The Samuel P. Langley Memorial Laboratory was the oldest aeronautical research center in the U.S., and it was father to all the rest. It had been founded during the First World War, conceived out of a fear that the land of the Wright brothers might start to fall behind the European belligerents in aviation. It had been a different world, a world in which the individualistic traditions of old America were still strong, and there was a great suspicion of falling into the emerging technocratic ways of the totalitarian powers of Europe.

Langley stayed poor, humble, and obscure, but it succeeded in keeping abreast of the latest technology. And back then — Gregory had told Jim — Hampton was a place where people still referred to the Civil War as “the late war.”

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.”