He shook his head. “I don’t want to hear when, or how, or why. I don’t give a damn. And you know what? Right now, I don’t know if I ever did.”

She watched him pace around the room. He was like a stranger, an alien, there in her apartment. “No. You never did give a damn, did you? I can’t believe—”

“What?”

“I can’t believe I ever thought I loved you.”

That took him aback for a moment, and he looked at her; but then his face resumed its mask of anger. “Yeah, well, you can believe what you like.”

“How can you rake up all of this now? Ben’s dead, for God’s sake.”

“I know he’s dead!” he shouted. “As dead as my fucking career!”

“Is that all you care about?”

His anger was consuming him. “Yeah. Yeah, maybe it is. That and the fact that this will probably kill off the nuke program.”

“Get out,” York said.

“Omelets and eggs, Natalie! You don’t get anywhere without taking a few risks! And with what we learned from this flight — if we’re allowed to fly again — we’ll get it right next time.” Under the anger in his voice, she thought she heard vulnerability, still, a plea for understanding. “Christ, Natalie, we could be on Mars by now. But fucking NASA—”

She turned away from him. “Get out. Go, Mike.”

She didn’t watch him leave.

Mike was right, in a way. He spoke a truth, as perceived by many within NASA. If only public sentiment would get out of the way, and let us move as fast as we know we can…

Lower reliability would mean lower development costs, and a faster schedule.

It was an insidious, strangely seductive argument.

The machine is everything! Oh, we have to put men inside those machines, and we have a few problems with that, and some of them are driven crazy by their experiences, and some of them die, in squalid, painful, unheroic ways — as dear Ben had died, decaying in a hospital bed, a month after his flight — but it’s worth it for the goal.

And besides, we’re never short of volunteers.

What made it worse was that NASA — a child of the Cold War — never told the truth about a situation if it didn’t have to. And certainly not if the truth damaged PR. So much was hidden behind the glamour: the dangers, the awful shitty deaths, the almost psychotic desire by some, engineers and crew, to keep on flying.

It isn’t just Mike. There isn’t even a “them” to blame for this.

All the astronauts were implicated: all of those who would volunteer for the most dangerous mission, and go along with the cover-ups. Even Ben himself. He’d worked on NERVA; he must have had a good idea of its lack of flight readiness.