Conlig was certain — so was Natalie, come to that — that he was heading for the top of his chosen profession. And since, if Spiro Agnew could be believed, nuclear rockets were going to be the next big thing in space, that top could be a very high summit indeed.

Meanwhile, York’s geology was likely to take her away for months at a time. Their relationship was going to be odd, to say the least.

It was strange to think that his whole life might be shaped by the success, or failure, of a nuclear rocket. I really am living in the future, he thought.

To Conlig, nuclear rockets were the simplest, most beautiful machines in the world. You didn’t burn anything, as in a Saturn. You just heated up high-pressure liquid hydrogen in a reactor core, and let hot gas squirt out of the rear of your ship.

A nuclear upper stage would outperform a Saturn V by a factor of two; Moon payloads could be increased by more than half.

But there were major technical challenges.

The working fluid was liquid hydrogen at twenty-five degrees above absolute zero. Once it was pumped to the reactor the hydrogen had to be flashed to above two thousand degrees.

Cooling systems were Mike Conlig’s specialty.

There were other difficulties. Like, if you were looking at space applications, there was the need to shield the crew from radiation. And the fact that you couldn’t cluster too many of these babies in a given stack, because their neutron emissions would interfere with each other, and, and…

Still, the project was making progress. In the short term they were aiming for a RIFT, a Reactor-in-Flight Test. But there was a hell of a lot of work to do before then. You couldn’t cut corners with nuclear technology: nobody wanted a live nuclear pile to be smeared over Florida thanks to some fuck-up at Kennedy.

But, Conlig thought, they’d fly one day. They had problems to solve. But they’d solve them. Just as soon as Nixon gave his go-ahead to the Space Task Group’s proposals.

The Space Task Group was a committee, headed by Vice President Agnew, which Nixon had set up to formulate post-Apollo goals for the space program. The STG were due to report in September. The rumors were they would endorse a manned Mars landing program. And when that happened, Conlig’s project would get some serious money to spend.

Ben Priest was still talking Natalie through the details of the XE-Prime. They looked good together, Conlig thought suddenly. Relaxed. He felt a remote stab of unease.

But Natalie was giving Priest a hard time. She was talking about politics, as usual.

Natalie York laughed, uncomfortable; a shiver of awe — or maybe disgust — swept over her, as she studied the slim XE-Prime.

“You said there have been nuclear rocket developments here for ten years?”

“Yes,” Priest said.