The VAB was a huge block to Muldoon’s left, the windows of the cars clustered around it glistening like the carapaces of beetles. There was a stretch of grass before him, with its clustered cameramen, the flagpole, and the big digital countdown clock, and on the other side of that the barge canal stretched across his vision. Beyond the canal was a line of trees. And beyond that — there on the horizon, made faint by morning mist — he could see the blocky, blue-gray forms of the two LC-39 gantries. The pad for Ares, 39A, was on the right.

If he turned to look farther to the right he could make out more launch complexes, gaunt, well-separated skeletons: ICBM Row, stretching off down the Atlantic coast.

KSC had changed a hell of a lot since he’d first flown, in Gemini. Even from where he was you could see how the space program had receded. Employment here was less than half what it had been then. The launch complex he’d flown Gemini from, LC-19, was still there — used for unmanned Titan launches — but only ten complexes out of twenty-six at KSC remained operational. The launchpads rotted, the gantries had rusted and were pulled down, and NASA executives let local scrap merchants bid to take away the junk.

But Complex 39A was still there. In 1969, he’d flown out of there on Apollo. And sixteen years later, the Ares stack was there, assembled and ready to fly.

Behind Muldoon’s seat, two old ladies chatted about the launch parties they’d held over the years in their Florida gardens, as brilliant manned spacecraft had drifted through the night sky, directly overhead.

NASA had set up a series of press porta-kabins, and reporters in short-sleeved shirts trooped in and out carrying photocopied mission time lines, and glossy goodies from the contractors. To Muldoon’s left, toward the VAB, the big network TV cabins were full of activity; their huge picture windows shimmered in the morning light.

Loudspeakers boomed with the voices of the astronauts on the air-to-ground loop, and with updates from Mission Control at Houston and the Firing Room there at the Cape. The Public Affairs Officer intoned countdown highlights. A way down from Muldoon, a woman reporter was fanning herself with a crumpled-up press release.

Muldoon, stiff and hot in his dark business suit, felt aged, restless, thirsty.

The mist was burning off the horizon. Then, at 39A, he could see the slim white needle of the Saturn, emerging from the blue haze.

LAUNCH CONTROL CENTER, CAPE CANAVERAL

When he’d first come to work here at the Cape, Rolf Donnelly had found the LCC very different from the MOCR back at Houston.