The car, parked in a Building 30 space, was a hired stretch limo with a bar in the back. It was pleasantly cool, a relief after the heat of the day. Lee got in and lit up a cigarette.

Cane nodded to the driver, and the car pulled smoothly away.

Lee eyed Cane. “Not like you to be so extravagant, Art.”

Cane shrugged and loosened his tie. “I’m an old man, JK. What can I say? I can’t put up with this Texas heat; I need the air-conditioning.” Cane folded his jacket neatly on his lap, and then put his hands together over the jacket, one on top of the other. “Now, look here, JK. You know the pressure we’ve been under.”

“Sure.”

“That goddamn tiger team thing. And the CARR on 009, and the delays in shipping the bird to the Cape, and those problems with the busted fuel tanks. And now that business in orbit.”

“But that’s all resolved, Art.” Lee launched into a bubbling description of how the whifferdill problem had already been diagnosed to a mis-set switch in the MEM’s cabin. “…When the ascent engine fired, the switch told the abort guidance system it should start looking for the Command Module, to get a lock on for a fast emergency docking. But of course the Apollo was miles away at the time.” He laughed. “So the MEM just started tumbling, looking for that old Command Module for all it was worth…”

Cane held up a hand, the skin on it so loose it reminded Lee of a plucked chicken’s claw. “Yeah,” he said. “But it wasn’t a crew mistake, was it? I mean, they thought they’d set that switch correctly. We had mislabeled the switch. So it was our fault, not theirs.” He shook his head, looking gaunt and old. “Jesus Christ, JK, how in hell did you let something like that out of the factory? It could have killed those guys.”

“Oh, come on, Art. It wasn’t so serious. It’ll be trivial to fix. All of the problems we had were trivial. Finding problems is what proving flights are for. Now, I can take the D-prime records and transcripts and test results back to Newport Beach, and we can begin raking out the remaining flaws in their hardware.” He felt enthusiastic, energetic, renewed by the flight of his machine. “Why, I want to set a new record, coming out of this. I want 010 to show the smallest number of defects in its preflight checkout of any craft of any generation ever shipped to the Cape. Why the hell not? We’re going to make history, Art. With the D-prime behind me, I’ll hit the next one out of the park—”