Even me, she admitted at last. Even I am guilty. I agonize about compromising my scientific principles by being here. But it’s more than that.

By being in the program, by giving it my tacit support, I killed Ben, as surely as that failed NERVA.

She sat in a chair and curled over on herself, tucking her arms into her belly, letting her head drop to her knees.

And now I have to decide. Do I get out? Maybe start shrieking the truth to the world?

Or will it make Ben’s death mean something, if I stay?

Something inside her, cold and hard and selfish, pointed out that it was Ben who had died, not her. And Mars was still there, waiting for her.

Maybe she was just rationalizing; maybe she was just trying to find a way to justify staying in the program.

And maybe she’d thrown out Mike and his talk of martyrs so angrily because — somewhere inside her — there was a part of her own soul that agreed with his brutal analysis.

The next day she had the locks changed. She packed up Mike’s stuff and sent it to Huntsville. And she made the Portofino apartment available for sublet.

Tuesday, January 20, 1981

NASA HEADQUARTERS, WASHINGTON, DC

When the first draft of NASA’s internal report landed on his desk, Michaels called a meeting of Seger, Muldoon, and Udet in his office in Washington.

The three of them sat in a row on the other side of his desk. Muldoon was tense, angry, uncomfortable; Seger seemed eager, energetic, somehow too bright; and Udet was reserved, watching Michaels and the others through his pale blue eyes.

Michaels picked up the draft report and dropped it on his desk. “I’ve tried to read this. I know I’m going to have to answer for it line by line. Gentlemen, I want you to walk me through this fucking blowout. Step by step, over and again, until I understand. You got that? Hans, you want to lead?”

Udet nodded crisply. “Of course, Fred. The malfunction occurred at the time at which we were preparing the S-NB for its restart burn. I will remind you that the rocket had functioned flawlessly during its first burn—”

“I remember.”

“The moderators were adjusted to lift the temperature of the core to its working range of three thousand degrees. The turbopumps were started, and hydrogen began to flow through the cooling jackets and the core. We registered thrust rising to its nominal levels; the cabin transcript indicates the crew was aware of this. Then—”

“And then,” Joe Muldoon observed drily, “we hit a glitch.”

The flow of liquid hydrogen into the coolant jackets became intermittent, Udet said. It turned out later that a flaw was developing in the piping carrying the hydrogen to the engine.

Michaels asked, “Shouldn’t you have shut down the core as soon as that happened?”