York felt shaken by what she’d seen of the nuclear test station, and she felt like arguing, trying to get it out of her system. “But what’s it all for? More footprints and flags, like Apollo?”

“No,” Mike snapped.

There had been an edge of impatience in his voice since they’d left the Flats. She sensed that her response there hadn’t been what he’d hoped for.

He said, “Haven’t you been listening, Natalie? Agnew’s presented a great vision. We could be on Mars by 1982. And by 1990 we’ll have a hundred men in Earth orbit, forty-eight on the Moon, and forty-eight in a base on Mars—”

“Oh, sure,” she said, bristling. “Yes, actually, I have been listening. And I hear that Agnew gets booed when he talks in public about going to Mars. People don’t want this, Mike; the war is fucking up the economy too comprehensively.”

Ben, gratifyingly, looked startled to hear her swear.

“Well, I doubt Nixon’s going to buy it all anyhow,” Ben said. “The word is he’s leaning a little toward the Space Shuttle, as the one element in the STG proposals to preserve over all the rest. Because it promises low-cost access to space. On the other hand, Nixon likes heroes…”

“But he’s backed into a corner, by what Kennedy said to Armstrong and Muldoon in July,” Mike said. “And by the pro-Mars statements he’s been issuing ever since.”

York grunted. “Nixon hates Kennedy. Besides, Kennedy’s just another opportunist. Do you really think he would have continued pumping funds into Apollo the way Johnson did, if he hadn’t been invalided out of the White House back in ’63? If he’d actually had to pay for any of the things he was able to call for, from his wheelchair?”

“Johnson was a genuine space enthusiast,” Mike said. “You’re too cynical, Natalie.”

“Johnson was interested in his own advantage. Why else do you have so many NASA centers in the South?”

“Does make you think, though,” Ben said. “What if Kennedy hadn’t taken those bullets in Dallas? Or — what if they’d killed him, instead of his wife? If he’d not been around as a cheerleader on the sidelines, maybe the whole program would have gotten itself canceled.”

“Anyway,” York said, “I just hope that whatever happens this time around they make room for a few scientists among all you av-i-at-ors.”

“Don’t listen to her, Ben,” Conlig said. “She’s playing it cool. Guess what she keeps on the wall of her bedroom in her mom’s house.”

“Shut up, Mike—”

“Tell me.”

“Pictures of Mars.”

Priest looked at her, evidently intrigued. “Really?”

“Hell, I was just sixteen. For a while I got caught up in all that showbiz about Mariner 4…”

Mariner 4 was a NASA space probe which reached Mars in July 1964. Mariner hadn’t carried the fuel to put itself into orbit around Mars; it made one sweep past the planet, firing off pictures as it went. Mariner sent back twenty-one pictures in all. They covered maybe 1 percent of Mars’s surface.