. And yet, once started, the process had a kind of inevitability about it, a grinding logic.

A couple of weeks after her first application, she got a telegram from the National Academy of Sciences. They wanted more information: a fuller rйsumй, reprints of published papers, a five-hundred-word essay on experiments she would like to conduct on the surface of Mars.