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Mars.’
    ‘Hey, Ben,’ Mike said now. ‘Maybe you’ll be the first man on Mars. In the nuclear rocket ship
Spiro Agnew.’
    Ben snorted. He cupped his hand over his mouth, and intoned Cronkite-style, ‘And now we take you live to the aptly-named Jackass Flats, where the good ship
Agnew
is ready to lift Man In Space to his new destiny … over to you, Dan.’
    ‘Thanks, Walter, and here as I stand under the painted sky of Nevada, I cannot but help recall …’
    On they clowned, like two kids, laughing and bumping against each other. Petey came away from the fence, drawn by their laughter, and pulled at his father, punching his back playfully.
    York, indulgently, let them walk ahead of her.
    She looked around more carefully now, trying to figure the layout of the place. When the laughter had faded, she said to Priest, ‘Tell me how they operate here.’
    ‘Well, the rail track is the key to everything.’ He pointed. ‘The track runs out of that building, the Radioactive Material Storage Facility. The test articles aren’t too radioactive, you know, until they’ve been fired. They are delivered on their flatwagon trucks to the test cells, and go through their firing. Afterwards they are taken to a dump over there, at the eastern end of the track.’
    ‘Because they are too radioactive to recover?’
    ‘Yeah.’ Priest shrugged. ‘Mike talks about restart capabilities, but it looks more likely now that an interplanetary ship is going to have a whole host of big NERVA rockets clustered together. After you’ve fired one, you’d dump it, to save the crew from theradioactivity. And you’d use them all up at Earth departure; you’d stick to chemical rockets for mid-course corrections.’
    ‘Good grief. And this strikes you as a
rational
way to fly?’
    He grinned at her, his teeth pale in the gathering darkness. ‘If it’s what it takes to get me to Mars, hell, yes.’
    ‘Have they had any accidents here?’
    ‘Sure. It’s a development site. What do you expect?’
    ‘What kind of accidents?’
    ‘Ruptured cores. Ozone production in trapped air bubbles. Loss of moderator –’
    ‘And injuries?’
    ‘Ruptured ear drums. A few burns.’ Priest looked uncomfortable. ‘Natalie, what do you want me to tell you? The NRDS was born in a different age. You have to see things through the eyes of the times.’
    ‘Oh, sure.’ A different age.
But we’re still using this hideous place now. And Mike works here, for God’s sake
. She shivered, as if she could feel old Cold War radioactive particles sleeting through her flesh.
    She looked around. ‘How do they do their containment? When the test rockets fire. All that radioactive hydrogen, pluming into the air –’
    Ben said, ‘What containment?’
    They all piled into Ben’s Corvette and roared off down the Interstate toward Vegas, where they were going to spend the night, and Sunday. Petey quickly drifted off to sleep, his head lolling against the seat cushions.
    Ben turned on the radio. A news program was broadcasting; York, sitting up in front with Ben, listened desultorily to dreary statistics from Vietnam.
    Outside, light leaked from the sky, and hard starlight poked through the desert blue.
    Ben leaned forward and turned up the volume. ‘Hey, Mike, listen to this. It’s Agnew.’
    … the three options identified by our Space Task Group represent a balanced program … a wide range of manned flights, unmanned planetary expeditions and applications satellites – serving people on Earth and increasing international cooperation in space …
    Wernher von Braun’s cultured voice came on, testifying to the Senate.
I say let’s do it quickly and establish a foothold on a new planet while we still have one left to take off from …
    ‘So they are still talking about going to Mars,’ York said.
    ‘Sure they are,’ Ben said. ‘Agnew’s three options are all about going to Mars; the only difference between them is, the more you spend per year, the