Gershon tried to settle himself in the small, hard-framed chair, with his briefcase tucked under the table. It was already hot, airless, and his collar chafed at his throat.

That word, “fly,” tugged at him. Flying a projector. Flying a desk. Jesus. Words misused by people who knew no more about flying than how to order a drink from a stewardess.

The chairman called them to order. He was NASA Assistant Administrator Tim Josephson, a tall, thin, bookish man. He sat on a swivel chair behind a desk at the head of the table, and rattled through the minutes and agenda.

Lee leaned over to Gershon. “How do you like that? This is Dutch’s old office. That’s Dutch’s chair, for God’s sake. Rockwell must really, really, want this contract.”

Behind Josephson the whole wall was covered with a mural. It showed a P-51 Mustang coming right out at you.

Gershon wanted to be out of here, doing something.

But life in the Astronaut Office wasn’t like that. You had to pay your dues.

“Listen to me,” Chuck Jones had said, in his role as chief astronaut. “We gotta have someone from the Office assigned to the Mars Excursion Module.”

Gershon had thought he was being dumped on. “But there is no MEM.”

“Even better.” And Jones had spun Gershon a story about how Pete Conrad had helped to design the controls and instrument displays for the Lunar Module. “Conrad spent fucking months in plywood mock-ups of that lander, surrounded by painted switches and dials, trying to imagine himself coming down onto the Moon.” Jones held his thumb and forefinger up, a hairbreadth apart. “And he came that close to being the first man to land there. Now. You want to tell me you know more about how things work around here than old Pete Conrad?”

So maybe it wasn’t such a bad assignment after all, Gershon had concluded.

The trouble was, though, it still didn’t look as if the MEM was ever going to fly, except in the glossy promotional brochures of the aerospace companies.