Gregory had often taken Jim around Langley. The research center was a cluster of dignified old buildings, with precise brickwork and extensive porches, that looked almost like a college campus. But, set among the neatly trimmed lawns and tree-shaded streets, there were exotic shapes: huge spheres, buildings from which protruded pipes twenty or thirty feet wide. They were Langley’s famous wind tunnels.

Jim Dana had come to identify the layout of Langley — the odd mixture of the neatly mundane and the exotic — with the geography of his father’s complex, secretive mind.

Hampton was so isolated that a lot of bright young aeronautical engineers didn’t want to come within a hundred miles of the place. Those who did come to Langley tended to be highly motivated, and not a little odd — like Gregory himself, Jim had come to realize ruefully. And the local Virginians hadn’t thought much of the “Nacka Nuts” — as they still called them — arriving in their midst. So the Langley engineers had kept themselves to themselves most of the time, on and off the job, and Langley had evolved into its own peculiar little world.

As Dana had grown and moved away, he’d become aware of the bigger world beyond Virginia.

“I don’t know why you stay here,” he’d once told his father. “All the real action in NASA is at other sites. Why don’t you ever think about moving away?” He couldn’t figure his father’s lack of ambition.

“Because things don’t get any better for people like me than they are here,” Gregory had replied. “The press don’t care much about Langley. Even the rest of NASA doesn’t care much. To the outsider, the place is just a set of gray buildings with gray people working slide rules and writing out long equations on blackboards. But if you’re in love with aeronautical research, it’s a kind of heaven — a unique and wonderful place.”

Jim knew that Langley had made immense contributions to the U.S.’s prowess in aeronautics and astronautics. It had gotten involved with the development of military aircraft during the Second World War and then in the programs which led to the first supersonic airplane, the Bell X-1. Langley staff had formed the task force which had been responsible for the Mercury program, and later it became involved with studies for the optimal shapes for the Gemini and Apollo ships…

Gregory never talked about his past. Dana knew he’d suffered during the war. Maybe, he thought, Langley was kind of a refuge, after all that. It buffered him from the pressures of the competitive aircraft industry, and on the other hand from NASA politics. It was as if the men of Langley — and they were men, almost exclusively — had made a kind of unconscious decision that their site and budgets and scope should remain small, even as the space program Langley had spawned had grown like Topsy.