The workshop, so-called, was actually a small unused bedroom at the back of the house, filled with tools and books and bits of unfinished models, a blackboard coated with obscure, unreadable equations.

Dana cleared some loose sketches from a stool. His slacks were already coated with a patina of fine dust. Every surface was covered with scraps of paper, chewed-off pencils, shreds of tobacco, bits of discarded models. Gregory had always banned Sylvia from doing any cleaning in there. As Dana had grown little older he’d done a certain amount to keep down the level of detritus and mire; but since he’d left home it looked as if the shop hadn’t been cleaned out once.

His father began to bustle about the workshop, pulling together obscure bits and pieces from the clutter, sorting haphazardly. Gregory puffed at his pipe as he worked, quite content, and the rich, seductive scent of burning tobacco filled the room, evoking sharp memories in Dana.

On Sunday afternoons, Gregory had often taken Dana out to the meadows alongside Langley’s airfield, and there they would join other Langley engineers in flying their model airplanes and rockets — made not from kits, but in ramshackle home workshops just like Gregory’s. It had been terrific for Dana to be out there on a windblown afternoon, with those gangling, noisy eccentrics — the Brain Busters, they called themselves, isolated from the Hampton locals, who scorned them.

To Dana as a boy of eight or nine, to be able to work at Langley on airplanes and spaceships had seemed the best possible future in the world.

“So,” Gregory said without looking at him, “where’s the next assignment?”

“I’m not sure. It’s most likely going to be Edwards.” Down in the Mojave Desert, the USAF’s top flight test station.

“Will you fly there?”

“Maybe. Well, probably. But not the most advanced planes.”

“And,” Gregory said levelly, “is that likely to be your long-term posting?”

“Nothing is long-term, Dad. You know that.” It was a question he was asked every time he came home.

Gregory’s face was soft, round, a little jowly; his thin hair was plastered over a dome of skull. “It’s your mother. She gets concerned. I—”

“Dad,” Dana said, “I’m not a combat pilot. You shouldn’t worry about such things. I’m not going to Nam. I’m aiming for the space program, not Nam. I don’t know how many times I have to—”

“Can you get to be an astronaut, out of Edwards?”

Dana took a breath. “Sure. In fact, Edwards’s day might be coming,” he said. “The studies are coming in for the Space Shuttle. That will lean heavily on the old lifting-body research that was performed at Edwards. And there is talk or having the Shuttle land at Edwards. Gliding down from space, to land right on the old salt flats.”