Josephson sipped his drink. “But could it be any other way, Fred? It was the same with Apollo. Once spaceflight becomes the religion of the empire, it becomes immensely powerful; but it can’t stir us to dream in the same old way. And all of us involved — NASA, the White House, the DoD — just figure out ways in which the space program can serve our own interests. It’s the way things are.”

“Maybe. And I know those guys at Langley are going to hate this one-shot business. Who the hell knows when we’ll be back again? I remember LBJ saying to me once that Americans are a lot better at breaking new ground than caring for the ground already broken. He was sure right. Anyway, the hell with it. We can forget all the political crap now, Tim, and start dreaming about Mars.” He studied Josephson again. “Tell you what I’ve been thinking,” he said. “Now that we have this nice tight goal, our new Apollo, this one-shot trip to Mars, we’re going to need a new name. Something to sum the whole thing up.”

“I guess you’re right,” Josephson said. “In fact, maybe we should have done that before issuing the press briefings.”

“Well, you’re in the hot seat now,” Michaels said. “What are you going to choose, Tim?”

Josephson pulled his lip. “Hmm. How did the name ‘Apollo’ come about? That was before my time—”

Michaels said, “It was picked out by Abe Silverstein in 1960. Now Abe was the head of the Office of Manned Spaceflight at the time — or rather, its predecessor. Silverstein kind of dabbled in the classical myths. He’d picked the name ‘Mercury’ a year earlier, because he liked the idea of a messenger in the sky. And then von Braun’s people called their new launch vehicle ‘Saturn,’ and so another classical god seemed a natural choice to Silverstein.”

“Maybe so,” Josephson said with half smile, “but that’s rather muddled. Isn’t it true that von Braun was actually naming his rockets after planets? There was the ‘Jupiter,’ and then the ‘Saturn’—”

“Give me a break,” Michaels said good-humoredly. “Silverstein was a research engineer; what did he know? Anyhow, Silverstein remembered from his schooldays the story of the god who rode the chariot of the sun drawn by four winged horses: Apollo, the son of Zeus. So Silverstein did a bit of checking to make sure Apollo hadn’t done anything that would be too inappropriate for the American public, such as screwing his mother, and found he hadn’t — and so Apollo it was.”