Lee shrugged. “We do a lot of subcontracting work for Rockwell, and others, and we’re doing some experimental stuff for NASA. Lifting body shapes and such. We’re small, but we’re growing, and we’re smarter than the rest. When it comes to Request For Proposals time, we’ll throw in our lot with one of the big guys and hustle for a piece of the pie.” He stared up at the HQ building, the big brick cube. “You know, I worked here, for a while. Under Dutch Kindelberger.”

Gershon looked at Lee with new interest. He knew that name, of course. Any kid like Gershon, who had grown up steeped in planes and the men who built them, would know about Dutch Kindelberger. Dutch had built up Rockwell — then called North American Aviation — in the war years by delivering perhaps the finest American flying machine of that conflict, the P-51 Mustang.

“Dutch designed this building himself,” Lee said. “We used to call it the Brickyard.”

“I didn’t know Kindelberger was an architect.”

“He wasn’t.” Lee grinned. “You don’t think it shows?” He looked around, at the airport, the boulevard, the sprawl of Rockwell buildings. “There used to be a sign, on top of the main building over there” — he pointed — “You could see it from miles away. ‘Home of the X-15.’ ”

Something clicked in Gershon’s mind. “I thought I knew your face.” He had a vague memory of an old photograph, from the scrapbooks and cutting files he’d kept as a kid: an experimental airplane, up at Edwards, with a line of grinning young engineers, all spectacles and buck teeth and uncontrolled hair. “You worked on the X-15?”

Lee said, “No. But I bet I know what you’re thinking of.”

“The B-70. You worked on the B-70, didn’t you? With Harrison Storms.”

“Yeah. With Stormy.”

Harrison Storms was the man who had built the Apollo spacecraft for Rockwell. And before that, there had been the B-70, a supersonic bomber. Gershon remembered old photographs: that stainless steel surface painted white to reflect Mach 3 heat, the huge delta wing two stories off the ground…

“Congress canceled the project on us,” Lee said. “We only made two of the damn things. And I know one of them crashed with an F-104. I guess the other was scrapped.”

“No. It survived. It’s in a museum.”

Lee eyed Gershon and smiled. “How about that? I never knew.”

Gershon glanced at his watch. “Come on. It’s after nine. We have to go in.”

“Sure. We don’t want to miss the read-through of the minutes, do we?”

Side by side, they walked into the Brickyard.

Two portly, shirt-sleeved aerospace executives were struggling with a balky Vu-graph machine. One said, “You sure you know how to fly this thing, Al?”

Al laughed.