“Listen to me,” Jack Morgan said. “You’ve got to get your head out of your ass, JK. You’ve got to start paying some attention to your family. And yourself, come to that. Or Jennine is going to walk out on you, and nobody’s going to blame her. In fact, I’ll be here to drive her away.

“I’ll come back in a couple of hours. You take care, Jennine.” And he went to get his coat, and she heard the door bang behind him.

JK looked devastated. He really hadn’t seen this coming, she realized.

“So,” he said stiffly. “I guess it was a cry for help, huh.”

Oh, JK. Pop psychology slogans. She closed her eyes and thought of the face in the mirror, the steady stream of pills passing her lips. Have I really become such a clichй?

JK sat silently for a while, rubbing her arm. And then he began jabbering about the tank failure. “It was amazing,” he said. “The tanks only blew when they were filled with nitrogen tet. So we knew there had to be some kind of chemical thing going on. But the tanks would only blow here, at Newport. We ran identical tests over at the manufacturers’, in Indianapolis, and zippo.

“So we started doing a trace on the nitrogen tet. It comes from a big refinery run by the Air Force. And guess what we found? The stuff we had at Newport was from a later batch than the stuff at Indianapolis. Our stuff was purer. The Indianapolis batch had impurities, a tiny amount of water in it. So we set up another lab test back at Newport. And we found that when the nitrogen tet is too pure — better than 99 percent — it becomes corrosive! It attacks titanium! But add a dash of water, like in the Indianapolis batch, and the problem goes away. Anyhow, to hell with it. I think we’re going to switch to oxygen-methane for our propellant. The performance is okay, and it’s nontoxic, and we can store it easily for months in space, even if it isn’t hypergolic…”

Jennine lay there listening to this, with her arm in JK’s hands. He was full of his story by now, with the technological sleuthing and all the rest of it, and she could feel his hand jerk around, animated by the storytelling, quite oblivious of her flesh lying passively inside his.

She thought of the immense project, the pieces of the Mars ship flowing into the Newport assembly bays from every state in the Union: fuel and oxygen tanks from Buffalo and Boulder, instruments from Newark and Cedar Rapids, valves from San Fernando, electronics from Kalamazoo and Lima. And probably every one of those pieces left an invisible trail behind it, of drunkenness, and heart attacks, and smashed-up marriages.

She thought, oddly, that JK really ought to understand what had happened to her.