At first Bert Seger had been enthusiastic about his new post in Washington. He was, after all, given the rank of associate administrator, and, as a senior manager in the Office of Manned Spaceflight, he still expected to have a strong hands-on involvement in the manned program. But when he studied the new organization charts, and he saw just how far away from him were the reporting lines of the major players, like Joe Muldoon, he started to realize he’d been had. He’d been handed a sinecure, something to get him decently out of the way during the investigations into Apollo-N.

He never became comfortable at Headquarters. He had a few assignments, and some pet projects of his own to pursue, and they filled his time, but not his attention. He would find himself sitting alone in his office for hours on end, waiting for the telephone to ring, reading newspapers.

He took long walks around Washington.

He found favored benches in the big public gardens and floated through the museums. He liked the serenity, the timelessness of the museums.

The evenings weren’t any better.

Fay was still in Houston, with the boys, and Seger would fly back there every Friday. Fay didn’t want to move, because of the boys’ schooling, and Seger accepted that, reluctantly.

Every Sunday or Monday, when he had to get ready to fly back to DC, Fay prepared him a little bouquet of carnations. Each day he’d take one for his buttonhole, but they’d be pretty faded by the end of the week, and it just wasn’t the same.

He had too much time to think.

He kept on going over the events of that flight — in fact, over everything he’d done in all the years that had led up to Apollo-N.

Was there anything he should have done differently during the flight, anything he’d missed that might have saved Jones, Priest, and Dana? And during the long development, how far was he responsible for the shoddiness, the carelessness which had finally destroyed the nuclear rocket?

He didn’t come up with any answers. He could, in retrospect, think of a thousand things he might have done differently. But he wasn’t wallowing; he knew that anything is possible with the benefit of hindsight. He’d done the best he could, at every stage of his career.

But it was no comfort. It happened on my watch.

In the hall of his rented apartment he had hung a small brass-framed photograph. It showed three space-suited astronauts. To Bert — In Your Hands.

Seger didn’t go in or out of his apartment without looking at that photo and reading the inscription.

He found a run-down little Catholic church, tucked away just a few blocks from Headquarters, and took to spending time in there. He attended Mass three or four times a week. The ancient, gentle ritual took him back to his childhood and comforted him.