It was a fresh June day, and soon Dana could taste salt and ozone from the coast; the sunlight was sharp on the bare arm he propped in the window frame. The landscape around him seemed to expand, to assume the huge, hollow dimensions of his childhood, echoing with seagull cries.

A little after noon he reached Hampton: his hometown, right at the tip of the peninsula. It was a fishing town, a backwater. He drove down streets so familiar it seemed his memories had reached out to reconstruct an external world. There were the same shabby boatyards, the crab boats lolling in the brackish tidal flow, the gulls: all the symbols of his childhood, still in place. It was as if twelve years had rolled off him, taking away all his achievements — Mary and the kids, the academy, his USAF service — leaving him a scraped-raw ten-year-old again.

Men had walked on the Moon. And the thinkers of the Langley research center, just a few miles to the north, had played a key role in putting them there, Dana’s father Gregory included. But it all seemed to have made damn little difference to Hampton.

Both his parents came out onto the porch to greet him. The house’s windows gleamed, the porch was swept until it shone, and the wind chimes glittered in the fresh blue daylight. But the little wooden-framed house had an air of shabbiness about it, and the downtown neighborhood seemed to have gotten rougher than ever. Dana felt a certain claustrophobia settling over him, like an old, ill-fitting coat.

His mother, Sylvia, was rounder, older, her face more tired and slack than he remembered, but she was lit up by a smile of such intensity that Dana felt obscurely guilty. And there came his father, Gregory Dana, in an old cardigan and with tie loosely knotted, wiping his hands on an oily rag. It was hard to see Gregory’s eyes through his dusty wire-rimmed spectacles — John Lennon glasses, Dana realized suddenly, and he suppressed a grin.

Gregory shook Dana’s hand. “So how’s the great astronaut coming along?”

Gregory had asked that question as long as Dana could remember. The difference now was it looked as if the question might soon have some bearing on the truth.

Lunch was a stiff affair. His parents had always been a little awkward with him, undemonstrative in their affections. So he talked about Mary, the children, how much they’d appreciated the presents they’d been sent for their recent birthdays: the Revell Saturn V rocket kit, which had been much too advanced for two-year-old Jake, the hand-knitted sweater for Maria.

When lunch was done, Gregory Dana tucked his tobacco pouch into the pocket of his shabby gray cardigan. “Well, Jimmy. How’s about a little brain-busting, back in the shop?”

Dana’s mother gave him a glistening nod. It was okay, she’d be fine.

“Sure, Dad.”