The night was crisp and cool and cloudless, but the horizon was ringed with the conurbation’s sulfur orange glow. Gershon had to tilt his head back and stare straight up to see any stars, in a little clear circle of sky directly above him. He thought he recognized the big square of Pegasus up there, the winged horse.

He had a sense of confinement, as if the city and all its smog was a great big box he was stuck inside.

Lee drove one-handed, hanging on to the T-bird’s wheel with one finger. “I remember coming up here. I mean, 1955 or earlier. The days of the B-70. The road out of the city was just a two-lane blacktop, winding up out of the Newhall Pass and through Mint Canyon, until it gave onto the high desert. And Palmdale was just a gas station, with a whole bunch of Joshua trees… All changed now, huh.”

“I guess.”

“So. You had a good day?”

Gershon grunted. “Not one of my best.”

“You’re not a lover of engineering debate.”

“That wasn’t a debate about engineering. And most of those guys sure weren’t engineers.”

Lee hooted. “You’re right there. But you have to understand the politics, my friend. Look at it this way. When Nixon canned the Space Shuttle, back in 1972 — well, that wasn’t the most popular decision with the big aerospace boys. They would have loved the Shuttle because the whole damn thing would have been new. They would have been able to throw away all their old Saturn tooling facilities and start afresh, at great public expense. But with the incremental program we’ve got now, everything is a derivative of something else. And it’s all pretty much owned by the companies who designed those pieces.

“So you’ve got Boeing working on the new MS-IC, for example, the enhanced Saturn first stage, which was what it had originally built. And McDonnell Douglas, over at Huntington Beach, has built the Skylabs and Moonlabs — space stations lashed up from disused Saturn third stages — which McDonnell built in the first place. And so on.

“But the plum contract — the most advanced technology, the real glamour work for the next decade — is going to be the MEM. A whole new spacecraft, to take a few guys to the surface of Mars. Making a lot of other guys very rich in the process…”

“But NASA hasn’t even issued a Request For Proposals yet.”

“Of course not. What do you expect? NASA’s taking too much heat from its contractors. And then on top of that you have all the usual bullshit infighting between the NASA centers.”

“Maybe so,” Gershon said gloomily. “But we’ve already pissed away six years, since ’72.”

“You want to fly something before you retire.”

“You got it.”

“Hell, I understand that. Listen, you want to break open that six-pack?”

“You want one?”

“Sure.”