While he was talking to Priest about the day’s events, Mike Conlig tried to keep a hawkeye on Natalie. She was gazing around the plant. Natalie was a little too tall, slim, intense, her hair jet black and tied back; those big Romanian-peasant eyebrows she hated so much were creased in concentration.

The visit was important to Conlig.

Strictly speaking, he and Priest were breaking NASA and AEC regs by taking her there, to see their work close up; and certainly a kid like Petey shouldn’t be allowed. But regulations got replaced by realism in a place as remote as Jackass Flats. We’re all good old boys together out here, he thought.

Anyhow, he was keen to show Natalie the place: where he worked, what he did with his life. It was worth breaking a few rules to achieve that. He wanted Natalie to see Jackass Flats through his eyes.

Natalie’s head was habitually full of suspicion and disapproval, of big government science like that. But the world looked different to Conlig. To him, that shabby test site was the gateway to the future: to other worlds, colonies on the Moon.

Even Mars itself.

Ben Priest was trying to explain the test rig to Natalie. He made her look more closely at the object inside the gantry, trying to get her to make sense of it. A nozzle, gracefully shaped, flared from the top toward the sky…

“Oh,” she said. “I’ve got it. It’s a rocket. There’s the nozzle, at the top of the stack. It’s a rocket, on its launch gantry. Gee. Just like Cape Kennedy.”

Ben Priest laughed. “Except it’s upside-down.”

“One day we’ll see this at Kennedy,” Conlig said, aware he sounded a little defensive. “One day soon. Its descendants, anyhow; this poor bird is never going to fly.”

“This is actually a late-generation engine,” Ben said. “Our newest pride and joy. The XE-Prime: quite close to a flight configuration. The first rigs here, ten years ago, were called Kiwis.”

“Oh,” York said. “Flightless birds.”

“Now,” said Ben, “there are a string of projects working under the generic title NERVA. For ‘Nuclear Engine—’ ”

“ ‘—for Rocket Vehicle Application.’ I know.”

“But we’re still restricted to building flightless birds,” Priest mused. “We’re proud of this baby, Natalie. We’ve managed to get close to fifty thousand pounds of thrust with her. And we managed twenty-eight restarts. You see, reliability is going to be a key factor in long-haul space travel…”

Conlig watched Natalie, trying to gauge her reaction.

All of six years older than Natalie, Conlig had finished his Ph.D. — on exotic, heat-tolerant refractory materials for lightweight fission reactors — in a near-record time.