So he went to his toolshed and started fiddling with the mower, lubricating the blades and checking the plugs. The shed was warm and dark, redolent with the smell of stained wood.

He could hear the voices of commentators at the Cape, drifting out from the windows of all the houses nearby. The launch was all around him, as if it had soaked its way right into the fabric of the neighborhood. And all the other neighborhoods, right across America, that Thursday morning.

Jennine called him into the house.

She handed him the phone. Jack Morgan was calling. He asked if Lee and Jennine wanted to come over to his house to watch the launch over a couple of beers. Lee thought about it, but said no, he wanted to work on his lawn today.

Actually, Lee had been hoping for an invitation from NASA to go down to the Cape, to watch the launch. It would have been a nice touch. It hadn’t come.

He and Morgan gassed on the phone for a while about the old days.

Morgan had quit Columbia and set up as an independent consultant in aerospace medicine, and was making a hell of a lot more money selling himself back to Columbia as a freelance. Still, he’d lasted longer at Columbia than Lee.

The frustration of his do-nothing sinecure had slowly driven Lee crazy, and he’d taken an early retirement.

Art Cane had died a while back, less than eighteen months before MEM 014, his company’s finest product, was due to touch down on Mars. And Gene Tyson — the smug jackass who had once taken over JK’s own job — was head of the company.

Anyhow, Lee went back to his mower, and eventually he rolled the thing out into the sunshine, and when he started it up the rattling roar of the petrol engine drowned out the thin Canaveral voices from the neighborhood.

After a while, Jennine came out again. The sunlight caught the gray in her hair, making it silvery, shining. She brought him a glass of lemonade, and then she took him by the hand and led him into the house.

The TV was on, of course.

And there it was, the already familiar image of the Saturn VB stack, a bundle of white needles. The ripple of early-morning Florida heat haze betrayed the distance of the camera from the launchpad. JK picked out the pregnant bulge of the MEM shroud at the middle of the stack, above the fat first stage and its boosters, beneath the slimmer lines of the Mission Module and the Apollo spacecraft.

“Go over there,” Jennine said suddenly. She had her Polaroid in her hand.

“Huh?”

She waved her free hand. “By the TV. Go ahead.”

He thought of the lawn, half-cut.

Then he went to stand by the TV.