“Oh, it’s worse than that,” Gershon said. He pulled off his gloves and jammed them in his helmet. “This thing doesn’t even make sense in itself. The changes you have made aren’t consistent.” He looked into Lee’s anguished, stressed-out face; his sympathy for the man struggled with his anger. “Look, Lee, I’m going to raise Cain about this. That’s my job, damn it. It’s impossible to gain genuine experience with such a flawed sim — in fact, in my view the simulator itself is a severe danger to the overall progress of the project.”

Lee led him away from the sim and lit up a cigarette. “Oh, Christ, tell me about it. Change is my bugbear, Ralph. Change is killing me.” He painted a picture of a whole industry plowing its way toward Mars, a vast national network of craftsmanship and expertise slowly coming to focus on a single problem, and all of it flowing through this one site. “We’re working in places no one has touched before,” Lee said. “It’s not surprising nothing is right the first time. So we get a thousand change requests a week, from all across the country. And every time we change something, every piece that component touches has to be modified as well. And I’ll tell you who the worst offenders are.” He eyed Gershon. “Your good buddies in the Astronaut Office.”

Gershon laughed. He wasn’t surprised to hear it.

The astronauts still exerted a lot of power, official and unofficial. It was their asses on the line, after all. Lee was trying to get them all to submit to his change request process, just like everybody else, to keep everything orderly. But he was also aware of the need to keep this key group sweet. So he’d set up a private lounge for the astronauts, just down from his office, with a shower and a couple of fold-out beds, a place where they could sack out and hide from the press. And he’d take them home with him and have Jennine throw swank dinner parties for them, and make a hell of a fuss over them, and laud them to the skies. And the astronauts would come away thinking IK Lee was the greatest thing to have happened to the space program since the invention of Velcro.

At least, Gershon reflected, until he bounced their next request for a change.