Bert Seger had some paperwork to finish up before he got to go home today. But when the news of the splashdown came in he walked out of his office, into the Control Center’s high corridor. He pulled a cigar out of the breast pocket of his jacket, his hand brushing the pink carnation that his wife had placed there for him, as always.

After a twelve-day flight, Apollo 14 had splashed down in the Pacific, four miles from the carrier Okinawa. NASA was going to be on a high for a while, Seger realized. Scott and Irwin had spent nineteen hours outside the LM, compared to under three hours for Armstrong and Muldoon, and they had traversed seventeen miles around the terrain at the foot of a fifteen-thousand-foot mountain. The flight controllers and astronauts had become pretty good at coordinating with the scientists in the back rooms where and how they should proceed. Almost every one of the J-class mission’s innovations — the upgraded LM, the Rover, the orbiting Service Module’s instrument pallet — had worked without a hitch.

Apollo 14 had been the biggest success since the first landing: even skeptics among the scientists were applauding the mission.

But it was done.

Seger’s footsteps echoed in the quiet. It was just two years since Apollo 11, he thought, and yet the first age of lunar exploration was already over. Damn it, Seger thought. We’ve just gotten good at this stuff, and now we have to stop.

He stopped at the door of the MOCR, Mission Control, and stepped in. The MOCR was deserted; everybody had already left for the splashdown party, some almighty gumbo affair the Mission Evaluation guys were holding over in Building 45.

He climbed the steps to the Flight Director’s console: the heart of a mission, even more so than the couch of the spacecraft commander himself. The big twenty-by-ten-foot screen at the front of the room was black, cold. The controllers’ consoles were littered with books, logs, checklists, headsets, and ashtrays filled with cigarette butts and half-smoked cigars. Some of the controllers had left behind the little Stars and Stripes they’d waved when the spacecraft splashed down.

Maybe, he thought, someday these consoles would be full of data streaming in from a manned spacecraft in orbit around Mars.

Standing here, thinking of it in those terms, it didn’t seem possible; but then, the lunar landing must have seemed just as impossible back in 1959, when NASA didn’t yet exist, and technicians had taken Mercury boilerplate capsules to the Cape on the backs of flatbed trucks, cushioned by mattresses.

It was Bert Seger’s job to make Mars happen.

Seger had been appointed, just a month ago, as a deputy director of the Office of Manned Spaceflight, one of NASA’s four big divisions. His job was running the embryonic Mars Program Office, here in Houston.