Voyage

“Sixty minutes to pericenter,” Stone said.

All three members of the crew were in the Mission Module’s science platform. At the heart of this little octagonal chamber, lined with its banks of switches and displays, they were strapped into harnesses and had their feet hooked into stirrups.

Above York’s head there was a small science viewport. A brilliant, shifting white light beat down over her face, flooding the fluorescents.

She could see the upper half of a fat, pale, gibbous disc.

My God. That’s Venus.

To her naked eye, the dayside of the planet was glaring white — much brighter than Earth, from a similar distance — and it washed out the stars. Of the thin slice of nightside she could see nothing at all.

The trajectory of Ares had taken it arcing inside the orbit of Venus. Ares was barreling out of the sun toward Venus, tumbling along a hyperbola into Venus’s gravity well. Ares was already moving toward the planet at more than five miles a second, and, as York watched, that gibbous disc was narrowing, and the reflected sunlight cast shifting shadows across her lap.

There was a Hasselblad Velcroed to the work surface near her; she ripped it loose, jammed her face up against the port, and began taking pictures.

Venus was about the size of the Earth, but this was nothing like her experience of Earth orbit. There was no detail: the surface of Venus was permanently hidden, baked under its huge layers of carbon-dioxide cloud. From this close, the cloud tops looked utterly smooth, featureless, as if the planet was a huge pearl: perfect, entire…

Although, when she looked more closely, she thought she could see a little structure in the clouds, right at the limb: a fine shell, surrounding the main cloud decks, outlined against the darkness of the sky.

She snapped the camera furiously.

“You have a problem, Natalie?” Stone asked drily.

“I think I see the haze layer,” she said. A shell of sulfuric acid clouds, swathing Venus, outlined against the darkness of the sky.

“Yeah. And that picture’s not on the schedule,” Stone said.

Christ. “Okay, damn it.” She slammed the Hasselblad back on its surface. “I just saw something no other human being had even seen before, that’s all. I thought it was worth investing in a snapshot.”

“If we don’t get through this encounter on the right trajectory,” Stone murmured, his eyes on the flickering CRT displays before him, “you won’t be going home to get that roll of film developed. Let’s concentrate, guys.”

Yeah, yeah. We’re in operational mode here. Stick to the goddamn mission plan.

York returned her attention to her displays.

Gershon was grinning over his shoulder at her.

The plan was for Ares to skim around behind the dark side of the planet. The slingshot would twist the ship’s trajectory through thirty degrees, and Ares would be hugely accelerated. As Ares had crawled, unpowered, around the sun, it had drawn only a little way ahead of Earth; so Ares was passing between Venus and Earth. The cluster would pass into the shadow of Venus, but it would never be out of Earth’s line of sight.

The members of the crew had their assignments for the Venus encounter phase: Stone was monitoring the cluster’s trajectory, Gershon was to follow the atmospheric-entry subprobe Ares had released, and York was operating the Mission Module’s sensor pallet.

In one of the video monitors she had an image of the cloud tops in ultraviolet light. It showed a wealth of blue-gray detail invisible to the naked eye: cloud structures that swept around the planet, complex bows and cells that distorted and stretched out along the planet’s lines of latitude. The whole thing, in its computer-generated false colors, looked almost Earthlike.

The sensor pallet on its rearview-mirror extensor arm was a collection of fat, awkward-looking tubes and antennae and lenses, all wrapped in foil. There was a TV camera to study the clouds, an airglow experiment to look for ultraviolet echoes of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen, an infrared radiometer studying cloud temperatures, a magnetometer, charged-particle telescopes. Four horn-shaped radar antennae would be able to penetrate the cloud layer and map the strip of Venus over which Ares passed. The sensors were already working, peering forward from the rearview mirror, the pallet which angled out from the Mission Module’s pressure hull.

“Hey,” Gershon said. “Here goes the probe. I’m passing through the ionosphere. Two hundred fifty miles above the ground. Progressing toward the main cloud layers, at hyperbolic speed… How about that.”

York unhooked herself from her stirrups and drifted over to Gershon. There was a TV monitor at the center of Gershon’s station; the screen showed nothing but a snowstorm of static.

The subprobe had been ejected twenty-three days ago, from a compartment at the base of the Mission Module, and had been pushed onto a slowly diverging orbit. Ares was missing Venus by a few thousand miles; the probe, pushed ahead of Ares, was supposed to impact the planet directly, a few minutes before the closest approach of the main craft. The probe would hit in the middle of the dayside, in an upland region called Ishtar Terra.

The probe was contained within its aeroshell deceleration module, a deep, streamlined pie dish. Its TV cameras couldn’t see out of the aeroshell, but there was a radio-transparent window at the top, so the probe could talk to Ares.

Gershon said, “I’m in the atmosphere now, but still above the main cloud banks. Fifty miles up. The temperature’s low here; under a hundred below, in fact. But this is the minimum; it should soon start to rise as I enter the main cloud banks. Here we come to breakout… Three, two, one. Mark. Watch the screen, Natalie.”

At just that moment, somewhere in those clouds, York knew, that fat pie dish was falling apart. A pilot chute would pull away the lid, and the main chute should open above the probe.

There was a break in the monitor’s snowstorm, a yellow, flickering blur.

Gershon whooped. “How about that. We can see out, at last.”

On the TV the pale, jaundiced wash brightened and darkened periodically: the probe was rotating, slowly, under its chute, and that cyclical brightening must be the sun, a glare behind the diffuse haze of sulfuric acid particles.

“Visibility’s dropping. Down to maybe four miles,” Gershon said. “I’ve got a pressure of three-quarters of Earth’s sea-level pressure, and the temperature is around fifty degrees. Yum. Balmy. And I’m still all of thirty-eight miles high.”

Thirty-eight miles Two hundred thousand feet On Earth, that would be the top of the stratosphere: pressure less than a hundredth of sea level.

The haze on the TV screen thinned out. “Whoa,” Gershon said. “Look at that. All of a sudden I can see for miles and miles.”

York found herself looking down on a layer of cloud, thick and unbroken, a pale, washed-out yellow. The clouds were fluffy, Earthlike. Almost friendly. Up above there was a featureless yellow sky; she could no longer tell where the sun was.

The probe dropped into the thick clouds.

“Coming up on twenty-eight miles. I’m through all that sulfuric acid shit. But temperature outside is all of four hundred degrees already. And pressure’s higher than an atmosphere already. Three, two, one. Mark. Chute sep.”

The picture seemed to shudder, then it stabilized again.

The pressure vessel — the heart of the probe — had hatched out of its aeroshell and cut itself loose from its parachute. The probe was still more than twenty-five miles high, but it had already cut away its last chute. The air of Venus was so thick that from where it was the probe could free-fall all the way to the surface.

The pressure vessel was a sphere of thick metal. There were vanes on the sphere to make it spin, so that it was stabilized during its fall, and there were tough little windows cut into the surface so that the probe’s instruments could see out.

“Hey,” Gershon said. “Look at these numbers from the mass spectrometer.” He tapped a screen. “I got me some heavy isotopes of hydrogen in the air.”

“So what?”

He narrowed his eyes. “Water, my dear. Oceans, maybe: once upon a time, anyhow. Long since boiled off by the greenhouse effect, caused by all this fucking CO2. But where there were oceans…”

Life, perhaps.

The probe was spinning slowly in the sluggish air. The light was dark, reddish, but the illumination was no worse than a cloudy day on Earth. She couldn’t see the sun at all; there was only an ill-defined glare, almost baleful, spread across half of the cloud bank that covered the sky.

And suddenly she could see the surface: the probe’s fish-eye camera returned panoramic views of a landscape, dimly visible through the murky air. York made out what looked like a cleft in the land, running from side to side of the picture — no, not a cleft, she realized; it was a ridge, hundreds of miles long, leading up to a plateau.

“Wind speed down to zip,” Gershon said. “Pressure and temperature still rising. Venus doesn’t have air; that stuff is more like my momma’s chicken soup.” He tapped the screen. “That’s Ishtar Terra,” he said. “Or the edge of it; right where we’re drifting. We’re slap on course. Look at it, Natalie. Seven miles above the mean surface, and—”

“ — and as big as the United States. I know.” Ishtar Terra was a high, exposed plateau, already mapped by radar from Earth: Ishtar was how a continent might look if someone drained away Earth’s oceans.

York felt excitement mount. At last, a chance to do some geology on this mission.

Venus and Earth were twins. So presumably Venus had a hot, radioactive core, just like Earth’s, whose heat must escape to space. On Earth, that happened in two ways: plate tectonics and vulcanism. But, in the radar mapping and the crude Russian probes’ results, nobody had observed any sign of plate tectonics on Venus: no rings of vulcanism, no rift valleys.

So York, along with every other geologist, believed that the dominant geological process for losing core heat had to be vulcanism: ongoing and continuing. There just had to be a whole bunch of live volcanic hot spots, all around the planet, feeding the heat to the atmosphere, and thence to the ultimate heat sink of space. Therefore, at Ishtar, she expected to see a young surface, heavily distorted by the upwelling of magma — liquid rock under the solid crust — and resurfaced by repeated lava flows. If there were any impact craters, they would be heavily distorted, maybe even buried, invisible under the fresh surface.

She pointed off to the right of the screen, to shadowy cones that loomed out of the murk. “Look at that. That must be the Maxwell Montes.” The tallest mountain range on Venus. The probe was drifting toward the Montes, she saw, floating like a fat metal balloon in some sluggish current. The Montes were steeper, in places, than anything on Earth. The mountains were folds in the surface, illuminated by the diffuse, ruddy light and wreathed by thick air; it was like swimming over some undersea ridge.

Something showed up on the edge of the screen: a circular feature, on the flank of the mountain range.

“Hey. What’s that?” The probe’s slow rotation took the feature out of shot, almost immediately. “Hot damn.”

Gershon grinned up at her. “Sorry,” he said. “No panning or zooming. This isn’t Wide World of Sports.”

A circle? Could it be a crater? What the hell was that doing there?

Something was wrong; York could smell it. She waited, excited, impatient, as the camera panned around, agonizingly slowly, the image wobbling as the probe hit turbulence pockets in the soupy air.

The circular feature came back again, drifting in from the right.

York shoved her face right up to the screen. Almost a perfect circle, surrounded by a dark blanket of material: it had to be an impact crater, surrounded by a layer of ejecta. Like a bullet hole centered in dried blood. And it was so large it was almost certainly several hundred million years old.

And it was pristine, no coverage by lava flows, no distortion by shifts in the landscape.

Which meant that Ishtar Terra had to have been geologically dead, too, for at least as long.

That’s impossible. Her mind raced. If that’s characteristic of the whole surface, everything is turned on its head. No plate tectonics, and no vulcanism either?

The enigmatic crater passed out of view as the probe descended.

“Ten minutes from pericenter,” Stone said. The mission commander was watching his instruments, York saw, not the images from the probe, the first pictures of the surface of Venus.

The probe was heading for a rough plain, broken up with large, jagged rocks. She saw some evidence of winds: dust streaks, scouring, a couple of flattened dunes. The air isn’t always so sluggish, then.

“Coming on in,” Gershon said. “Approach speed twenty-one feet per. Thirty seconds.”

Around fifteen miles per hour. Like a slow car crash: hard, but survivable.

“Nine. Eight…”

The ground rocked upward, spinning toward the camera; York, trying to pick out features, felt oddly dizzy.

“Two. One.”

The picture fuzzed over briefly, then cleared.

She saw a steady image, a rocky plain, no longer rotating. The plain tipped a little, as the probe settled on its side.

Gershon whooped. “Touchdown!” He pumped his arms, football-style. “Welcome to a pleasant spring day on Venus. Air pressure is a soothing ninety-one atmospheres. Temperatures today will peak at a frisky 880 degrees Fahrenheit…”

Hot enough to melt lead.

York bent to stare into the screen. The image was distorted into a kind of bow by the fish-eye lens. She couldn’t see the horizon; the visibility couldn’t have been more than a few hundred yards. The sun was invisible, but the sky was bright. Like a smoggy day in L.A.

Live, from the surface of Venus. York felt a surge of affection for the tough little superprobe.

The land was flattened, shattered into plates, littered with scattered rocks. The plates were reddish brown, and looked vaguely shiny. The light was strong enough for some of the rocks to cast a sharp shadow. The surface looked like clay that had been baked, carelessly, in an oven that was set too high: cracked, fractured.

Could be basaltic. Volcanic. Probably highly alkaline. And those plates look almost sedimentary. But there’s no water here! Laid down by deposition from the air, then? No. Maybe a volcanic origin is more likely. And where the hell did that surface rubble come from? What erosion mechanisms are available? The wind, the acidic atmosphere?

Without plate tectonics or vulcanism, how the hell does the interior heat escape?

Maybe it doesn’t escape, she speculated wildly. Maybe the heat gets trapped, under a stable surface, rather than leaking out steadily, as on Earth… building up until it reaches a point where the lithosphere can’t contain it.

She thought it through. Periodically the surface would melt, suddenly, dramatically, all over the planet, as all that trapped heat escaped. The whole damn planet would resurface itself at once. Catastrophic vulcanism, maybe once every half billion years: hundreds of millions of years worth of geology, crammed into a few millennia.

She felt breathless. The scenario seemed outrageous. A hell of a hypothesis to spin out of one goddamn impact crater, Natalie.

But what other explanation could there be for that pristine wound on the Maxwell Montes?

She wondered if she should publish this. Maybe even radio home a paper, before they got to Mars.

Without corroborative proof, though? Peer reviews, to which she’d have to submit any formal write-up of the notion, weren’t often kind. I’d be laughed out of court. The dippy Space Lady from California…

The distribution of impact craters would be significant, she thought quickly. Corroborative, in fact. On Mars and the Moon there was a clustering of craters, in certain regions. On Mars, you had one young hemisphere, smooth and unblemished, the other heavily cratered, ancient. The same on the Moon, with its separation into the younger seas and the ancient highlands.

Here — if I’m right — it would be different. The craters must be uniformly distributed, right across the planet’s surface.

All we’d need is a reasonably detailed global map of the surface, and to do a simple crater count. Then we’d know.

But that map wasn’t available, and it wasn’t going to be. Not in her lifetime.

The radar mapping from this flyby would be the most detailed ever performed, but would be confined to a strip wrapped around one side of the planet. Any crater counts based on that were going to be tentative, at best.

She slammed her fist into a working surface. Stone glanced at her, surprised; she kept her eyes averted from his face.

Damn. We shouldn’t be here! A fifty-million-buck radar mapper in polar orbit would settle this. And they spent more than that on the backup john for this tin can of ours.

For fifteen years, most of NASA’s budget had been sucked into manned spaceflight. Unmanned projects had been subordinated to the needs of the Mars mission or cut altogether. They had lost a gravity-assist flight to Venus and Mercury, asteroid and comet encounters, Grand Tour probes to the outer planets. The Large Space Telescope, a big Earth-orbital eye, had also been axed.

Sure, humans were on the way to Mars. But humanity knew nothing of the rest of the Solar System it hadn’t known in 1957: the moons of Jupiter and Saturn remained points of light in the sky, the disks and rings of the giant worlds a telescopic blur.

And I’m cooperating with it, she thought sourly. After all my great moral pronouncements, I’ve finished up as guilty as the rest. Maybe, because I know better, more so.

The screen filled up with static.

The probe had imploded, crushed by the pressure.

York checked the time. It was just fifty-five seconds after landing.

Gershon pushed himself away from his console. “Well, there you have it. Venus is, officially, a shit-hole.”

And then, suddenly, the cabin grew perceptibly darker. She glanced up. As Ares sailed into the shadow of Venus, the last crescent sliver thinned out into a hoop of light — it was suddenly multicolored (I hope the cameras are getting this) — and then it faded and died away.

There was a hole in space, above Ares: it was the blackness of the cloud decks of Venus, empty, scorching, lifeless.

York returned to her station. “The TV mosaics have started,” she reported. “And the planetary strip photography. Everything’s nominal on the pallet.”

“Pericenter,” Stone said abruptly. “How about that. Mission elapsed time one seventy-one days, fourteen hours, twenty-four minutes.” He checked his displays. “It’s the eighth of September 1985, and here we are at Venus, guys. Distance to the surface three thousand, one hundred, fifty-five miles and change. We’ve come a hundred and seven million miles from Earth, and we’re within fifty miles of the nominal trajectory. Damn fine shooting.”

York looked up, through the little science viewport above her. Her eyes seemed to have grown dark-adapted, and she thought she could see something of the cloud tops, presumably illuminated by starlight. The cloud-world looked like a huge, milky, pregnant belly, protruding toward her.

There was a flash, somewhere beneath the clouds, like a lightbulb exploding under cotton wool.

She pushed up to the viewport and stared out, “Jesus Christ.”

“What?” Stone asked.

I recognize that, from Earth orbit. “I just saw lightning, under the clouds.”

Gershon looked at her. “That’s ridiculous. You get thunder and lightning on Earth from large particles, like ice crystals, being shipped around by updrafts. Venus has a layer of stew for air. There’s no evidence for updrafts or large particles. So how the hell can there be lightning?”

It happened again: a flash, roughly elliptical, that must have covered tens of square miles. For an instant she could see detailed structure in the gray clouds, layers and banks streaked out in the direction of rotation, illuminated from below.

“Don’t argue about it now,” Stone said calmly. “If it’s there, the TV cameras will pick it up. Hell, Ralph, your fat little probe might even have heard it.”

Gershon was right, of course, York thought. There was no direct evidence on Venus of any of the mechanisms which generated thunder and lightning storms on Earth. Then what? Vulcanism?

She returned to her station, troubled. A glimpse like this isn’t enough. It’s a whole planet out there. You need a year in orbit, a wider range of sensors, a hundred probes. With this swing-by, we’re going to come away with more questions than answers.

“Makes you think,” Gershon said. “We have a delta-vee of over thirteen thousand feet per second out of that. For free. That’s more than our two tanks of propellant gave us when we left Earth orbit! And now we’re traveling at more than twenty-five miles per second, our greatest velocity…”

“How about that,” Stone said. “Natalie, as of now you’re riding the fastest man-made object in history. Quite a ride, for someone who didn’t want to be a pilot anyhow.”

York wasn’t listening.

We’re only here to steal from you, she thought. Ares had no intrinsic interest in Venus itself. We only want your energy.

Light flooded the science station. She glanced up. A new crescent was forming, as Ares swept toward the dayside of the planet.

She couldn’t get that astonishing image out of her head: the single, pristine crater, punched in the top of a mountain range.

Wednesday, June 3, 1981

JK Lee thought the new Mars Excursion Module RFP was the roughest piece of crap he’d seen in many a long day.

An RFP, a Request For Proposals, was part of the standard procedure the federal government followed to award large contracts. This particular RFP had gone out to fourteen companies, including McDonnell, Boeing, Rockwell, Lockheed, and Martin. Response was requested in ten weeks. NASA would then evaluate the proposals, using a scoring system based on a prearranged formula, to weigh the technical approach, the personnel to be used by the bidder, the bidder’s corporate expertise in areas relevant to the bid, and so on. For a major contract an RFP was a major piece of work in its own right.

The document JK Lee held in his hand — short, badly photocopied, some of it even completed by hand — was horseshit.

He called Jack Morgan into his office.

Lee threw the MEM RFP at Morgan. “Look at this thing.”

Jack Morgan was compact, grizzled, with broad, strong hands. He sat down on the other side of Lee’s big metal desk.

After skimming the RFP, Morgan dumped the paper back on Lee’s desk.

Lee asked, “So what do you think?”

“I wouldn’t wipe my ass with it. I’ve never seen such a hasty, amateurish piece of work.”

Morgan was right, of course. The weight limits on the new MEM were fantastically tight, and the cost ceilings and time frames, to make a 1985 launch, were forbidding. The RFP had obviously been issued in a hell of a panic, as NASA, in the midst of its recovery from the Apollo-N thing, scrambled to put together a viable program for getting back on course to Mars.

Lee said, “I agree. This RFP is a piece of shit. I’m surprised they put it out. But still…”

“But still, what? JK — you’re not thinking of bidding.”

Lee sat back and put his feet up on his desk. “Why not?”

“Because we wouldn’t win. Because it would be a waste of money. I don’t even know why we were sent this thing.”

Lee thought he knew.

He happened to know that Ralph Gershon was on NASA’s evaluation panel for this bid. Since they’d met at that lousy Technical Liaison Group meeting over in Rockwell’s Brickyard, and gone for that drive in the Mojave, and Lee had bullshitted a rookie astronaut about a MEM shaped like Apollo — making it up as he went along, really — he and Gershon had stayed in touch.

He had Gershon to thank for this RFP invitation, he figured.

“Anyhow,” Morgan said, “Rockwell is going to get the MEM; everyone knows that.”

“Yeah, but suppose.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. Just suppose.”

“One small detail,” said Morgan. “We couldn’t build the thing, even if we won.”

“Why not?”

“Because our specialty is airframes and avionics. That’s what makes us a good subcontractor. If you’re bidding for a complete spacecraft, for Christ’s sake, you’re looking at everything: the tanks, the engines, the navigation and flight and guidance stuff, the heat shields, the life support—”

Lee had been waiting for that. “We’re okay on life support. We’ve got you.”

“Bullshit, JK,” Morgan said. “If you think I’m going to hang my hide out for you in front of Art Cane over a goddamn harebrained stunt like this, you’ve got another thing coming.” He stood, picked up the RFP, and threw it at Lee’s wastebasket. “If you’ve got any sense, you’ll leave it there.”

“Yeah. I will. Thanks, Jack.”

When Morgan had gone, Lee settled back in his big swivel chair, propped up his heels more comfortably on his desk, and lit up a cigarette. The big gunmetal desk was a JK trademark; it was a gift from the crew he’d worked with on the old B-70 project, and it had followed him ever since.

He thought about Jack Morgan.

Morgan had been an Air Force flight physician during the Korean War, and he’d gotten into aerospace medicine by accident. After the war, working for Rockwell — North American as it was then — he’d been on hand when a pilot had been forced to bail out of an experimental F-100, a supersonic jet. The air at that speed was like a wall. Morgan had been on the team of surgeons who had helped to pull the pilot through. It was only the third time in history a pilot had left an airplane traveling faster than sound. So Morgan became, de facto, a leader in the new field of aerospace medicine.

Since then Morgan had become one of Lee’s most trusted confidants — translate that as drinking partner — and he’d come along for the ride when Lee had busted out of Rockwell, back in 1967, disillusioned by the firing of Stormy Storms.

Lee valued Morgan’s advice. That didn’t mean he often took it, though.

After a quarter of an hour he leaned forward and pressed his intercom. “Bella, I want you to set me up some meetings.”

“Yes, sir, JK.”

He got out of his chair and dug the RFP out of the trash.

Three days later JK Lee bustled into the office of his boss, Arthur Cane, with four of his top people. Including Jack Morgan. They had armfuls of charts and graphs, all making up a hastily assembled presentation called: “Why We Should Bid For The MEM.”

Cane sat behind his big walnut desk, with his heavy English stone-cased fountain pen resting on top of the pile of paperwork before him.

Arthur Cane was over seventy, and a huge Bakelite hearing aid clung to one fleshy ear, and he didn’t have a hair on his head. But, after all these years, Lee could still see the look that came into the old man’s eye when he walked around the company lot, past the big, gleaming walls of the wind tunnel. Look at this. My very own wind tunnel.

Cane was an old-timer who’d worked in the Hughes Corporation before the war, and had then spent a number of years with the boffins at Langley. Cane loved working on advanced aircraft concepts — the push of knowledge into new areas, the thrill of making materials and systems perform beyond the limits of what seemed possible — but he’d gotten frustrated at Langley, with its budget compromises and in-house politics.

So, when Langley was subsumed into NASA, Cane had gotten out and formed his own company — Columbia Aviation — so that he could fund his own research and follow his nose, and sell the results back to NASA and the big players.

Which he’d done with success. But Cane had fiercely resisted growing Columbia too fast or too big, and he’d also defended his company astutely from the takeover bids that came along regularly from the big boys.

Well, today Lee was going to ask Cane for a couple of million bucks of company money, to bid for a contract so big it was bound to transform Columbia out of all recognition. So I damn well need to understand how Art ticks.

Lee opened the pitch. He kept his introduction flat, neutral, and brief. Time enough for tub-thumping later.

First up after Lee was Julie Lye, a smart young MIT graduate. Lee had pulled her out of her regular research to give the proposal some academic weight. Lye gave a brief, concise talk on what was known, from the various space probes, of Mars: the structure of the atmosphere, the properties of the surface. It was an introduction to the problems anyone would face in landing humans safely on Mars, keeping them alive, and bringing them home. Lye was trim, precise, reassuring.

Cane watched her with his face blank and his fingers steepled before him.

Next came Chaushui Xu, another smart kid, a Chinese-American who was taking a doctorate in aerodynamics based on his work at Columbia. Xu’s presentation was about the options for getting through the Martian atmosphere, and how Columbia’s expertise could be leveraged to solve the problems.

Cane’s eyes narrowed to slits, as if he was falling asleep.

Xu started to get nervous, and he fumbled a little. But Lee wasn’t perturbed; he knew that Cane valued brains above everything else, and these were some of the brightest kids in the company. Cane was listening.

Xu got to the end of his presentation. He sat down, fumbling again.

Bob Rowen took the floor. A good bit older than the others, Rowen had worked with Lee on the old B-70 project, and with Lee and Storms on the later X-15 development. Rowen outlined how Columbia could handle the challenges of the spacecraft’s avionics. Soon, it was pretty clear that a Columbia MEM would be the smartest spacecraft that ever flew.

Halfway through Rowen’s pitch, Cane very visibly turned off his hearing aid and started going through his paperwork.

Jack Morgan leaned over to Lee. “Christ,” he whispered. “What the hell do we do now?”

Lee grinned. “We keep briefing. He’s hooked, believe me. If he didn’t like us, we’d be out of here by now.”

The last pitch was Jack Morgan’s, and he described how a Columbia MEM would keep four humans alive on Mars for a month. Clearly irritated by Cane’s manner, Morgan rattled through his spiel as quickly as he could, and sat down with a clatter of show-cards.

Lee got to his feet again. He summed up everything that had been said, and made a little speech about the future, and then just waited.

He was aware of his team getting restless behind him, but Lee had been here many times before. He stood before Cane’s desk, unperturbed.

After a full two minutes, Cane put down his stone pen and leaned back in his chair. He turned his hearing aid back on. “JK, you’re a crazy man. I don’t know why I keep you on the payroll.”

Lee leaned forward and rested his clenched knuckles on the table surface. “Goddamn it, Art, we’re in the aerospace business. And this is the finest opportunity to achieve something new in our field since Apollo.”

Cane rubbed his eyes. “We’re an experimental shop. One of life’s subcontractors. Not a big player.”

“But it doesn’t have to stay that way,” Lee insisted. “And maybe it shouldn’t.”

“And we wouldn’t win anyway.” Cane picked up a piece of paper from the seemingly random pile on the desk top before him. “Look at this, now. Look who we’re up against. McDonnell, Martin, Convair, General Electric, Boeing. Not to mention Rockwell, who will win anyhow. Some of these guys have been involved in the MEM base-technology studies since ’72. They’ve got a jump on us of years, damn it. Years. Look at this. Martin has spent three million bucks of its own money, and it already has a detailed analysis that runs to four thousand pages. And we’re starting from scratch.”

Lee waved his hand. “Look, we can’t get into a blueprint duel with these guys. But remember how Bell fumbled on its bid for the X-15. Bell built the X-1 — the ship that Chuck Yaeger took through the sound barrier—”

“I know my aviation history, JK.”

“Sorry. Anyway, Bell should have won the X-15 contract. But what it proposed was an exotic spaceplane that was years ahead of its time. Rockwell won by giving NASA what it wanted, straight down the line, a simple brute force machine. And later, when the bidding for Apollo was going on, there were companies like Martin and Douglas who spent millions on all kinds of Buck Rogers stuff, lenticular shapes and lifting bodies and you name it. Rockwell won out by giving NASA precisely what it wanted and needed, which was a three-man Mercury capsule.”

“Yes, but, JK,” Cane said drily, “we’re bidding against Rockwell this time. And you’re saying you know better than Rockwell, and Martin with its team of three hundred engineers, and—”

“Yeah. Yeah, I do. Because those guys are going to be too busy defending the pet projects they’ve built up over the years to be able to see what the goddamn customer wants, Art.”

Cane thought about that. “You’re a smart guy, JK. Only you could turn the fact that we don’t know what the hell we’re doing into a strength. What’s more, I have the feeling that you actually believe it when you say it.”

“Sure I do. Look, we have a real opportunity here; we could achieve something unique. Columbia could go to Mars. Now: are you going to back me or not?”

Art Cane studied him through small, sharp, watery eyes.

“I guess I’ve got to allow you to bid. But if you spend more than two million bucks, I swear I’ll have your ass in a sling. Now get out of my office.” June 1981 U.S. NAVY ACCELERATION LABORATORY, JOHNSON, PENNSYLVANIA; LYNDON B. JOHNSON SPACE CENTER, HOUSTON

With a heavy whir, the Wheel started to rotate. It felt as if her chest was being pressed back to meet her backbone.

York, strapped into her couch, tried to comfort herself with the thought that according to pilots who’d actually made it into space, this fake experience was a lot worse than the real thing.

It was cold comfort.

She reached five Gs; she had to make a conscious effort to open up her ribs to suck in air. The cage rattled her back and forth, and from side to side — she felt like a pea in a cup, being whirled around on a rope — a real flight’s a lot smoother, Natalie…

She had a checklist she was supposed to work through, and she conscientiously pressed her dummy switches with gloved fingers.

A gray curtain started closing in on her vision, as if sweeping in around her head. It was the first symptom of blacking out. There was an array of colored lights on a panel in front of her so she could tell how far gone she was. When she relaxed, the gray curtain was prominent; when she tensed herself up the curtain would disappear. She tried to ignore the pain in her chest; but every time she raised her arms or moved her head she felt giddy. That was the Coriolis force — the sideways force associated with fast rotation.

York was in the middle of a series of simulated reentries from Earth orbit. This particular exercise, the worst of the set, was modeling a high, steep trajectory, as if her Command Module were cutting into the layers of Earth’s atmosphere too rapidly, and so undergoing terrific deceleration.

When she reached eight Gs, she found she couldn’t raise her arms anymore. She could only lie in the cage and endure it.

Then the gray curtain around her eyes was thickening, and it wouldn’t go away.

Of course it’s worse than a real mission. The damn doctors design it that way.

Her vision started to blur. She found it hard to read her instruments. Twelve Gs; far higher than anticipated during a real mission. Enough to flatten her eyeballs. Her head was being battered against the inside of her pressure-suit helmet. The lights of the lab beyond the cage whirled past the mock-up cabin’s small windows.

Fifteen Gs. She couldn’t breathe at all. She became sure she was going to black out. But I’m only halfway through the run. And the doctors were watching her, every twitch of her flattened face, on closed-circuit television.

At last the load began to drop away; the pressure eased from her chest, and she sucked in great gulps of air.

Of course, nobody would complain about being subjected to high-tech torture in instruments like the Wheel, or query the relevance of all these exercises to actual spaceflight, or — still worse — admit that he or she had any problems with the routines. Because if you complain, it’s bound to get back to Muldoon, and a note will go into whatever damn system he uses to select his crews, and you’ll never get off the ground.

And that was the name of the game at the moment. Joe Muldoon, in his new role as head of the Mars program, had also assumed unto himself the old, separate function of director of Flight Crew Operations.

It was Muldoon who assigned crews to missions. And everyone knew that Muldoon was in the middle of drawing up his crew rota for the first flights in the new program, leading up to the Mars mission itself; the only thing that mattered in life right now — the only thing — was getting a berth in that rota.

So York was going to have to put on a front when she came out of the cage.

How’d it go? You didn’t black out, did you?

Me? Come on. I felt like I was riding a little heavy on a T-38 afterburner, that’s all…

Sure.

When the doctors helped her to limp out of the cage, she found her back covered with ruptured capillaries, where the blood had been forced through her flesh, and she had a headache like the worst hangover in the world.

Piece of cake. Problems? Me? Come on.

While she was soaking in a tub, recovering, she got Muldoon’s message.

She — along with the rest of the astronaut pool — had to return to Houston by the next flight, for a meeting with Muldoon.

It was an unusual request, even unprecedented. But she knew what it had to signify.

She got out of her tub and began toweling herself off. She could feel her heart thumping a little faster, and it had nothing to do with acceleration.

Ares. It’s beginning.

By the time York arrived, the small conference room on the third floor of Building 4 was crowded. Joe Muldoon sat isolated at a small desk on a stage at the front of the room; he was riffling through Vu-graph foils.

York pushed through a forest of sports-shirted male astronauts and found a seat near the back of the room. A man who had flown around the Moon sat down next to her.

Muldoon must know, York thought, that he had every person in the room by the metaphorical balls.

One of the many things she speculated about regarding the mysterious crew selection process was whether men like Muldoon actually enjoyed wielding their power. Looking at Muldoon, his foot tapping nervously on the stage, his shoulders knots of tensed-up muscles, she somehow doubted it.

Which, as far as she was concerned, was all to his credit.

All around her there was a babble of conversation, lively, deep-throated, maybe a little nervous. There was a kind of competitive cheerfulness in the air. Like none of this really mattered. Oh, it’s only the crew rota for the most significant new program of flights in years. Hey, you catch the ball game Monday?

Then Muldoon got to his feet and stood with his hands on his hips, facing the astronaut corps. Blue-eyed, his sharp crew cut graying blond, he looked like a caricature of a drill sergeant, York thought.

The remnants of conversation died off immediately, leaving Muldoon facing rows of silent faces.

Muldoon spoke without a mike, without preamble, and his words carried to every person in the room. “The guys who are going to be the first to fly to Mars are right here, in this room.”

“You’ve heard by now we have a first cut of Ares mission profiles.”

He snapped on the Vu-graph projector, and an image was thrown up on a screen behind him; it was a simple list, typed and copied onto the foil. “We’ve got eight flights here, both manned and unmanned. We’ve defined six preliminary classes of mission, designated here A to F. They are mostly Earth-orbit tests of the system components. But they lead up to the final flight — mission class F — which will be the full Mars landing attempt.

“You can see from the foil that the two A-class missions will be unmanned shakedown tests of the new Saturn VB booster system, carrying boilerplate Apollos and MEMs. The B mission will be the first manned flight to Earth orbit — or maybe lunar orbit — to man-rate the Saturn VB. A live Apollo, obviously, but a boilerplate MEM again. The C mission is another unmanned shakedown, this time of a MEM test article in near-operational condition. The D mission will be the first manned MEM flight, to Earth orbit; this will be a long-duration mission to test for space soak.

“The two E-class missions will be further manned MEM tests; we’re intending to trial the new descent systems with lunar and/or Earth landings. Also in this period we expect to confirm orbital assembly procedures. Finally, the F mission will be the Mars flight itself, and it’s got to be ready to depart on March 21, 1985. Otherwise we wait two more years for the next opposition. The precise sequencing of the other missions, and their dates, is to be determined; we’re intending to take advantage of success…”

York was hardly listening. Nor was anyone else, she suspected. You’ve got just five manned flights up there.

Just five flights.

Muldoon whipped away the foil; it showed for a moment as a gray curl in the light of the Vu-graph lamp. Then, without ceremony, he put up the next slide.

It was a list of names.

Muldoon said, “There’s a mix of three-man and four-man missions here. I’m assigning you to four-man teams. If you have a three-man flight, the fourth will be assigned to support. I want to maintain a team structure; there will be no transfers between teams, if I can help it. It’s not appropriate, at this stage, to assign crews all the way through to the F mission. I’m sure all of you understand that. You have here, instead, the assignments for classes B, D, and the first E mission — that’s the first three manned flights — plus backups…”

Like everyone else York was craning forward, squinting to make out the poorly typed, badly projected list, her lips working as she read the names.

Three of Phil Stone’s crew — Adam Bleeker and a senior astronaut called Ted Curval — would take up the B mission, she saw, the first, risky, shakedown of the enhanced booster, the Saturn VB. An all-USAF crew. York could see the logic behind sending up test pilots for what was basically a flight test, but it set a tone for the whole program, right from the start: the wrong tone, a military, test-pilot tone. More dumb-fighter-jock bullshit, just as it’s always been.

But then the D mission, the long space soak flight, would have a full crew of four, including two mission specialists: Ralph Gershon, she read. And -

Natalie York.

She tried to read on. Phil Stone’s B-mission four-man crew made up the backup crew…

Natalie York.

She read her name over and over, unable to be sure if she was seeing it correctly, as if her eyeballs were still compressed by some invisible centrifuge, Jesus. That really is me, up there, in a prime crew. I’m going into orbit.

I’ll be the first American woman in space.

She was one of just three female astronauts in the corps, and the only one who’d been named on Muldoon’s chart.

All around the room there was an explosion of tension; there were whoops, a lot of handshakes, good-old-boy back pats. York was even the recipient of a few of those herself.

There were a lot of forced grins around her. She knew what lay behind the grins; she’d be thinking the same. I’ve got to smile, make like I’m really pleased for you. But it should have been me, you bastard, not you. Maybe it will be, if, pray God, you break your leg or otherwise fuck up somewhere down the line.

Muldoon held up his hands for silence. “I told you that beyond the first E mission I don’t think it’s appropriate yet to allocate crews. But I expect the selection to be made by the normal rotation system. Thanks for your attention; if you’ve no questions right now, you can come see me in my office…”

He’d said, The normal rotation system.

That hit York like an electric shock, burning away her brief euphoria.

She knew what that meant, and so did everybody else. She stared at the chart again, doing fast calculations. It means I will make it to Earth orbit. But that’s as far as I’ll get. Phil Stone is going to Mars. I’m not.

Nobody was going to get any more work out of the Astronaut Office that day; York guessed Joe Muldoon had planned the announcement around that.

She drove out to the Singing Wheel. The parking lot was packed with Corvettes, and inside she found Phil Stone, Ted Curval, and a few of their ex-military cronies, already working methodically through pitchers of Bud. Stone pulled up a stool for York beside him and gave her a dew-coated glass of beer.

“Congratulations,” he said warmly. “So you’re finally making it into space. America’s first spacewoman. Here’s to yah, Natalie. Come on, fellas—” He led a couple of toasts, in cold beer, which she endured. “So,” he said. “How are you feeling?”

“Mixed,” she said bluntly. “I’m flying, at last—”

“Hey, you done well. What is it, three years since you joined the Agency? Hell, we have guys who’ve waited three, four times as long as that to get a seat. I’m looking forward to working with you on the D mission. I mean that, Natalie.”

“Yeah.” She tried to smile.

Stone was watching her carefully. “Yeah, but—” he prompted.

“But, Phil, what I’m really thinking is that you’re the asshole who’s going to Mars, and I’m not.”

He laughed, mildly, and took another pull of his beer. “Come on, Natalie. Nobody knows who’s going to Mars. Not at this stage. If the preliminary flights don’t work out, maybe nobody will be going.”

“Give me a break. You heard what Muldoon said. ‘The normal rotation system.’ ”

The “rotation system” dated back to the earliest Mercury days, and it had been applied all the way through Apollo. Crews were assigned to missions in a leapfrog fashion. The rule was “back one, skip two, fly one,” and then start over. Thus, Phil Stone and the other members of his crew were backups for the D mission, York’s space soak flight. If the rotation worked out, they would skip two missions — the E missions — and fly the next, the F mission.

Which just happened to be the full Mars landing attempt.

Stone spread his hands on the table. “Rotation’s not a bad system, Natalie. At least it’s orderly. I mean, Muldoon has a pig of a job. Everyone wants to be on every crew—”

“Oh, bullshit, Phil. The rotation stuff isn’t a goddamn machine. It’s not hard to work it so you get the crew patterns you want.”

“Look, Natalie, anything but a rotation system is an insult to the astronauts and destructive to morale. That’s what I think, and I reckon it’s what old Joe thinks, too. Every crew should be able to fly every flight. It’s like handling a squadron of fighter pilots. You’ve got a mission to do and so many flights to fly and so many pilots to fly them…”

“But this isn’t a goddamn fighter squadron. We ought to be handpicking crews for the needs of the mission.”

“And you think you should be handpicked for the F mission?”

She sipped her beer, her irritation increasing. “It’s foolish not to pick the very best for your key missions.”

He eyed her, amused. “So now you’re saying I’m not the best?”

“That is not the point, damn it, Phil, and stop patronizing me…”

But then Adam Bleeker came in — one of Phil’s crew, another probable Mars-walker — and there was another round of general backslapping and joshing.

For a while York joined in the wider conversation.

Her thoughts drifted back, ignobly, to her selection gripes.

She drank a little more beer; it was warming up, and tasted sour. She put the glass down and wiped her damp palm on a napkin.

She left the bar. She suspected half the guys were so far gone already they didn’t even notice her leaving.

She was going to have to get this out of her system.

Without stopping to think about how smart it was, she drove straight back to JSC and stormed into Muldoon’s office.

Muldoon was working through a pile of paper. “Natalie. You want a coffee? I can send Mabel to—”

“No.” She realized, suddenly, she was trembling; it seemed to be coming from somewhere deep down inside her. From three years of frustration inside NASA. From Ben’s wasteful, needless death. From the fact that I’m thirty-three years old, and I’ve thrown away my academic career just so I can get to spend months in low Earth orbit, watching MEM components slowly degrade.

Or, she thought, maybe they’re all correct. Maybe I’m just a goddamn hysterical woman after all.

Muldoon was watching her sharply. “I thought you’d be pleased at getting a seat in one of the prime crews.”

“I am.”

He sat back and sighed. “But you want to go to Mars. And you can figure out the implications of the crew rotations as well as anyone else.”

“Damn it, Joe, I’m far and away the best mission specialist for Mars surface operations. You know that; I should be in line for the F mission, so I can get out there and do what I’m having to teach everyone else!”

He steepled his fingers. “All I can tell you is, we’re going to follow the rotation system. If it works out that Phil Stone takes his crew to Mars, then so be it; and if things get messed up or delayed for some reason, and your crew gets back in line — through the normal rotation system — then you’ll have your chance. And maybe, if there’s a second or third landing—”

“You know damn well there will be no second landing. We’re putting everything we’ve got into this one shot. Square with me, Joe. I should be on the damn flight. And if I was a man, another Jack Schmitt, I’d be inked in already as a no-brain choice. But I’m a woman, and that’s why I’m not going.”

“Natalie, it’s not like that.”

“Come on, Joe. Don’t bullshit me, for once.”

He folded his fingers together. “No bullshit?”

“No bullshit.”

“I’m not going to pretend that the gender thing doesn’t cause us problems, Natalie.”

The gender thing. “What problems, for Christ’s sake? That I won’t be able to fit my flight helmet over my bouffant hairstyle? Joe, it’s 1981—”

“Give me a break, Natalie. Look, it might have been different if we’d ever built the shuttle, if we had big roomy ships to carry seven or eight to orbit, if access to space had ever become routine. Then we would be flying women every month. But we don’t. So you work it out. If you have a mixed crew, you need extra facilities. Personal hygiene. Privacy. It’s all avoidable payload weight. And that’s not a good thing when you’re planning an eighteen-month deep-space mission.”

“So take an all-female crew. No need for separate showers then; right?…”

Muldoon was starting to look exasperated. “Look, Natalie, you know you’re not going to win this argument. And I’m not even the right guy to be arguing with.”

“Then who is?”

He shrugged. “American culture. The world. Hell, I don’t know; I’m just the poor schmo who recommended you for the D mission.” He studied her with, she thought, a little more sympathy. “Natalie, take my advice. The main thing is to be in the rotation. That’s all that matters; that, and doing your damnedest at the job. And I know you’ll do that. We need you in the program, Natalie. You’re an element we’ve missed before. We think a lot of you. You’d be surprised. And I noticed the work you did at capcom during Apollo-N.”

She shrugged. It wasn’t an assignment from which she wanted to gain any credit. “You need me in the program, but not necessarily on a ship to Mars.”

He shuffled the papers on his desk, the typed-out lists of crew assignments. “Maybe that’s true. Maybe you’d actually be more use to the program, overall — to the science goals — right here, in Houston, than stumbling around on Mars itself. Have you thought about that? Natalie, you’re complaining about flying the space soak mission. Hell, I understand that; in your shoes, I’d be up here beefing, too. But all I get to fly these days is this damn desk.” He looked wistful. Almost desperate. “Two hours on the Moon just wasn’t enough, for one lifetime.”

She couldn’t help saying it. “Two hours too many for your wife, maybe.”

He threw the papers down on the desk. “Goddamn you, York, why do you have to be so abrasive?”

“I’m sorry, Joe.” She shook her head. “I guess I’m just—”

“Listen to me,” he said bluntly. “Who the hell knows what’s going to happen? You just keep on doing what you’re doing. Do whatever that bunch of assholes out there does, but do it twice as often, and twice as good. And offer me things they can’t; like your geology training. Keep yourself in the frame. Make yourself indispensable. Who knows where we’ll all be, by 1986?”

For that brief moment she felt oddly cheered — almost confident. He’s right. I’ve gotten this far; maybe I can get through the final barriers. I can do this.

But Muldoon’s eyes started straying to the heaps of papers on his desk.

York was shut out again: she was out in the dark, with her mission prospects — her career, her life — reduced once more to being a matter of little more than guesswork and hope. Her brief warm stab of self-confidence faded as quickly as it had come.

She got out of Muldoon’s office.

June 1981

When he got up in the morning Lee liked to hit the ground rolling. Jennine fixed him two cups of coffee, both heavily sugared, so the second one had time to cool and he could down it in a gulp, on the run to the black T-bird in the yard.

His first task was to find somewhere to work on the proposal. He spent a day roaming around the plant.

Columbia’s plant was a bunch of decrepit old factory buildings, with the big wind tunnel snaking through the complex. The site worked pretty well for the small-run experimental work that was the norm for CA’s workload. But it was already bursting at the seams.

What Lee needed was office space.

Finally his eye settled on the canteen; it was the only open space big enough to take a hundred people or more.

“This is it. Bella, I want you to get rid of the serving hatches and the goddamn trestle tables. I’ve got drafting tables and desks coming in here.” He squinted upward. “Not enough light. Get some skylights knocked through. And check the power; we’ll need a secured supply for the computers.”

“Yes, sir, JK. But—”

“What is it with you and these buts?”

“Where will we eat?”

Lee waved a hand. “The whole of the goddamn U.S. is full of McDonald’s. Nobody will starve.”

“Yes, sir, JK.”

He looked around the canteen, with its battered serving bays and scuffed floor and stink of tomato sauce. It was the pits. And it was going to be a tough regime in here. He’d already issued a notice that for the duration of the proposal development he’d expect everybody to be at their desks by 7 A.M. and to work through until at least 9 P.M. And the work here would just be the center of a huge effort right across the company, with teams of engineers in laboratories and wind tunnels generating data to support the thesis that Columbia was going to be able to do this, to build this unprecedented machine…

But this was the focus: it was in this big, dirty room, he felt with a growing excitement, that the final proposal for the Mars Excursion Module would be drawn up.

He started scouring the organization, taking out whoever he thought was going to be of use to him in constructing the bid. When anybody howled, he just waved Cane’s name at them, and that was usually enough. That was Art Cane’s culture, Lee reflected. He might have doubts about the wisdom of this bid, but once they had gotten into it, it was a corporate effort, all or nothing, and Cane would expect the whole organization to support Lee as best it could.

During that first week Art Cane spent some time trying to assemble corporate partners: potential subcontractors who would support Columbia’s bid. A coalition of subcontractors was, by traditional wisdom, a major feature of any serious bid for a contract like this.

At Cane’s recommendation, Lee and Bob Rowen flew out to Culver City, the headquarters of Hughes Aircraft. That was where Cane had cut his teeth, and he still had some contacts out there. Cane arranged an appointment for them with a vice president called Gene Tyson. As it happened Hughes hadn’t been signed up by anybody else in the MEM bidding process yet. And Hughes was skilled in control and stabilization, so the company would be good to have on Columbia’s side.

But when Lee and Rowen got to Culver City, Tyson kept them waiting for three hours, and when they’d given their pitch, Tyson and his aides laughed them out of the office.

Gene Tyson was a fat, soft-looking man who reeked of cologne and tobacco, and he irritated the hell out of Lee. He put a fatherly arm around Lee’s shoulders as he walked him to the door. “Take my advice,” Tyson said. “Art Cane is a great old guy. But, JK, you’re wasting your time. Not to mention mine. You have no chance of winning this contract, absolutely none. You’re just a bunch of lab boys.”

Lee went back to Newport steaming — and worried. If Hughes wouldn’t take their bid seriously, who the hell would? And not having a partner could leave a big hole right in the middle of the bid.

But the more he thought about it, the more he began to see that he might be able to turn this, too, from a weakness to a strength.

“Look at it this way,” he said to Art Cane. “Fuck ’em. Fuck Hughes. And the rest. We’ll go it alone. We’ll go to NASA as a coach, not a team. That’s what they need. Once you have Columbia as the coach, you can put anybody you like on the goddamn team. Let the customer make the choice when they’re ready; we don’t need to lock them in now.”

Art Cane shook his head. “You’re a crazy man, JK. Get out of my office.”

When the canteen had been converted, Lee set himself up at a desk on a stage. He appointed team leaders, his senior and smarter people like Bob Rowen and Julie Lye. But all the time he himself was going to hover over the whole thing like a hawk, looking out for trouble.

Rapidly, the concept of the Columbia MEM began to emerge.

Lee wanted something that would look, to the NASA evaluation panel, easy to build. So the MEM started out pretty much as Lee had outlined it that night he’d driven out to the Mojave with Ralph Gershon. You had your basic Apollo Command Module shape, a squat cone thirty feet tall, with a heat shield all of thirty feet across at the base. And his teams of engineers focused on that concept. Inside the conical, heat-resistant shell, the MEM would have two stages, like Apollo’s Lunar Module: a descent stage for landing on Mars, which would later serve as a platform for an upper ascent stage, which would return to orbit.

Lee laid down rules about how he wanted as little innovation as possible. “You can start being creative when we’ve won the goddamn bid, not before.” For instance, he didn’t want to see any changes to the overall Command Module shape. The angle of that cone had been determined years back by wind-tunnel tests at NASA’s own Ames Laboratory, and all the experience of Apollo had proved out that analysis since then, and he wasn’t about to let anyone in his organization challenge it.

In Lee’s first sketch, the MEM would land on five fold-down landing legs. Five was chosen in case one of the legs broke off on landing; the MEM could stay stable even if that happened. The descent-stage engine, the rocket which would carry the MEM down the last few miles to the surface of Mars, stuck out of the base of the MEM, with its fuel tanks clustered close by.

Inside the fat base of the descent stage there was a doughnut-shaped compartment. Some of this was taken up with fuel tanks, but the rest was given over to payload. Half of the doughnut was a surface shelter, a tightly curving chamber that would serve as crew quarters and laboratory for the crew while it was on the Martian surface. Then there were surface operations bays, with room for airlocks and equipment, and space for a small Mars Rover.

Sitting on top of the descent stage was a smaller cone, the cabin of the ascent stage. This was a bubble of glass, to give all-round visibility. The crew would ride down to the surface and back to orbit again inside this cabin. It held room enough, just, for four guys, lying side by side in acceleration couches. But you could fold the couches out of the way, so the pilots could stand up to control the final descent.

The rest of the ascent stage was a cylinder, impaled down the spine of the MEM’s descent stage. The ascent stage, rising from Mars, would look like a Kojak lollipop, Lee thought whimsically, a glass lollipop on a stick of propellant tanks and rocket engine, leaving behind a truncated half cone: the descent stage, scorched and decapitated.

That was the skeleton of the thing, anyhow, and the teams soon began to put on some flesh, mapping out the subsystems.

ECLSS, the environment control and life-support system: Jack Morgan’s baby, with molecular sieves to scrub out carbon dioxide, and filtration for water recycling. Electrical supply fuel cells for the descent stage, separate, smaller cells for the ascent. Guidance and control there would be inertial guidance, and rendezvous and landing radar systems, and attitude rocket clusters, and gimbaled main engines to allow thrust vector control. Communications: the engineering models of the ascent stage started to sprout antennae, S-band for TV links to the orbiter and voice to Earth, and VHF for voice links to the orbiter and EVA to MEM links…

Lee had his people borrow where they could. Details in the subsystems, for example: they put in power cells that had already served in the Apollo Lunar Module, an L-band rendezvous radar from Gemini. As for a propellant, should they use the nitrogen tetroxide/Aerojet 50 Grumman had used on the LM? That was hypergolic — meaning it would ignite on contact with its oxidizer, with no need for an ignition system — but it was low-performance, corrosive, not to mention toxic. Not the stuff you’d want to have to store for a year or more as you hauled your MEM out to Mars. There had been some studies of fluorine-based compounds, but they hadn’t been taken too far because fluorine was such difficult stuff to work with. What, then?…

As the teams worked, the design quickly evolved away from the first baseline sketched out by Lee.

That bubble of glass on top of the ascent stage, for instance. It would have given the crew an uninterrupted horizontal field of view, and 135 degrees vertically: it would have been like riding some superb helicopter down to the surface of Mars. But if the bubble was made of laminated glass, it would be too heavy; and lighter alternatives like Plexiglas would discolor and weaken under the intense, ultraviolet-laden Mars sunlight. And, as Jack Morgan was quick to point out, all that glass would overload the environment control system. So the beautiful bubble was discarded, in favor of small, LM-like, downward-slanting pilot’s windows.

And the five-landing-leg geometry was soon upped to six, to provide the broad-based craft with better landing dynamics. To guard against excessive forces on landing, the legs incorporated a crushable aluminum honeycomb, so they would compress, absorbing the force of impact…

It was an exciting, invigorating time.

Lee didn’t spare himself; he charged through the organization, checking, cross-fertilizing, collating, cutting through a lot of what he judged to be sterile crap.

Sometimes he’d realize he couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept, or eaten. Sometimes, in fact, it was only a pressure in his bladder or bowels that made him attend to the human side of his needs at all.

Every day he went home in the dark and left in the dark.

It was incredible. He never even saw the apple blossom in his yard. He hardly saw his kids — two boys, Bert and Gerry, both high-school age — for more than minutes at a time.

He had a little more time with Jennine, but most of that he spent eating, or — if he was lucky and could relax — sleeping lightly.

He worried a little about Jennine, when he thought about it. She’d grown used to the stupid hours he worked, over the years. Although she knew and cared nothing about airplanes, Jennine seemed to understand that these bursts of activity were like brushfпres; they wouldn’t last forever, and then she would have him back. For a while, anyhow.

But she seemed a little more strained, this time, although he couldn’t quite figure out why.

They were both older, he supposed. That was one thing. And the boys were sure a handful.

But the MEM pressure would go away. She would get him back.

…But what if we win?

Then it isn’t going to go away. Is it, JK? Not until 1986, and that ascent stage lifts off Mars, and it’s all over.

But always, the work came crowding back in on him again, shutting out his consideration of anything else.

He kept two supreme goals in mind. One was meeting the proposal submission deadline, and the other was keeping the MEM’s overall weight within the design limits specified in the RFP.

For the first, he had Bella print up a kind of calendar, which he pinned up around the plant and had checked off every day. FORTY-SIX DAYS TO SUBMISSION DAY! AND ROCKWELL IS STILL AHEAD OF US! Lee was proud of this. “It’s kind of like the calendar they had in When Worlds Collide. Do you remember that, Bella? When they were building a rocket ship to get off the Earth?…”

“Yes, sir, JK.”

The weight problem was more difficult to crack.

Every design definition Lee had ever worked on was the same; each subsystem inevitably grew in scope and complexity as the engineers got into the detail. So Lee started to keep a list of best-guess weights for all the various components and subsystems.

Every morning Lee would call his senior people into his own office, into a progress meeting he called a hot griddle. It was something he knew they used at the Strategic Air Command. Seven-forty-five smart and then the doors were locked; the chairs were pushed against the wall, and there was no coffee, so you couldn’t sit down and take it easy. Then, everybody would talk through their top problem for the day and how they would resolve it.

At the griddle sessions Lee handed out weight summaries, showing how far the current aggregate design was over the limit. He was reluctant to start setting weight limits for subsystems — he wanted to find the best trade-off across the whole spacecraft — but he pushed his people every day to figure out what they could do to bring down their net weight, to give the rest a little slack.

Still, the daily totals weren’t coming down fast enough, and the weight issue soon emerged as his major worry.

It wouldn’t matter if, at submission time, they were a little heavy, a little above the target. If they won, there would be plenty of detailed design work to follow. But just then it seemed as if the Columbia MEM wouldn’t even be in the right ballpark.

The weight limits had been set by NASA to fit into their new all-chemical, gravity-assist system configuration. And the limits were thereby much tighter than they had been in previous nuclear-option baselines.

Lee started to worry, privately, that they might be too tight to be feasible.

The issue was brought to a head, at last, by Lee’s closest ally.

Jack Morgan took Lee into a corner of the office, away from the hubbub. Morgan’s face was long, uncharacteristically serious. “JK, I think we’re in trouble.”

Morgan took Lee through the figures he had been establishing for the MEM environment and life-support systems. He had guideline figures, based on Apollo, for what it would take to support one human being for one day on Mars: food, clothing, air supply, waste disposal, living space, EVA consumables.

“Look at this. And this.” Morgan took Lee through a whole series of options, where he had tried to juggle elements of his ECLSS weight budget against each other. “There’s no way I can support four men for thirty days on the surface. That’s one hundred and twenty man-days. It just doesn’t fit. We’re an order of magnitude out, here.”

Lee felt a bubble of panic swell up in his throat. It really looked as if they weren’t going to be able to close the design.

Suddenly he was aware of the lack of sleep, all the meals he’d skipped, the adrenaline he’d been burning off; he felt ill, light-headed.

Come on, JK. Get a grip on yourself. If it’s a problem for you, so it is for Rockwell, and McDonnell, and all those other assholes. Look for a way to turn this to our advantage.

Morgan was looking at him with concern. “Are you okay, JK? You look kind of—”

“Don’t turn into a doctor on me now, Jack.”

“Buddy, the way you eat yourself up, you’re going to need a doctor someday. I mean it, JK.”

Lee railroaded on. “Listen, Jack. You can’t deliver a hundred and twenty man-days on Mars. Fine. What can you give me?”

Morgan thought about it. “Maybe 75 percent of that. Say ninety days.”

Shit. Worse than I thought. “So we have our four guys down there for, what, twenty-three days?”

“You’ve just lost a quarter of your surface stay time, JK. I can’t believe that’s going to be acceptable.”

Lee shook his head. “No, it isn’t. But there has to be another way.” He thought about it. “Ninety man-days, huh. Well, what if we only take three guys? Then we can still stay the full thirty.”

Morgan shook his head immediately. “That’s impossible. The RFP sets it out. Having spent all that money to get their guys onto Mars, NASA wants to get twenty-four-hour EVA cycles going. They want two guys out on the Martian surface for as much of each day as possible. They want a ‘red’ and ‘blue’ team shift system—”

“Well, the ‘red’ team can take a flying fuck at the ‘blue’ team,” Lee snapped back. “This won’t be the only place where that shitty RFP is wrong.”

His mind was starting to race.

Three guys instead of four. If it could be done, he started to figure, there would be add-on savings throughout the rest of the program, beyond the MEM definition itself. For example, one quarter less life support would have to be hauled all the way out to Mars and back. And all at no, or minimal, cost to the value of the surface activities.

That’s what he would have to demonstrate, anyhow.

If he could achieve this, he realized with growing excitement, it would be a hell of a strong plank in the bid.

All Lee’s brief feelings of panic were gone; he felt strong, fit, eager, pumping with adrenaline again. He grabbed Morgan’s arm. “So all we have to do is figure out some way of getting three guys to maintain a twenty-four hour EVA shift pattern. Listen, Jack. This is what I want you to do.”

It was hardly a simulator: just a room within a room, fenced off from one of the Columbia site’s larger lab areas. They fitted it out with a rudimentary life-support system — food and water — but the room was left open to the outside air.

Morgan paid three students from a paramedic class he taught at Caltech to come and live in there for a month.

Every day the students went through a mocked-up EVA: they put on dummy space suits and backpacks loaded with lead weights, and they moved about simulating Mars surface experiments. And then the students would climb up a little ladder to simulate returning to the MEM, and vacuum each other clean of talcum-powder Mars dust.

The students experimented with work and sleep patterns, trying to find ways to optimize their surface shifts.

The whole setup was crude, but effective; at the end of the month the students were a little bored, and definitely exhausted; but they were alert, functional, and actually fitter than when they had gone into the mock-up. Exhaustion was fine, anyhow; the real crew was going to have the whole return leg of the trip, seven months of it, to sleep it off.

Morgan wrote this up for Lee, and Lee was delighted with the results. Not only was his three-man idea going to hit that evaluation board between the eyes, he was going to be able to throw at them detailed proposals about managing the Mars surface time: suggestions for shift rotas, the need to establish work and sleep patterns before arrival at Mars, how to schedule suitable rest periods, and all the rest.

Problems and opportunities. He had a mood of gathering momentum, of approaching triumph.

As the clock wound down to the deadline day, Lee started sitting in on the rehearsals as each group put together its own piece of the pitch.

He began to figure out how the final thing would come together. There would be him — and Xu, Rowen, Lye, Morgan, and a few others — on a stage in some kind of hotel or convention center, in front of a mass of NASA engineers, and they would have sixty minutes to make their case.

But the more he listened to the draft pieces of the pitch, the more he understood that it wasn’t going to make sense to have five or six or seven presenters in that time. One man was going to have to do the whole show, from beginning to end, on every aspect of the proposal, every damned subsystem, with the others sitting there in support to help field questions.

So after that, he started taking material home — draft scripts, documents, notes — and set himself to memorize every piece of the system he was proposing. He even took the stuff to bed, and sat there propped up against his pillows, with his reading light and his glasses.

Jennine would wake up, and mumble something, and he’d be shocked to find it was four in the morning, or some such godforsaken time. An hour until he had to get out and start all over again.

But he was full of energy. He couldn’t believe it. Day after day. He felt like he could fly.

Eventually he had a cot brought into his office. It seemed to him he saved a lot of time that way.

Lee received a call from Art Cane.

“I’m getting kind of worried about what you guys are costing me. If we don’t win the bid, I’m looking at one hell of a write-off. How’s my two million budget looking, by the way?”

“Fine, Art.”

Actually, that was a barefaced lie. Lee was well aware that he had long since gone beyond that two million limit, and in fact he was headed for three or four times that limit.

One of Art’s more endearing characteristics, from Lee’s point of view, was his distrust of computerized accounting systems. He insisted on inspecting the figures every month, analyzed, summarized, and interpreted more or less by hand. Just as when he’d started the company.

So Cane was always at least a month behind the action. And by a little manipulation, Lee could juggle his billings and payments to pick up another thirty days. So he had two months’ grace in all.

That was all Lee needed. In two months, the bid would be in. He figured that if he won the bid, nobody would care how much it cost. And if he lost, Art would have his hide anyway. Either way the important thing was to have the resources he needed at hand, at that moment.

Cane said, “I just got a call from McDonnell Douglas.”

“Oh, yeah? And?”

“It wants to throw in with us on a joint effort to bid on the MEM. How about that, JK? Now, I want you to think about this…”

Cane went on about the details.

Lee thought hard.

If you were objective about it, a call like this from McDonnell was second only in value to a similar call from Rockwell itself. McDonnell had built Mercury and Gemini, the first two generations of manned American spacecraft, and the third stage of the Saturn V. So it would be a good, credible partner. And Lee knew that there were plenty of muttering voices within NASA who had never been happy about Rockwell’s work on Apollo, and had grumbled ever since. That community inside NASA, and Lee was sure there would be some of them on the evaluation board, would welcome a return to the good old days of partnership with McDonnell.

Every which way you looked at this, it made sense.

Lee cut through Cane. “Not interested,” he said.

Art Cane was silent for a long minute.

“Now, look here,” Cane said at last. “You know I’m not going to jam this deal down your throat. That’s not my style, JK.”

“I know that, sir. But this is our bid. Fuck McDonnell. Maybe we’ll hire them as a subcontractor later. Who needs them?”

“JK—”

“I need you to back me, Art.”

There was a bass rumble on the phone line. “Hell, Lee, you know I’ll do that. Just don’t let me down.”

“You know I won’t, Art. Now get off the line, I’ve got work to do.”

Monday, July 6, 1981

Natalie York and Ralph Gershon sat side by side in the Mars Excursion Module Biconic Simulator Number Three. York was hot and cramped in her closed pressure suit. Inside, the MEM cabin was realistically mocked up; from the outside, this motion-based simulator was a big, ungainly piece of engineering, with heavy white-painted hydraulics completely enclosing the cabin.

“Okay, Ralph, we’ll give it to you at OMS burn plus one,” the SimSup said.

“Roger,” Gershon said tersely.

Around York, electroluminescent readouts and gauges and dials came to life, the needles flickering and the CRT tubes blinking awake, to register engine temperature and chamber pressure and fuel and oxidizer levels.

Gershon sat to the left, in the pilot’s seat, and York to the right. The cabin’s windows, at eye level around them, were big and square, so that it was like sitting in a small, cramped airliner cockpit. The instruments’ soft green glow suffused the cabin; it was, York thought, like being immersed in water.

There was a smear of crimson beyond York’s window. She saw a simulated Martian landscape, salmon pink and softly curving, come rearing up beyond the glass. The landscape was a slice of painted plaster of paris over which, somewhere, a light television camera was panning under computer control. The sky was black, starless, probably just a backdrop. But there were splashes of orange light: representations of the tenuous upper atmosphere of Mars, reflecting the glow of the biconic’s RCS thrusters.

“Take it that the burn was good.” the SimSup said. “Your residuals are three-tenths, and your pitch maneuver was successful.”

“Okay,” Gershon said.

Gauges flickered and acronyms scrolled across the CRTs before York.

“We’ve dumped our forward RCS propellants,” she told Gershon. “OMS and RCS post-ignition reconfiguration complete. Auxiliary power unit start. We have two out of three APUs running, and that’s nominal.”

Gershon flicked at a gauge. “SimSup, I’ve got a poor correlation with the attitude reading on the inertial ball. I’m going to center the readings manually. You got a problem with that?”

“No problem, Ralph. We agree with that.”

“Entry interface,” York said. “We’re in the atmosphere, Ralph. A hundred and fifty-eight thousand feet. Nose up at forty degrees.”

Gershon said, “Let’s see what they’ve got to throw at us this time.”

“You’re getting paranoid, Ralph.”

“Tell me about it.”

Then the plaster of paris was scrolling past the window more rapidly.

“Frictional heating,” York said. She watched sensors telling her how the temperature was climbing over the lower surface of the craft.

The biconic, based on Rockwell’s current draft design, was the most advanced MEM configuration being studied by the various contractors. The four-man craft would fall into the atmosphere belly-first, and then fly down like an airplane, so the whole of the underside was tiled with heat-resistant panels, forming a heat sink which absorbed the energy of the sparse Martian air molecules.

“Get ready for your comms blackout,” the SimSup said drily. “See you on the other side, guys.”

“I hope so,” Gershon said.

Beyond York’s window a pinkish plasma glow built up.

Gershon grunted. “What a fake.”

“I kind of like it,” York murmured.

York and Gershon began to monitor the systems displays before them, checking them against checklist cards taped to the consoles. Then the work of the sim became routine, almost dull…

Except that, York knew, if this was for real, she would be feeling the first tug of deceleration in earnest, as the craft dug deeper into the Martian atmosphere. She could feel her pulse rising, beating at her throat. This simulation, designed more for engineers than astronauts, was crude: not even motion-based, it was a shadow play, mimicking life. But there was just enough in the sim, inside this static cabin, for it to catch at her imagination, to give her a taste of how it would be, really, to fly down from orbit to the surface of Mars.

She wished — suddenly, childishly — that this was for real. That she could somehow fast-forward through the years of training and uncertainty that lay ahead.

Oh, I want this. So badly.

Even if I have to get there with Ralph Gershon, she thought.

“A hundred and thirty thousand feet. Coming up to aerosurface control initiation.”

“Yo,” Gershon said. He began to work his stick and pedals.

The biconic was deep enough into the atmosphere, on this computer-generated dive, for the pressure to have rendered the forward attitude rockets useless. And the atmosphere would be almost thick enough for the biconic’s control surfaces to start biting into the air.

York realized that the biconic was a peculiar, unprecedented mix of spacecraft and aircraft.

“Dynamic pressure twenty pounds per square foot,” York said. “One hundred twenty thousand feet.”

“I got it,” Gershon said.

Then the last thrusters were switched off. The craft had become a glider, with only its aerodynamic control surfaces to maintain its attitude and trajectory.

The glow outside her window reached its peak, racking up through pink and yellow and blue-white. Actually the colors changed in visible clunks, as the computer changed over its filters.

Gershon worked at his stick and pedals, the biconic’s oddly old-fashioned aerodynamic control system. “The response seems sluggish to me.” He pushed the stick forward. “I’m trying to descend. The elevons have gone down, the rear has come up. I don’t feel a damn thing. Fucker. There we go. I overshot. Okay, bringing her up. Arresting my sink rate. Back on the stick. Elevons up, lift dumped, back end dropping down. Shit. Where’s the response… Oh. Here it is. I’m wallowing like a hog in mud.”

The biconic would be slow, clumsy, heavy to handle by comparison with most Earthbound aircraft, York knew. Flying the biconic was more like guiding a boat; you just had to rearrange your control surfaces and wait while the new configuration bit at the stream of thin air, and slowly changed your momentum.

“One hundred and three thousand feet,” she called.

“Here we go,” Gershon said. “First roll reversal coming up.”

In the electronic imagination of the computer, the biconic banked through eighty degrees to the right. York watched the tilting landscape; the plaster of paris appeared to quiver as some fault in the TV camera’s control mechanism made the tracking shudder.

The biconic was designed to go through a series of S-shaped turns in the upper atmosphere of Mars. The flight path was a question of budgeting: the craft had to shed all of its orbital energy by the time it reached its landing site, but on the other hand, at any point in its trajectory, the craft needed to maintain enough energy to reach that landing point. So the craft had to manage the lift generated by its biconic shape, together with the kinetic energy of its descent, to shed heat and reach its target…

“Overshot,” Gershon muttered. “Eighty-five degrees. Eighty-six. Banking left to compensate. Come on, SimSup. Is this where you hit us? Banking left. Okay. Here we go. Okay. First roll complete. Here we go. Second roll reversal.” Gershon’s voice was tense, his movements fast, mechanical.

He takes these games too seriously, York thought.

At this point the biconic would be traveling at many times the local speed of sound. Still glowing, it would streak across the Martian sky, scrawling a wake of vapor across unmarked skies, shedding great crashing waves of acoustical energy across the dead, empty landscape, a land that had lain undisturbed for half a billion years.

This sure would be a spectacular phase of the mission, she conceded. A pilot’s dream.

Maybe, York thought wistfully, the aborted Space Shuttle might have felt something like this. To fly down from orbit in huge graceful curves over the high desert would have been a hell of a difference from falling into the sea ass-backwards in an Apollo. We lost a lot of beauty when we killed the Shuttle.

“Sixty-one thousand feet,” she read off.

“Rager. Reducing air brake to 65 percent. Take air data.”

“Rog.” York flicked a dummy switch. On a real biconic a series of pitot-static probes would thrust out of the craft’s surface then to confirm measurements of dynamic pressure and airspeed.

“Looking good,” Gershon said. “Coming out of the third roll.” He grinned at York. “Hey, maybe we’re going to get through this fucker.”

“Maybe. Fifty thousand feet.”

“Banking for fourth roll.”

The plaster of paris plain, unobscured by the fake plasma glow, tipped over again.

“Okay, coming out of the roll. Coming out… come on, baby… coming out of the roll… Shit.”

Here it comes, York thought. Every sim, they were out to get you somewhere. Her stomach contracted.

The attitude indicator was tumbling. Gershon worked his controls and snapped through emergency checklists. “The aerosurfaces are biting. But just not enough. Fuck. What’s going on?”

York glanced out of her window. Gershon couldn’t get out of the roll, and the landscape had tilted up through more than ninety degrees; the biconic, in the imagination of the computer, had tipped over almost completely.

“Recommend you abort,” the SimSup said calmly, breaking his radio silence.

“Screw you,” Gershon said. He kept working through his lists, checking instruments, snapping switches.

This is what pilots do, at times like this, York realized. Work through the book. Keep it logical, but move fast. Try A. If it doesn’t work, try B. If it doesn’t work, try C…

But the plaster landscape was upside-down completely, the fake craters and canyons like a crimson roof above them.

York was shocked to find that only seconds had elapsed since the first sign of the problem. That was all you were granted: seconds, to figure out the underlying cause of what could be a complex, multiple failure.

There was virtually no chance of succeeding.

If anything went wrong, you had to get out of there, more or less immediately. Or you’d die. The equation was as simple, as finely balanced, as that.

“Ralph, we have to hit abort.”

Gershon didn’t even bother to reply; he just kept working feverishly.

The landscape tilted farther, visibly coming closer. The biconic was starting to go into a hypersonic spin.

“Hit abort,” she told Gershon again. “Christ, Ralph, once we go into a spin we’re through.”

The light in the cabin flickered as the fake Martian sky hurtled past the window. She had a sudden, comical image of a little TV camera on its robot arm spinning around over a plaster-of-paris floor.

If this were for real, my head would be shaking now, battering against the helmet, my inner ears coming apart from Coriolis forces. If this were for real, the craft would start to break up, maybe before I lost consciousness.

“MEM, we recommend you abort. We recommend—”

“Ralph! Jesus Christ! Ralph!”

There was a shudder, a crunch, a puff of white powder.

The landscape froze in place.

“Welcome to Mars,” the SimSup said drily. “We’re just figuring out the size of the crater you made.”

“Fuck,” Gershon said. He pulled off his helmet and threw it across the fake cabin.

The two of them clambered out of the back of the simulator. From outside it looked like the nose of a small light aircraft, a cockpit section roughly sheared off, with wires and umbilical cables dangling from the gaping rear.

The technicians were grinning at them. “Hey, Ralph, You busted our camera. Flew it right on down into the plaster of paris. How about that.”

Gershon wasn’t laughing. He confronted York. He pointed a gloved finger at her face. “Don’t you ever give me orders when we’re flying.”

She was amused rather than disquieted; she’d seen such tantrums before. Most of the time she was able to cope with Gershon, and he seemed prepared, in his rough way, to accept her as an equal in exercises like this. Even though he’d lectured to her, back when she was an ascan. Then, every so often, he would blow his stack like this.

“Orders? Me? You’re the pilot, Ralph.”

“Don’t you fucking forget it.” And he went stalking off for the wake.

Phil Stone came strolling up to her, dressed in a light blue coverall, his hands in his pockets. “Don’t take it personally.”

“I don’t.” York shrugged, and began to pull off her gloves. “Pretty soon he’ll be bawling out the techs. And then the SimSup. And then you, and… Bawling his way up the chain of command. I was just the first one to hand, the place to start. He hates to fail.”

“He didn’t fail,” Stone said. “That failure wasn’t recoverable.”

“That hypersonic spin—”

“I wrote the book about hypersonic spins,” he said, and she suspected he had a war story behind that somewhere. “I know about the spin. But even before that point, you couldn’t have gotten out of it.”

“What happened?”

“You don’t want to wait for the wake?” The wake was the long, harrowing official debrief.

“Just give me the headline.”

“Your nose RCS thrusters started firing. Just as you went into that fourth roll reversal. The aerosurface couldn’t handle the additional torque.”

She thought about that. “But that firing didn’t show up in the instruments. And besides, it’s impossible for the RCS to fire at that point. We’d dumped the fuel.”

“You thought you had.” He grinned. “Just one damn thing after another, huh?”

“Christ.” She shoved her gloves into her helmet. “Sometimes I think these guys want us to fail.”

“No. But you have to fail, a hundred times maybe, so you can succeed the one time when you need to. Besides, this is the place to do it. Nobody ever got killed in a sim. Anyhow, this was primarily a proving flight for the biconic design, not for the pilots.”

That was true, York reflected. The biconic sim was so unpopular, in fact, that only real sim hounds, people desperate to rack up some sim time, any sim time, in order to get a better seat in the crew rotation, would consider working on it.

People like Natalie York and Ralph Gershon.

Stone said, “And I don’t think this thing is ever going to fly. There’s too damn many things to go wrong. The percentage of biconic crashes we get in the sims is a joke…”

“It’s just a shame Ralph doesn’t have that perspective.”

“He may be the best we’ve got,” Stone said quietly.

She was surprised to hear Stone say that.

Stone went on, “He kept on trying. Everything he had, trying to pull her out of that spin. He came closer to saving the MEM than I thought anybody could get.

“By the way,” he said. “You did pretty well in there yourself. Calling for abort when you did was the second best option.”

“What was the best?”

“What Ralph did. Come on.” He slapped her on the back, the pressure of his hand heavy through the layers of her pressure suit. “I’ll buy you a coffee before the wake.”

They walked out of the training building.

Wednesday, August 12, 1981

They flew into Newport News the night before the presentations: Lee and Morgan and Xu and Rowen and Lye and all the others — even Art Cane, who had decided to open and close Lee’s presentation himself, to show that the corporation was committed to the bid.

They checked into the Chamberlain Hotel at Old Point Comfort, near Langley, where the presentations were to be held. Morgan beat a path to the bar, where he started drinking rum: Lemon Hart, 150 proof.

But Lee went to his room with his boxes of slides.

He’d had a final run-through in front of Cane the day before and he was horrified to find that he still overran, by nearly twenty minutes. So he opened the boxes and began sorting the slides, trying to find something he could cut.

At about 3:30 A.M. Jack Morgan came to the door, thoroughly oiled. He took a flash photo of Lee, with his slides spread out all over the hotel room’s polished desk. “For Christ’s sake, JK, put that crap down and go to bed. If you don’t know the pitch now, you never will.”

Lee gave in. He cleared up the slides and got into bed. He even turned the light out and lay there in the dark.

But he could see the slides more clearly than when they were physically in front of him.

After maybe thirty minutes of this he got out of bed, had a shower and a shave, and started working again.

His wake-up call came, and when he looked out of the window he found the planet had rotated again, and it had become light.

Thirty minutes before the Columbia pitch was due to start he went down to reception to meet the others. Bob Rowen was carrying a fat PC. The computer contained the whole Columbia case, split into little chunks and indexed so that in response to questions Lee could get at any point of it quickly.

Lee glad-handed the others, trying to radiate confidence and surety.

But suddenly his stomach clenched up, and he knew he was going to be ill.

Jack Morgan had been watching him, and he dragged Lee off to a bathroom, away from the others, where he threw up violently: a thin, brown, stinging liquid, nothing but coffee.

Morgan didn’t say anything, but Lee knew what he was thinking. He’d been running on adrenaline and coffee and no sleep and little food for ten weeks.

Morgan made him pull down his pants, and gave him a shot in the cheeks from a needle full of something, vitamin B-12 and other crap. But it worked; it got Lee back together again.

And in a couple of minutes he was able to walk out of there, smart and spruce and neat and feeling just fine.

They arrived at the ballroom where the presentations were to be made.

The MEM Evaluation Board members were sitting in rows before the stage: seventy-five of NASA’s most senior people.

Lee knew many of the members by sight. There was Hans Udet from Marshall and Gregory Dana from Langley — famous enemies, sitting stiffly side by side — and he spotted Ralph Gershon, skulking at the back of the room. Gershon nodded to Lee and grinned.

Joe Muldoon was sitting front and center, chairing the session; Muldoon might have become a power in the hierarchy, Lee thought, but he still didn’t look like he fitted the blue pinstripe he had tucked himself into.

Tension hung in the room like ozone.

As the Columbia team set up, the team that preceded them was coming out. It was McDonnell, whose invitation for a joint pitch Lee had famously rejected. And among their subcontractor partners was Hughes, who had rejected Columbia’s approach.

The contrast between the two groups struck Lee strongly. The McDonnell/Hughes cadre was sleek, weighty-looking, all middle-aged white men with slicked-back hair and comfortable guts. There was Gene Tyson from Hughes, for instance, still stinking of cologne and tobacco, looking as if he had stepped off the cover of Fortune. By contrast, Lee was carrying his own slide projector, for Christ’s sake, and all he had to back him up was with this bunch of college kids and a hungover doctor.

Lee had actually seen a copy of McDonnell’s final report, the result of millions of dollars worth of study. It called for a biconic approach, a variant of the theme Rockwell would be developing. The study was damned clever stuff, and so vast that nobody at Columbia had had time to read it.

Tyson came over to Lee. “Well, JK. I’m surprised to see you here.”

“Oh, we were passing,” Lee said. “So we thought we’d throw something together, and see how it hangs.”

Tyson laughed, quite good-natured, and he clapped Lee on the shoulder and walked off.

Art Cane walked up to the lectern, slow and dignified and very impressive, and he gave a short speech about the commitment of his company to the bid, and referred to their tradition and values.

Then Lee strolled to the front of the room, smiling and nodding, and exchanged a brief formal handshake with Cane. He stood at the lectern and called for his first slide.

The room lights dimmed, and the slide came up, right on cue.

Thursday, September 24, 1981

Phil Stone and Adam Bleeker watched her steadily.

The three of them were in a small conference room that had been turned over to the Ares landing site selection committee. The walls were covered with images of Mars: Mariner orbiter photographs, U.S. Geological Survey maps, false-color stratigraphic profiles, geological surveys. The long tables which ran in rows down the walls of the room were covered by more charts and pictures and ring-bound folders.

York unrolled a chart and pinned it up on a wall, covering maps and photos. It was a bright, simple, block-color map, with little flags scattered over it.

“Mars,” she said. “In as much detail as you need to understand it for now. Know your enemy, right? This is a geological map of the planet, drawn from Mariner data.” Actually that wasn’t true; the map was kiddie stuff, too simple to be anything but an operational guide. Useful if you were planning to bomb Mars rather than study it. “Now. What’s the first thing you notice?”

Stone grinned. “I see seven little Stars and Stripes, and seven little Hammer and Sickles, all with labels beside them.”

“We’ll come to the flags. Think about the geology first. Just describe what you see.”

Bleeker shrugged and said, willingly enough, “North and south are different. The top half of your map is pink, the bottom yellow. More or less.”

“Right. The logical basis of geology is that no solid planet is either a homogeneous blob, or a disorganized jumble. They’re all made up of pieces — called geologic units. Each unit was formed in a certain way at a certain time; each has depth as well as breadth and width, and when we do geology we’re always trying to look beneath the surface, to reconstruct the three-dimensional structure that is hidden from direct view. The relations between the units show their age relations, something about the processes that formed them, and something about how far beneath the surface they extend…”

Stone, surreptitiously, was checking his watch.

“Do I have your full attention, gentlemen?”

Stone and Bleeker glanced at each other like guilty children.

“I’m sure you’re just doing your job, Natalie,” Bleeker said languidly, “and we’re glad you’re running the site selection committee—”

“I’m not running it. I’m just on it.”

“Whatever. But we’d have a year en route to Mars with nothing much else to do but study this stuff. Can’t this wait until then?” As usual, Bleeker sounded calm, rational, reasonable, colorless.

A year? Yes, but I won’t be there to hold your hands, or make you think. I’ll be light-minutes away…

And this guy was likely to be designated the Ares mission specialist. My God.

Phil Stone waved Bleeker quiet. “Go on, Natalie. We’re committed to the science. You’ve got us.”

“All right. Now,” she plowed on, “the probes have shown us that in the case of Mars we have two main types of landscape. The yellow stuff in the south is heavily cratered, and looks ancient. And this pink stuff, to the north, is made up of smooth, young plains. The planet bulges out below the equator; most of the south is above the mean altitude, and most of the north is below.”

“You say ‘ancient’ and ‘young,’ ” Stone said. “Meaning?”

“ ‘Young’ is maybe half a billion years old. The plains are volcanic — frozen lava fields. And the ancient cratered stuff is three to four billion years old. That’s almost as old as the planet itself…”

Bleeker said, “So let’s get back to the flags. I guess those seven Hammer and Sickles are the sites the Soviets have identified as prime interest.”

“Yes. You can see—”

“So screw that,” Stone said easily. “Let’s look at the good old American selections. Those two white stripes at the top and bottom of your chart — I guess we’re looking at the polar caps.”

“Yeah.”

“I see no flags up there.”

“No. We have to rule out high latitudes for the first mission.” Spacecraft arriving from Earth would naturally settle into a parking orbit around Mars with not much inclination to the equator; changing the orbit to reach the poles would take a lot of extra energy. “But it’s a shame; the poles are interesting.”

“What are the caps? Water ice?”

“Maybe. The orbit of Mars is more elliptical than Earth’s. And that distorts the seasons. In the south you get a short, hot summer, but a long, cool winter. And the makeup of the caps seems to differ as well. We think the cap in the north is water ice, yes. But the southern cap is probably carbon dioxide — dry ice.

“There are a lot of puzzles about the poles.” She walked across the room to a blowup photograph; it showed a thick band of layering in brownish terrain.

“What the hell’s that?” Bleeker asked. “It looks like melted chocolate.”

“These are bands of thick-layered deposits, thirty or forty feet thick, that surround the poles for hundreds of miles; they are made up of dust and ice, mixed up, laid down by the Martian winds. The bands tell us that the deposition process must vary, over the years. Or the millennia, anyhow. But what caused the variation? We’ve got three possible mechanisms. First, maybe the eccentricity of Mars’s orbit changes.”

“Why should it?” Stone asked.

“Mars is a lot closer to Jupiter than we are; Jupiter’s mass is capable of a lot of perturbation. Or maybe the tilt of the planet’s axis changes.”

“I can see how that would happen,” Stone said. “That bottom-heavy southern hemisphere would make a hell of a difference to Mars’s moment of inertia. The whole damn thing must wobble like a spinning top.”

She smiled. “On geological time scales, yes.”

“And what’s your third mechanism?”

“That the heat output of the sun changes, in some way we don’t understand.”

Bleeker frowned. “But that would change the Earth’s climate.”

“That’s right. And that’s why the layering is a good reason for going to the poles someday. Mars is like a dusty mirror, Phil, Adam; every time we look into it, we learn something about the Earth.”

They were silent for a moment, digesting that.

York felt pleased with herself. Even if they learned nothing else, if she could puncture their complacency, make them think about the significance of the flight they were likely to take, she’d have achieved something.

She glanced again at her polar blowup. It was actually of much lower quality than the images taken by later generations of probes, which had concentrated on equatorial landing-site mapping. Because of the Mars landing program, paradoxically, much less was known about the planet as a whole than might otherwise be possible.

And it was in the hands of guys like these to make it all worthwhile.

Adam Bleeker said, “I’d guess the high-latitude problems would also rule out the site you’ve marked far to the south there, Natalie.”

“I guess. But it’s another interesting site. That’s the Amphitrites Patera: an ancient volcano, much older than the volcanic plains in the northern hemisphere. We don’t fully understand how it was formed. Maybe the vulcanism there was sparked off by the huge impacts which created the massive impact craters in the south. You see these mustard yellow spots in the center of the southern fields: that’s Argyre and Hellas — huge, ancient impact basins, more than three billion years old. Hellas is bigger than anything we’ve found on the Moon — bigger even than the Mare Imbrium, for example. Hellas is where the Soviets put down Mars 9.”

Stone whistled. “That’s what you get for setting up shop next door to the asteroid belt, I guess.”

Argyre held a Stars and Stripes.

“You’re suggesting we should try for Argyre?” Bleeker asked.

“It’s a possible. Argyre is obviously very ancient, and very deep. But the basins are surrounded by concentric rings — mountain chains, actually — which would be hard to negotiate or land on.

“Now,” she went on, “you can see that the rest of the action is in the western hemisphere. This scarlet area, sprawling over into the north, is the Tharsis Bulge: on average, more than five miles above the surrounding terrain. And these crimson spots are the great shield volcanoes.” She pointed. “Ascraeus, Pavonis, and Arsia Mons; and here, to the northwest, is Olympus Mons: 370 miles across its base, with a caldera fifty miles wide. Olympus is so big it pokes its way out of most of the atmosphere. So you get orographic clouds, formed when the air has to move up the slopes…”

“Sure,” Bleeker said, “but I hear Olympus is so huge that it wouldn’t be so spectacular from the ground.”

She shrugged. “Maybe. Look at this.” She hunted about on the pin board on one wall, until she found the image she wanted. She passed it to the astronauts. It was a perspective view of a huge volcano; a cliff, sharp and well delineated, marked out its nearer rim. “That’s a computer image, an oblique view, faked up from Mariner data.”

Stone pointed to the cliff. “How high is that?”

“The scarp? Oh, three miles.”

“Jesus. A three-mile-high cliff?”

“Give or take.”

They were both staring at the cliff image. Bleeker held up his hands in mock surrender.

She suppressed a grin. Astronauts were easy to impress if you pushed the right gosh-wow buttons.

Stone said, “I see you have a couple of flags on top of those big volcanoes.”

“Yeah. Olympus Mons is the youngest, and the tallest; and the youngest lava flows on Mars emanate from it. But Olympus is seventeen miles high—”

“Too high for aerobraking,” Bleeker said. “And I guess that would rule out the other Tharsis volcanoes also.”

“Okay,” Stone said. “To the east of Tharsis I see a ragged blue streak, stretching along the equator. I guess that’s the Mariner valley.”

“Yes. Valles Marineris. The great canyons: two and a half thousand miles long, four miles deep, and over a hundred miles wide. We know that the Valles system wasn’t formed by water. A lot of the individual ‘canyons’ are boxed in. So water couldn’t have gotten in or out of them; we’re looking at geological faulting here, like the Rift Valley in Africa.”

“The whole valley looks as if it’s flowing out of your Tharsis Bulge,” Bleeker said.

“Yeah. And we don’t think that can be a coincidence. Maybe when the bulge was uplifted, magma withdrew from around it, which would have cracked the surface. There would have been earthquakes and extensive faulting.”

“I see we could maybe go for the Valles Marineris itself,” Stone said.

“Maybe,” York said. “This flag is actually in a tributary called the Candor Chasma; we’ve seen layers in the canyon walls here, so we’d be able to get clues to the canyons’ origins.”

“But I’ll bet the landscape isn’t too easy to negotiate.”

“No. Some of the smaller canyons there are a couple of miles deep. If you had several months to survey the place, and some kind of flying machine—”

“But we don’t,” Stone said. “Okay, Natalie. That leaves two places. Both on the border between the old stuff in the southern hemisphere and the volcanic plains in the north.”

“Yes. This one in the eastern hemisphere” — on the opposite side of the world from Tharsis — “is called Nilosyrtis Mensa. It is what we call ‘fretted’ terrain.” She dug out a photograph, this one a mosaic in black and white. It showed a surface uniformly crumpled.

“Christ,” Stone said. “It looks like beaten copper.”

“We think the older, southern terrain has been eroded, here on the border, leaving this irregular, grooved landscape.”

“Looks bloody difficult to land on,” Bleeker said.

“Yes, and you’d need long traverses to achieve systematic surveys.”

“All right. So that leaves one site.”

The final flag was at the western fringe of the Tharsis Bulge, close to the border of the north and south terrains. It was in the middle of a green stripe that cut north to south across the Valles. The green, together with the blue ribbon of the Valles, made a rough upright cross, straddling the equator.

“This is a region shaped by running water. Apparently. There are channels that seem to flow out of the Valles Marineris, and across the northern plains.”

Stone smiled. “So these are the famous water-carved features you tell us about in the Singing Wheel.”

“It’s an equatorial site,” she said. “So you get a mix of young and old geological types. And that’s important to us. Most mixed terrain is complex, broken up. But here the landscape is pretty forgiving for a landing. And if you’re going to find water anywhere, it’s here. Maybe under the surface. And where there’s water—”

“Maybe there’s life.” Stone got out of his chair and walked across to the map; he leaned close so he could read the label by the little flag. “Mangala Vallis. What does it mean?”

“All the major valleys have been named after words for Mars. Here, to the east of Marineris, we even have an Ares valley…”

“And Mangala?”

“Sanskrit. The oldest language of the Indo-European group.”

“So maybe Mangala is the oldest word for Mars in the western world.” Stone smiled. “I kind of like that.” Standing at the map, he turned to eye York. “So you’ve been pushing the site selection board toward Mangala Vallis. For good operational reasons, of course. A place on which you just happen to be the world’s leading expert. Right, York?”

He was grinning, and so was Bleeker.

“Still wangling to get my seat, Natalie?” Bleeker called, good-natured.

She felt chilled. These guys see right through me.

But maybe that’s not a bad thing. If Bleeker knows I’m right on his tail, maybe he will take his geology a little more seriously.

And all he has to do is slip once…

She started to roll up her maps. “What do you think? I’ll give you a preprint of my next Journal of Geophysical Research paper on Mangala; read it and weep, flyboys.”

“Now what?” Stone asked. “Are we done?”

“Like hell. We’re only just beginning; that was the fun stuff. Now we come to Martian climatology. Compare and contrast with Earth’s, and…”

After some grumbling, the guys settled down again.

The day wore on, and the little room grew progressively hotter. October 1981

In the end, five lead companies submitted proposals to build the Mars Excursion Module: Rockwell, McDonnell, Martin, Boeing, and JK Lee’s company, Columbia.

The post-presentation work of the MEM Evaluation Board was long and complicated. It was all a question of weighted scores; Ralph Gershon had never seen anything like it. There were subcommittees to evaluate the bidder’s “administrative capacity” and “business approach” and “technical qualification” …Gershon was himself involved in three of the subcommittees. And each subcommittee assigned weighted scores to each bid, under hundreds of categories.

It didn’t make sense to Gershon. Would all these numbers really determine the final outcome? If you could reduce decision making to a mechanical process, the day would come when a computer could run an outfit like NASA.

In this bidding war, for instance, it was pretty obvious to Gershon that Columbia had the most plausible strategy. NASA, with the bigger players, had pissed away the best part of a decade on studies and proposals and evaluations of ever more exotic Mars landers, without ever really getting to the point. Lee’s people had come in fresh and had cut through all that crap, and presented something that looked as if it could be up and flying in a couple of years.

The trouble was, the scoring didn’t back up that intuition. Even though its technical pitch was well received — and the human factors stuff seemed particularly well thought through — Columbia was penalized by its status as a small experimental outfit. It just didn’t look as if Columbia was capable of delivering a complete spacecraft.

When the first-cut summary sheets came in, the overall totals gave Rockwell first place, with Boeing and McDonnell tied for second, and Columbia a distant last.

Gershon argued against the scoring in the final plenary sessions. “Damn it, you’ve got the results of the sims. I bust my balls trying to get a biconic to fly. We have to pick the bidder with the best chance of building something that will work…”

He got some sympathy from Joe Muldoon. The scores went through a rethink which helped Columbia a little.

But in the end Muldoon’s final report to Tim Josephson followed the scoring conclusions: “Rockwell International is considered the outstanding source as the Mars Excursion Module prime contractor…”

His assignment completed, Gershon went off to work at the Cape on the first of the Ares A-class missions, an unmanned proving flight of the upgraded Saturn VB.

In a couple of days he was called back to JSC to put his pawprint to the final MEM report. Gershon turned up, pretty pissed with the whole thing.

Muldoon caught him up.

“Where are you going?”

“It’s over, isn’t it? Oh, come on, Joe. You know as well as I do that Columbia was the only outfit with a real chance of building something in the time frame.. And now we’re dumping them.”

“Of course I know that. But it’s not over yet.”

“Are you kidding me? We’ve just signed off the final report, for Christ’s sake. Columbia never had a chance.”

“You’re learning fast, Ralph, but you’ve got a long way to go. In this game, a signed-off, final report is just the start of the negotiations.”

“What do you mean?”

“I want you to do something for me.”

A couple of days after that, a long telegram landed on JK Lee’s gunmetal desk.

He called in Jack Morgan and flipped the telegram across the desk at him.

Morgan read through the thing carefully, but he kept one eye on Lee as he did so.

The telegram had come from Ralph Gershon, one of the astronauts on the evaluation board. It was basically a list of questions about the Columbia bid. A lot of them were brutal, and the first was a doozie: translated from corporate speak it was, How can a pissant bunch of amateurs like Columbia handle the development of a major spacecraft like the MEM?

“Well, I guess this is it,” Morgan said, studying Lee. “We’re dead.”

Morgan had never seen Lee so low as in the last couple of months, since the MEM presentation. The release of tension, the sleep deficit, and all the rest of it had dumped Lee into a deep, deep trough of depression. And Lee’s overspend on the proposal had finally come out into the open, and there was a lot of muttering against him within Columbia. During the MEM exercise Morgan had become genuinely worried about what Lee was doing to himself. Not to mention his family. With the MEM thing being over, Morgan knew he was going to have to broach the health thing with Lee, somehow. Maybe he’d try to work through Jennine.

But just then Lee, sitting back in his chair, seemed bright, alert, and his eyes had that slightly glazed, almost high look in them that Morgan had come to associate with Lee’s major bursts of activity.

“Hell, no,” Lee said vehemently. “Don’t you get it? This damn note means we’re still in the running. They wouldn’t be asking us these questions otherwise.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Get the answers, of course.” Lee stabbed at his intercom. “Bella. I want you to start putting out calls. Get the MEM team leaders in here as soon as you can. And book a flight for us all, out to Houston, for — let me think — two days’ time.”

“But that’s a Sunday, JK.”

“Here you go again with your but but but,” Lee said. “I’ve told you about that before.”

“Yes, sir, JK.”

Morgan was aghast. “You’re not serious. It’s unheard of for a bidder to make a personal visit during an evaluation process.”

“What is that, a rule?”

“An unwritten one, I guess.”

Lee arched his eyebrows. “Imagine my concern.”

After the visit of the Columbia people to JSC, the scoring was revised again, and the senior people on the evaluation board took the proposal to Tim Josephson in Washington.

Muldoon’s people recommended Rockwell on the basis of the scoring system, with Columbia finally showing up at third.

The Administrator listened carefully.

Then Josephson thanked the board, and he asked Joe Muldoon, Ralph Gershon, and a couple of others to stay behind.

“Tell me the truth.” His tone sounded to Gershon typically dry and bureaucratic. “Are there any factors, other than those presented by the evaluation board, which I ought to take into account in this decision?”

Joe Muldoon spoke up. “Hell, yes. You have to look again at the Columbia bid, Tim.”

“Why so?”

“Because in my opinion it’s the most technically plausible. It’s shallow in some areas, but overall it was the most coherent of the bids. With the support of good subcontractors, the small organizational weight of Columbia won’t be a handicap…”

Gershon tried not to grin. As he’d watched Muldoon and Josephson and the rest work in the last few days, he’d come to believe that running an organization had a lot in common with flying a plane. You had to use your instruments, sure, but raw data, however well interpreted and analyzed, was only one input; in the end — when you had to make the decisions that could save you or kill you — there was no substitute for the mysterious internal processing that amalgamated data and experience and the feel of a ship in your hands.

It was just what Tim Josephson and Joe Muldoon were doing, he thought. The Columbia bid felt right, and that might swing it for JK Lee, even yet.

Still, it was going to be difficult for Josephson to set aside the conclusions of his formal evaluation. Two decades earlier Jim Webb had done that, when he’d plumped for Rockwell to build Apollo. And there had been muttering about corruption and backhand deals ever since.

When Gershon left to take a plane to the Cape, the decision still hung in the balance.

Lee was getting steadily more depressed. Even though his unorthodox visit to Houston had gone well, the rumors coming out of Washington were strong and consistent: that Rockwell had the MEM contract wrapped up. Hell, he thought, they always did. Who was I ever trying to kid?

At 10 A.M. on the day after getting back from Houston he found himself staring out of his office window. He was thinking of going home. He could spend some time with Jennine. And his son, Bert, was playing baseball that evening for his high-school team. Maybe it would be good for Lee to show up, for once.

Then Joe Muldoon called.

“Can you come back over to Houston today?”

Lee was nonplussed. “I don’t know. The flights—”

“Tonight would be fine. I’d like to see you. Come to my office at JSC.”

Maybe Muldoon thought it would be kinder to tell Lee in person, even if it meant dragging him all the way out to Houston.

Lee thought of Bert and his ball game. That seemed a more attractive option.

He called Bella to ask her to fix up a flight to Houston.

He got to JSC in the late afternoon. He’d spent the flight, and the ride from the airport, bracing himself for the axe.

Muldoon took him into his office and closed the door. He stuck out his hand and grinned. “Congratulations. I wanted to tell you in person. You’ve won the MEM.”

Lee, for once in his life, couldn’t think of a damn thing to say.

“Can I tell my people?”

Muldoon checked his watch, an astronaut’s heavy Rolex. “We can’t make a public announcement until the stock markets on the West Coast close… Well, what the hell.”

He allowed Lee to make two phone calls.

Lee used the phone in Muldoon’s office. He thought of calling Jennine.

He called Art Cane.

And then he called Gene Tyson, at Hughes, and he took a lot of pleasure in commiserating with him.

Muldoon took Lee out that night, for a meal and a good few cold ones. Lee got thoroughly oiled and had a hell of a time.

But by 5 A.M. he was up, watching the early-morning news on the TV, and packing his overnight bag.

He caught a glance of himself in the mirror on the wall of his motel room. “By God,” he said aloud. “I’m going to build a spacecraft to take three Americans to Mars.”

Then the TV news item broke into his awareness.

A Saturn VB had blown up. There was an image of a white cloud, tinged with orange, with Solid Rocket Boosters veering crazily out of it, trailing smoke.

The commentators said the accident would set the Ares program back years.

My God. Lee knotted his tie, his fingers frantic, fumbling, and hurried from the room. New York Times, Tuesday, December 15, 1981

…Today the last remains of the tragic Apollo-N space mission have been buried, in an underground storage facility at NASA’s Cape Kennedy launch site in Florida.

I spoke to Aaron Raab at the Jacqueline B. Kennedy Space Center about the problems involved. Raab was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1946. He joined NASA in July 1967, just a few months after another tragedy, the Apollo 1 pad fire which claimed the lives of astronauts Grissom, White, and Chaffee.

In the immediate aftermath of the Apollo-N disaster, Raab shouldered the heavy burden of “Debris Manager.”

After being off-loaded from its recovery vessel at Port Canaveral, the Apollo-N Command Module — the 11,000-pound capsule which returned NASA astronauts Dana, Jones, and Priest to Earth — was painstakingly disassembled and laid out for investigation purposes in temporary storage areas by a National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) team. Under Raab’s supervision, and under the watchful eye of the investigating commission appointed by President Reagan, the components of the Command Module were arranged in their original configuration relative to one another, to assist the investigators. The components remained in this “footprint” for almost a full year, because once the investigations were over and the reports written, NASA got down to its own internal engineering evaluation and data retrieval.

Surprisingly little equipment was used to move the components about, including a light crane, a forklift, and two flatbed trucks.

Because the Command Module had been recovered from the saltwater ocean, some of it required corrosion-proofing to preserve it. In addition, special measures were taken to protect Apollo-N’s voice recorders. Soon after recovery the recorders had been sent to the Johnson Space Center in Houston for restoration by IBM and analysis by a team led by woman astronaut Natalie York.

The Command Module’s final resting place is perhaps bizarre, but practical. The spacecraft now lies deep underground in a disused Minuteman missile silo complex in a quiet corner of Cape Canaveral. The chosen site consists of one silo (Complex 31) and four vaultlike underground equipment rooms.

The operation to prepare the silo as a final resting place was a tricky one. The silo complex had deteriorated badly after some ten years of neglect. The equipment rooms still housed a considerable amount of electronic equipment associated with missile operations, which Raab’s team had to remove before the Apollo-N debris could be transported in. Other modifications were made to transform the underground equipment rooms, which were in a bad state of repair, into permanent storage vaults. Although there was to be no environmental control, the underground facilities had to be made at least watertight; it turned out that back in the late 1960s a burst pipe had immersed the floor of Complex 31 under several feet of water, and so the water lines were all capped off before the Apollo-N debris was moved in.

There was extensive photo-documentation by NASA cameramen, and the whole operation was conducted under a tight security cordon, with round-the-clock surveillance to deter morbid souvenir hunters.

“We got the components in the vault in a very organized manner,” Aaron Raab told me. “We compartmentalized the components according to function and storage requirements. Primarily, we put the larger components in first, and anything we felt would be of any significance in the future was left in an accessible area. It was all logged in by our quality control personnel here at the Cape, in official logbooks. These record precisely where each component is stored.”

It would be a fairly involved operation for anyone to get back into the vault, but future investigators could go in and retrieve components after a few days of clearing work. But, says Raab, there are no plans for the periodic opening up of the vaults to check the condition of the stored wreckage.

Today, I watched as Aaron Raab personally laid the last few poignant components of the Command Module in position. A huge 10-ton concrete cap was secured with long steel rods and welded down over the underground vault.

A year after the accident, Apollo-N is at last laid to rest…

January 1982

At first Bert Seger had been enthusiastic about his new post in Washington. He was, after all, given the rank of associate administrator, and, as a senior manager in the Office of Manned Spaceflight, he still expected to have a strong hands-on involvement in the manned program. But when he studied the new organization charts, and he saw just how far away from him were the reporting lines of the major players, like Joe Muldoon, he started to realize he’d been had. He’d been handed a sinecure, something to get him decently out of the way during the investigations into Apollo-N.

He never became comfortable at Headquarters. He had a few assignments, and some pet projects of his own to pursue, and they filled his time, but not his attention. He would find himself sitting alone in his office for hours on end, waiting for the telephone to ring, reading newspapers.

He took long walks around Washington.

He found favored benches in the big public gardens and floated through the museums. He liked the serenity, the timelessness of the museums.

The evenings weren’t any better.

Fay was still in Houston, with the boys, and Seger would fly back there every Friday. Fay didn’t want to move, because of the boys’ schooling, and Seger accepted that, reluctantly.

Every Sunday or Monday, when he had to get ready to fly back to DC, Fay prepared him a little bouquet of carnations. Each day he’d take one for his buttonhole, but they’d be pretty faded by the end of the week, and it just wasn’t the same.

He had too much time to think.

He kept on going over the events of that flight — in fact, over everything he’d done in all the years that had led up to Apollo-N.

Was there anything he should have done differently during the flight, anything he’d missed that might have saved Jones, Priest, and Dana? And during the long development, how far was he responsible for the shoddiness, the carelessness which had finally destroyed the nuclear rocket?

He didn’t come up with any answers. He could, in retrospect, think of a thousand things he might have done differently. But he wasn’t wallowing; he knew that anything is possible with the benefit of hindsight. He’d done the best he could, at every stage of his career.

But it was no comfort. It happened on my watch.

In the hall of his rented apartment he had hung a small brass-framed photograph. It showed three space-suited astronauts. To Bert — In Your Hands.

Seger didn’t go in or out of his apartment without looking at that photo and reading the inscription.

He found a run-down little Catholic church, tucked away just a few blocks from Headquarters, and took to spending time in there. He attended Mass three or four times a week. The ancient, gentle ritual took him back to his childhood and comforted him.

He was struck — shocked, even — by the poverty he saw around him in the neighborhood of the church, just blocks away from NASA Headquarters, here in the capital city of the richest nation on the planet.

He began to see that he’d been locked away inside NASA for too long, pursuing the organization’s single goal, the Mars landing, with blinkered obsessiveness. Perhaps they all had.

He remembered how shocked he’d been by the intrusion of those antinuke protesters at the Cape.

The world out here, beyond JSC, had continued to evolve, and Seger felt as if he was emerging into a new, harsh light, his NASA cocoon crumbling around him.

He went to the libraries and started going through back issues of newspapers — papers he’d barely scanned when they were printed, save for sports results and NASA coverage. Then, as he stared into grainy microfiche screens, he felt as if he was learning about some phase of ancient history. But this was the world in which he had lived, the story of the country which supported him.

The United States was falling apart, it seemed to Seger.

The country was deep in recession. Under Reagan, there was a kind of cheerful, simplistic optimism around. But the divisions in society seemed to Seger to be growing wider than ever. Two Americas were emerging: there was a grotesque, materialistic money-chase among the already affluent, and among the poor — particularly the nonwhites, in the inner cities — there was a tailspin of drugs, crime, decaying housing projects, and a failing educational system.

And meanwhile, Seger learned, in the middle of the recession, Reagan was vastly increasing the Pentagon’s budget. Nuclear weapons were a key part of that buildup. Next year, cruise missiles would be deployed in Western Europe, in the face of much protest from those countries. There’d been more protest at home, too, he read.

People were growing scared again. A DoD official had talked about how backyard shelters would save them all, when the bomb dropped. If there are enough shovels going around, everybody’s going to make it.

Seger read back as far as Three Mile Island. The similarities — administrative and technical — between that disaster and the Apollo-N incident chilled him.

The general press coverage of NASA, once he looked on that with his new perspective, startled him, too. He saw skepticism, anger, contempt, resentment, on the part of the people outside looking in. He remembered how Eisenhower had cautioned against the unwarranted influence of the military-industrial complex — against an expanded space program, in fact — because technocracy was foreign to the individualistic American spirit, and grafting it onto the nation was going to do a lot of harm. Well, Kennedy had accepted that risk. And it seemed to Seger that the country was paying the price.

The space program, he saw now, was a prime symptom of all this. What use was any of it? The much-lauded spin-offs were minimal and probably would have come about anyhow, if the need was there. NASA’s continuing obsession with manned flight had distorted the whole organization, the direction of other programs. Space initiatives which might have done some good down on Earth — science projects, Earth resources studies — had all been subordinated to the operational needs of the manned missions. An unmanned mission wouldn’t even be approved if it didn’t support the manned effort more or less directly — or worse, if it indicated that humans might not be necessary in space…

NASA had lobbied to go to Mars, he began to see, in order to justify itself, to keep its huge teams together, after the great lunar effort wound down.

Of course, releasing NASA’s funds to other, Earthbound projects would have been a token gesture. The money would have seeped away, Seger was sure, with no tangible benefit. But that wasn’t the point. The space program was like a huge, spindly, etiolated plant, pushing all its energy obsessively into one sickly Mars red bloom, while the society in which its roots were anchored was steadily disintegrating.

It just wasn’t appropriate. Any more than had been the overambitious civilian nuclear program, the weapons buildup…

To Seger, the Mars mission came to seem almost blasphemous.

A new clarity entered his thoughts as he shaped these ideas. A new determination.

Of course he knew that he was still reacting to Apollo-N. His thoughts would be structured by that defining incident for the rest of his life. Perhaps, in fact, he was still in some mild form of shock. It didn’t matter. Truth remained truth, no matter what the form of the revelation, and he felt he was on his own road to Damascus, seeing the space program from the outside, in its true perspective, for the first time in his working life.

He found great comfort in his new perception.

The next time he attended Mass, he asked the priest if he could give a sermon. Mission Elapsed Time [Day/Hr:Min:Sec] Plus 313/11:33:22

313/11:33:22 CDR …For my part, I want to use the opportunity of this telecast to register our awareness of the debt we owe to all those who came before us. This flight has come out of the efforts, first, of people from history, of scientists across the world, who have brought us to the point where we can meet the challenge even of a deep space trek like this across the Solar System. Next, the American people, who have expressed their will to see this great exploration adventure continue. Next, four administrations and their Congresses for having the courage to implement that will. After the Moon landings I think it’s true to say that America came close to turning its back on spaceflight, and it took political courage and vision to bring us to where we are, today. And then we come to the Agency and industry teams that built the spacecraft: the Saturn boosters, the Mission Module, the Apollo, and the MEM. This trip of ours to Mars may look to you simple or easy. I’d like to assure you that that has not been the case. The Saturn VB booster system which put us into orbit is an incredibly complicated piece of machinery, every piece of which worked perfectly. This switch which I have in my hand now, if you can see that, has over three hundred counterparts in this control rack alone, and there are many more in the Command Module and the MEM. In addition to that, there are myriads of circuit breakers, levers, rods, and other associated controls. The MS-II, the big rocket stage on the back end of our Ares cluster, has performed flawlessly so far; and it must do so again, or we cannot return to the Earth… We have always had confidence that all this equipment will work and work properly, and we continue to have confidence that it will do so for the remainder of this flight. All this is possible only through the endeavors of a number of people. First, the American men and women who put these pieces of machinery together at the factory. Second, the test teams, with their painstaking work during the assembly and retest after assembly. Third, the astronauts who flew before us to assemble the Ares components in Earth orbit. Finally, the people at the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, in management, in mission planning and flight control, and in crew training. This operation is somewhat like a TV news show; all you see on screen is the three of us, but behind the scenery are thousands of others — hundreds of thousands. And every damn one of them did his or her job to the utmost.

313/11:35:10 MMP [INAUDIBLE]

313/11:35:12 CDR And every one of them did his or her job to the utmost. To those people, we give a special thank you, and to all the other people that are listening and watching tonight. And finally we have to remember those crew, those astronauts, who have lost their lives in the course of our space program. Here I want to remember both Russians and Americans. I want to tell you that I begrudge every one of those lives lost, and no such price is worth paying. But by their sacrifice, those brave men and women have made today, this mission, possible. God bless you. And now Ralph is going to show you something, the marker we’re intending to leave on the surface of Mars. Ralph?

313/11:35:45 MMP I have it. I’ll hold it up to the camera. I hope you can see that. Maybe if I turn it a little. For those who haven’t seen it, I’ll describe the marker. The marker is a disk of diamond, a little like a coin, about an inch across and maybe an eighth of an inch thick. It is a single-crystal diamond. An excimer laser was used to cut a message into the diamond, creating a layer of graphite in there, with a layer of diamond deposited on the top. The marker has been manufactured of diamond because that is the most durable material we know; the marker could survive for millions of years, long after our MEM and our other artifacts have been destroyed. As you know this is the only Mars flight planned for the foreseeable future. But the marker is like a time capsule, to people who may follow us to Mars; and it is, perhaps, a message to future life on Mars, to sentient beings who may emerge there some day. The marker is a little like a microfiche, with a lot of information stored on it, mostly too small for me to make out. But we have here greetings from all the nations of the Earth, and a map of the Solar System as it exists today, and information about the biological composition of human beings. And, embedded in the diamond, we have small samples of Earth rock, and of Moon rock, and human tissue. And, also on here, there is a list of all four hundred thousand Americans who have contributed to Project Ares. We think this is a fitting thing to leave there, on Mars, as a memorial of our mission.

313/11:37:07 CDR Okay. Natalie, I believe you’re going to tell the folks about our call signs for the rest of this mission.

313/11:37:11 MSP Thank you. I know that sometimes our space-age jargon confuses the hell out of people.

313/11:37:15 CDR Hot mike.

313/11:37:17 MSP Confuses people. And it sure confuses me. For instance, our space travelers’ “calendar.” We count our days from the moment we left the ground, aboard our Saturn VB booster, from the Jacqueline B. Kennedy Space Center. So, to us, today is MET 313 days — that’s three hundred and thirteen days of Mission Elapsed Time, more than three hundred days since we left Earth. While to you, it is a plain old Tuesday, January 28, 1986. And this business of the call signs is another problem. Why is it that spacecraft sometimes have call signs — individual names, like Apollo 11’s Eagle and Columbia — and at other times Houston will refer to us as just, say, “Ares”? The answer is that we need to use call signs when there is more than one separate spacecraft involved in a flight, and they need to be distinguished in our radio conversations. And that’s going to be true on this flight, when we get to Mars in a couple of months’ time, and we land on the surface in our MEM. Unlike the Apollo missions to the Moon, we decided not to choose the names for our separate craft until now, until after the launch, as we haven’t needed them. As a crew we thought we’d prefer to spend some of the long transfer time to Mars on thinking about that.

313/11:38:18 MMP Sure. That’s what we did. Rather than watch videotapes of the Super Bowl.

313/11:38:25 CDR [INAUDIBLE]

313/11:38:28 MSP So today I’m going to tell you what names we’ve chosen. I know we have a lot of children listening today, at schools, and I hope this will bring alive some of the history lessons you have, and you’ll be able to see how what we’re doing today, in our exploration of Mars, is really an extension of the great journeys you can read about in your texts. Phil, if you…

313/11:38:46 CDR Sure. We’ve decided to name our spacecraft after famous exploration sailing ships of the past, uh, in line with what Natalie’s just said. And I’m particularly pleased with the name we’ve given to our Mission Module — that is, the place we’re living in during the voyage — because it was from the Mission Module that we conducted our study of Venus, as we flew past that planet. And we’ve decided to name it after the sailing ship which Captain James Cook commanded to Tahiti in 1769, to watch a transit of Venus across the sun: Endeavor. Ralph…

313/11:39:17 MMP Yeah. Then there’s our Apollo, which we’ll use to return to Earth. We’ve chosen the name Discovery. That’s actually for two ships: the one Henry Hudson captained in 1610, in his search for a northwest passage between the Atlantic and the Pacific, and another of the ships Cook captained, when he visited Hawaii, and Alaska, and western Canada. Back to Natalie.

313/11:40:00 MSP And now the MEM, the Excursion Module which will be the first ship to land humans on the surface of Mars. We’re going to call it after a famous U.S. Navy ship, which made a prolonged and very successful exploration of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans in the 1870s.

313/11:40:19 CDR Yes.

313/11:40:21 MSP We’re naming our MEM Challenger.

Source: Extracted from NASA, Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, “Ares Technical Air-to-Ground Voice Transcription, “January 1986, pp. 1367f. Ares Files, NASA Historical Reference Collection, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

Monday, January 11, 1982

The conference room was almost full, but a chair had been reserved for Udet in the front row. He took his seat and crossed his legs with precise motions.

Gregory Dana was at the lectern, fumbling with his thick spectacles, preparing to speak. Udet had not been surprised when Dana had been selected to chair the investigating panel.

On a large screen behind Dana, an image was projected; it showed the Saturn VB stack a few minutes before launch from Pad 39B at Kennedy. The fat MS-IC first stage gleamed white in the sunlight, with its wide tail fins and the four slim Solid Rocket Boosters clustered around it. It looked like a broken-off piece of some elaborate Moorish temple. The second stage was a squat cylinder atop the MS-IC, bone white, with the silver-gray gumdrop shape of an unmanned boilerplate Apollo capsule at the top.

Umbilicals snaked into the stack from the big, complex launch tower, feeding liquid oxygen and propellant into both the liquid stages: hydrogen for the second stage, and RP-1 — kerosene — for the big first stage. Vapor wreathed the upper levels of the booster, dispersing slowly, and Udet could see the sparkle of ice against metal and insulation.

The sky behind the stack was a gray-blue, and heat haze shimmered about the tower.

Udet felt his heart move at the sight. He had never lost his boyish wonder at the sight of such magnificent devices — these heroic machines — wrought by human hands from the raw materials of the Earth, to be hurled toward the planets.

And, of course, that sense of awe was piqued on this occasion by his foreknowledge of the fate of Booster AS-5B04, just a few seconds later.

Udet glanced around. Joe Muldoon, up on the stage with Dana, was moderating the meeting, and much of NASA’s senior management appeared to be in attendance; there were staff from Marshall and Houston and NASA Headquarters, including aides of Tim Josephson, and a heavy representation from the contractors responsible for the system components under scrutiny today.

The presentation was to be a summary of NASA’s preliminary internal report into the problems encountered during the launch of Saturn VB stack AS-5B04, three months earlier. Depending on the reaction of this audience, and on the NASA hierarchy as a whole to the content of the report, a draft would be finalized and published within the week.

There was an air of tension, anxiety, weariness.

Coming so soon after the Apollo-N tragedy, nobody in the Agency wanted to face up to another disaster, the first loss of a Saturn. Udet had heard the muttering. Who the hell can we blame for this one?

Dana was speaking, in his thin, frail voice. Udet drew a little more upright in his chair.

“At 6.6 seconds before launch, the Saturn’s kerosene-fueled F-1A main engines were ignited in sequence and run up to full thrust, while the entire structure was still bolted to the launchpad. The thrust of the main engines pushed the Saturn assembly upward, against the restraint exerted by the pin-down bolts anchoring it to the pad. When the Solid Rocket Boosters’ restraining bolts were explosively released the stack’s ‘stretch’ was suddenly relieved…”

On the screen behind Dana, clouds of smoke and steam billowed up around the base of the Saturn stack. Then the four Solid Rocket Boosters ignited, and yellow-white fire plumed from their engine bells. The camera shuddered, as testimony to the acoustic energy spewed out by the stack — but the film was without sound, and the brilliant launch sequence worked through in eerie silence.

The image froze. Billows of smoke stopped their evolutions, and became mounds of gray and white, solid-looking, like dirty ice cream.

Around Udet, rows of lined faces were illuminated by frozen rocket light.

An arrow pointed to a blurred patch of white near the base of the MS-IC; it was just below the “A” of the red-stenciled “USA” on the wide hull of the booster.

Dana said, “At 0.687 seconds into the flight, photographic data shows a strong puff of vapor spurting from the lower casing of the MS-IC, just above the engine fairing.” Dana glanced over his shoulder, wrinkling his nose. “As you can see here. The two pad cameras that would have recorded the precise location of the puff were inoperative. Computer graphic analysis of film from other cameras indicated the initial vapor came from that level of the MS-IC where the feed from the oxidizer tank exits the propellant tank.”

The MS-IC contained two huge cryogenic tanks. The oxygen tank was uppermost, and the fuel lower. Fat suction lines carried liquid oxygen through the kerosene tank for combustion in the five huge F-1A engines at the base of the stack. Dana was implying that there had been some kind of problem with that feed.

The film started again, in extreme slow motion; the smoke evolved around the Saturn with glacial slowness. White arrows continued to prod at the offending vapor patches at the base of the MS-IC.

“Six more distinctive puffs of vapor were recorded between 0.836 and 2.501 seconds. The multiple puffs in this sequence occurred at about four times per second, approximating the frequency of the structural load dynamics and resultant stack flexing…”

The wretched “stretch”!

“You can also see shock diamonds in the F-1A exhaust, another symptom of the stack resonance. At 3.375 seconds the last vapor was visible below the Solid Rocket Boosters and became indiscernible as it mixed with rocket plumes and the surrounding atmosphere. Other vapors in this area were determined to be melting ice from the bottom of the MS-IC or steam from the rocket exhaust in the pad’s sound-suppression water trays…”

The film began to run at normal speed.

The Saturn tipped away from the launch tower, and rolled, as programmed, onto its back. Udet could see, between the four brilliant stars of the Solid Rocket Booster bells, the pale, almost invisible, smokeless fire of the kerosene-oxygen main engines.

Dana went on, “At this point the first indications were received, via telemetry, of a significant reduction in propellant flow to the MS-IC main engines.”

The image froze again. The audience stirred; the sudden cessation of the launch sequence’s hypnotic flow was jarring. An arrow pointed to the five main engine bells.

“The first visible indication of main engine thrust reduction was detected on image-enhanced film at 58.788 seconds into the flight. It is visible in this frame, as a dimming of the plume from the right-hand F-1A bell — just here.

“One film frame later from the same camera, the reduction is visible without image enhancement.” The engine bell had grown dark, and its four brothers were also clearly ailing. “At about the same time telemetry showed a differential between the pressures in the main engine chambers. The right-most booster chamber pressure was lowest, confirming the growing reduction in the flow of propellant.

“At 62 seconds into the flight, the control system was responding to counter the forces caused by the differential thrusts from the main engines…”

The film ran on, slowly; the main engines flickered or died, but the Solid Rocket Boosters still blazed with fire. The stresses on the stack were enormous as the SRBs tried to compensate for the loss of the main engines.

No change in the attitude of the complete stack was visible to the naked eye. Udet knew, however, that at this point his doomed Saturn was already fighting for its life.

Dana cleared his throat, and pushed his glasses against his face; his gestures were small, precise, almost apologetic. “Analysis has shown that the primary cause of the malfunction evident at this point in the flight was the feeder valves set in the underside of the MS-IC’s oxygen tank, which carry oxidizer into the feeders to the main engines. Tests have indicated that under certain circumstances, the valve design could go into a ‘flutter’ regime and effectively shut off the supply of oxidizer, resulting in a total failure of all F-1A engines. As was observed here. The frequency of the possible flutter has been shown to be close to the frequency of the launch ‘stretch’ and to oscillations caused by instabilities in the burning of the Solid Rocket Boosters…”

Udet massaged the bridge of his nose, trying to control the irritation that flared within him. We know this. My team at Marshall, and the contractors independently, determined this root cause of the fault within an hour of the malfunction. The Saturn had already been vibrating, from the “stretch,” at three or four cycles a second just after launch. Then one of the Solid Rocket Boosters had started vibrating lengthwise, at about the same frequency. Such oscillations had been observed before. But the coincidence of frequency was unfortunate, for that frequency, as it turned out, had been just right to set up standing waves in the valve system carrying liquid oxygen into the main engines…

We know all this, and we are already working to correct the problem. Have you no more wisdom to add than this, Dr. Dana?

But Dana was continuing; he was describing how some preliminary tests, carried out during the MS-IC’s design stage, had indicated the possibility of a resonant flutter — although no change in the stage’s design had resulted — and he even referred to the problems encountered with the Apollo-N flight, when similar resonance problems had caused that stack to pogo.

That link with the fatal Apollo-N mishap showed Udet clearly which way the report was shaping.

It was ludicrous, of course; anyone who understood anything of the complexity of a ship like a Saturn — with its millions of moving parts — would recognize the impossibility of adjusting the design to counter every possible problem that could be conjured up. There was never the time, or the resources; the realistic way was to balance the risks, and exercise judgment as to what is acceptable, and what must be changed. Why, if one waited for the perfect rocket, one would never fly at all!

Udet felt enormously tired. He was sixty-eight years old. And sometimes — especially since the death of von Braun — he wondered whether the battle was still worth the effort, whether he still had the strength for the endless struggle to convince the Americans to accept the great rockets he was building for them.

Udet had donned something of the mantle of von Braun, since Wernher’s retirement a decade earlier. He had even inherited Wernher’s office, there on the tenth floor of Marshall’s headquarters building. But Udet had no pretensions; he knew that he was no substitute for Wernher. The Americans had adored von Braun: they responded to him, Udet thought ungraciously, as they did to evangelists, and the salesmen of cars. And, it seemed, questions about the Germans’ past — possible complicity in “war crimes” during the Peenemьnde period — were irrelevant for Wernher.

Well, Wernher was dead. And it was different for Udet. He knew that, try as he might, he could not help but project an aloofness, an aura of the disdainful Prussian aristocrat. The Americans did not trust Udet; and they appeared to find it much easier to believe ill of him than ever they had of von Braun.

And meanwhile, he had been forced to watch as Gregory Dana had risen in status and power within the organization. His fatherhood of the lost hero James, and the fact that his once-vilified mission mode had been chosen as the basis for the new Mars program, had raised Dana’s status almost to national celebrity.

And Dana continued to pronounce his damning testimony on Udet’s life-work, his tone dry, level, like a soulless prosecutor.

Udet’s dark, dwarfish twin.

“Beginning at about 78 seconds, a series of events occurred extremely rapidly that terminated the flight. Telemetered data indicate a wide variety of flight system actions that support the visual evidence of the photos, as the Saturn struggled against the forces that were destroying it.

“At 78.9 seconds the lower strut linking Solid Rocket Booster Number Four and the MS-IC was severed or pulled away. This failure was evidently caused by the abnormal stresses placed on the structure by the failure of the main engines. SRB Four rotated around its upper attachment strut. This rotation is indicated by divergent yaw and pitch rates between the Solid Rocket Boosters.

“At 79.14 seconds a circumferential white vapor pattern was observed blooming from the side of the MS-IC. This was the beginning of the structural failure of the MS-IC’s propellant tank, which culminated in the separation of the aft dome of the tank. This released massive amounts of RP-1 from the tank and created a sudden forward thrust of about 2.8 million pounds, pushing the propellant tank upward through the motor casing toward the S-II. At about the same time the rotating SRB Four impacted the lower part of the MS-IC’s liquid oxygen tank. This structure failed at 78.137 seconds, as evidenced by the white vapors appearing in this area…”

The images on the screen continued to unroll, frame by frame, their pace matching Dana’s dry, analytical delivery. The pictures were blurred and shrouded by the haze of distance, and a fog of escaping vapor, but it was just possible to see how the Solid Rocket Booster was swiveling around, and its conical tip was puncturing the flank of the central first stage.

Then brilliance erupted, within the space of one frame, engulfing the image.

“Within milliseconds there was a massive, almost explosive, burning of the propellant streaming from the bottom of the failed tank. At this point in its trajectory, while traveling at Mach 1.92 at an altitude of 46,000 feet, the Saturn was totally enveloped in the explosive burn. The Apollo spacecraft’s reaction control system also ruptured, and a hypergolic burn of its propellants occurred; the reddish brown colors of this burn are visible on the edge of the main fireball. As you see here. The second stage also ruptured at this point, adding one million pounds of propellant and oxidizer to the fireball. The stack, under severe dynamic loads, had by now disintegrated into several large sections, which emerged from the fireball; separate sections which can be identified from film include the instrumentation module, trailing a mass of umbilical lines, and the first stage’s main engine section with the engines still trailing vapor…”

The upper sections of the Saturn didn’t explode. They had fallen out of the disintegrating stack and hit air, which, at such velocities, was like a wall. The Saturn was simply smashed to pieces by the air.

The screen showed the image which had filled TV screens for days: a huge orange-and-gray fireball of the explosion, hovering in the Florida air; the four Solid Rocket Boosters emerging from the explosion, still burning, veering crazily across the sky and trailing their frozen lightning, plumes of white smoke.

Dana was still talking. “At 110 seconds after launch, the Range Safety Officer caused the destruction of the Solid Rocket Boosters. Had this been a manned flight the emergency escape tower should have hauled the Apollo Command Module free on the loss of the main engines. Had the launch escape system failed, however, and arguing from the evidence of some system components later recovered from the Atlantic, it is possible that the crew capsule might have been thrown clear of the fireball intact. There is no reason to suppose that such a module might suffer an internal explosion, or significant heat or fire damage. The most severe damage would probably have come from the high forces generated by impact with the water, rather than by the explosion itself…”

Then, for the first time, there were rumblings of complaint from the audience.

Udet found himself on his feet.

“I must protest at the tone of this last section. This is entirely speculative. AS-5B04 was not manned, thank God, and if it had been we have no reason to believe the launch escape system might have failed, and I see no purpose in hypothesizing in such detail, and in public, about the fate of the crew of a manned flight.” He was aware of the orange light of the fireball — still frame-frozen on the big screen — gleaming on his glasses, his cheekbones.

Joe Muldoon, at his moderator’s desk, said, “Will you let me take that, Gregory?”

Dana shrugged his compliance.

Muldoon turned to the audience, his lean face underlit by the lamp on his desk. “Now, Hans, I don’t think we’re in a position where we’re going to be able to hide on this. We have to discuss the implications for the manned program. And we have to face the fact that there was evidence of potential problems on earlier VB tests, with solid fuel burns inducing destabilizing oscillations…”

Udet found himself shouting. “But the AS-5B04 loss was not caused by a Solid Rocket Booster failure!”

“But Solid Rocket Booster problems contributed,” Muldoon said. “We’ve seen that. And it seems to me that the whole design is inherently more risky than the old liquid-fuel configurations. Remember we survived Saturn V launches in which we lost whole engines. But if you’re sitting on top of those damn unstoppable Solid Rocket Boosters, it’s not a question of if you go, just which direction. None of us is arguing that we should stop flying the upgraded Saturns; it’s just that we have to be honest about the consequences of the compromises we’ve made in its design. Because if we don’t come clean now, the folks on the Hill are going to hang our hides out to dry.”

Muldoon looked around the room, taking in all of the delegates. “You know the situation we’re in, folks; the budget deficit is running so high this year that every discretionary program — including Ares — is under pressure, all the time, every budget round. Now, you may say that isn’t fair — that our mistakes get magnified out of proportion, while the much bigger foul-ups of other agencies are hidden — but we’re a high-profile agency; you have to accept it as a fact of our lives. So, we have to be squeaky clean. We’ll take questions at the close, folks; I want to move this along now…”

Udet, still standing, did not trust himself to speak. Compromises. You talk of compromises. We were compromised from the beginning. Our Saturn VB fuding from the start has been half the projections we requested. Half! Without compromises you would not be flying into space now. And yet you bleat about the consequences, about the loss of a single launcher!

He felt he could bear no more of this. He clambered past the people beside him, apologizing, and reached the aisle. He stalked toward the back of the room.

Dear God. Are we really reduced to such finger-pointing inanity? All I ask — all I have ever asked — is that you give me adequate tools, and I will finish the job. Achieve the dream. Even with half the resources, I will find you solutions! But what I will not — cannot — achieve is a miracle, I cannot guarantee you perfect safety and reliability. When will you people understand that?

It seemed a long way to the door Nobody was prepared to meet his eyes.

Dana’s patient presence at the podium, unseen, was like a wound in Udet’s side.

Saturday, June 5, 1982

It all came to a head.

It was their wedding anniversary, for God’s sake. And although JK had flowers for her, and a card, and a kiss on the cheek in the morning, Jennine knew from long experience that it was his secretary, Bella, who scheduled such events in his diary and would buy the card and whatever. There was no thought from JK at all.

This evening they were supposed to be going out for dinner. They did that together maybe twice a year. But JK didn’t come home. That wasn’t so unusual. When Jennine phoned his office, she got Bella, who politely told her he wasn’t at the Columbia site. That was code for: he’s out with the guys.

And so it proved. JK came rolling in, after eleven, as oiled as you like, parking his T-bird at a crazy angle in the driveway.

“You shouldn’t drive like that,” Jennine said. She hated the querulous tone that came into her voice at such moments.

“Oh, God, the dinner. Honey, I’m sorry,” JK said. “I clean forgot. We’ll do it tomorrow. Okay?”

No, you idiot. It’s not okay. And right now, I have the feeling that it never was.

She went to bed.

After an hour or so he joined her. He touched her face, tenderly, and ran his hand down her nightgown, until he had cupped her breast.

She turned away. She was much too tense, too upset. And anyhow she could smell the stale rum on his breath, oozing out of his pores.

But at least he was home. At that thought she softened, as she drifted toward sleep. At least he’s come home. Maybe in the morning, I might be able to persuade him not to go in quite so early for once.

Before she fell asleep, the phone rang. JK picked it up immediately. “Lee.”

She had followed the development of Columbia’s MEM program. Actually, since JK brought work home most nights, and since he routinely held business meetings at their home — and always without any warning — she could hardly help but follow the program.

Once, JK took her out to Boston, where the Avco company were manufacturing the MEM’s ablative heat shield. It was a fascinating place. The ablative stuff was an epoxy resin, something the Avco engineers called “Avcoat 5026-39.” To hold this in place, the engineers constructed a titanium honeycomb, which would be bonded to the capsule’s lower surface, and they pumped the epoxy into each individual cell with a caulking gun. It had to be done by hand; the engineers worked their way across the surface until they had filled in all two hundred thousand cavities. If an X-ray inspection revealed a bubble, that cell would be cleaned out with a dentist’s drill and refilled.

Jennine watched this through a glass picture window. It was a startlingly medieval scene, this slow and painstaking handcrafting. And she wondered how it must feel to work on something — to touch and shape it with your fingertips — knowing that it might, one day, enter the air of Mars.

Avco’s testing process would start with handheld blowtorches, and finish up with rocket-propelled power dives into the Earth’s atmosphere…

But such occasions, when JK took the trouble to share his work with her, were the exception, not the rule. Mostly she had to endure his absences, silently hostess his business meetings.

Jennine had married JK back in 1955.

At the time he had been working for a master’s in aeronautical engineering at Caltech, the California Institute of Technology, out in Pasadena.

They got married in a Catholic church close to Jennine’s parents’ home in New Orleans. She had been starting to make her way as a secretary in a large law practice in the city. But she gave it all up to go with JK, to support him and his career a thousand miles away. That was what you did in 1955.

Jennine’s parents gave them money to rent a car for a couple of weeks, and so they drove back east, through Vermont, to watch the fall coloring the leaves. Whenever the fall came she thought of that honeymoon.

After the honeymoon they flew west, and JK drove her out to Pasadena, to the little house he’d rented.

When they arrived, there was a group of JK’s pals waiting there. She thought it must be some kind of welcome home party. But no; it turned out there was a problem in the Caltech wind tunnel.

So JK had kissed her and gone off to the lab, leaving her standing in the driveway with all her luggage. JK didn’t get home until dawn.

As it turned out, that honeymoon in Vermont, twenty-seven years ago, had been the last holiday Jennine and JK had taken together.

And this damn Mars program was the toughest project JK had ever worked on. JK was at heart a technician, and a hands-on manager, at his best — so Jennine thought — when working with comparatively small teams, at one site. But now he was running a national effort, one of the most complex engineering projects ever undertaken.

Even beyond the complexity of what was going on at Columbia itself there were all the subcontractors Columbia had to deal with: Honeywell working on stabilization and control (not Hughes, JK would point out with relish), Garrett Corporation on the cabin environment, Rocketdyne, a subsidiary of Rockwell, providing the main propulsion systems, Pratt and Whitney developing the fuel cells, and so on.

JK wanted to avoid the thousands of uncoordinated changes that had pretty much paralyzed Rockwell’s development of Apollo for a while in the 1960s. So he had instigated a change control mechanism. And that had brought him endless conflict with the astronauts — including Joe Muldoon — who, in the Apollo days, had gotten used to ruling the roost.

And on it went.

Once, JK showed her a PERT chart for the MEM development, a project plan with all the tasks linked together in their logical order. It was just a mass of computer printouts, little boxes, and spidery connecting arrows.

“What do you do with all this?”

JK laughed and tipped the plan toward a waste bin. “Nothing! Haven’t got time to read it!”

The project was a monster, and JK was trying to wrestle it to the ground.

She could see that the whole damn thing was bending Lee in half. But to relax, he generally wouldn’t think of coming home to her. Instead he would go out with Bob Rowen or Jack Morgan or some such, out to some Newport Beach hot spot like the Balboa Bay Club, and he’d come home in the small hours roaring drunk and sleep it off. He wasn’t an alcoholic, she believed; the drinking was just one more example of the way JK’s life was never stable, never routine, but swung constantly between crazy extremes.

And the next morning he would be back at his desk, hungover or not, with his two cups of sugary coffee inside him.

The night was so quiet that she could hear both halves of the phone conversation.

“JK, you’d better get down here,” Julie Lye’s insect voice whispered. “I’m at the pressure test of the oxidizer tank. We’ve had a failure. Catastrophic. I’m looking into the test pit right now. We had seven tons of nitrogen tet down there. Now, all we’ve got is a few fragments of titanium stuck in the walls.”

“All right. I’ll be straight over.” JK began to rattle out instructions while he hunted for his pants. Lye was to begin with a scrutiny of the evidence of the explosion. Just by looking at the distribution of the pieces it was possible to figure out the order in which the tank had come apart. Then there would have to be more structural tests. They should pressure up other test tanks with plain water instead of the nitrogen tet. That way, they could tell if the failure was due to something mechanical — like a faulty weld — or some kind of chemical reaction to do with the propellant. And Lye should get onto the tanks’ manufacturer, a division of General Motors out in Indianapolis. The manufacturers should run identical tests. That way, they could see if the failure had been caused by damage in shipment, or some kind of local phenomenon…

He was still barking out instructions as he left the bedroom. He threw the phone back on the receiver cradle, and left the house at a run.

He didn’t say good-bye to Jennine.

Jennine lay there, trying to summon up sleep. It didn’t work.

She felt as if something was cracking inside her, as if she was one of JK’s goddamn oxidant tanks, pumped full of pressure.

She got out of bed and walked barefoot to the bathroom. She had a couple of bottles of tranquilizers there.

She looked at herself in the mirror. She saw a slack, sagging woman, with worry lines etched into her face and tired, graying, mousy hair.

She took the pills, popping them into her mouth like jelly beans. Viewing the image in the mirror, the little pills pushing into the small sour-looking mouth, was like watching somebody else, someone on TV maybe. She couldn’t feel anything.

When she’d done, she threw the empty bottles into the trash and went back to bed.

Even then, sleep wouldn’t come.

After a time, she reached out for the phone and dialed Jack Morgan’s home number. By a miracle he was there, and not throwing rum down his throat in some bar. She told him what she’d done.

At around 6 A.M., JK came running in, with his hair mussed and no tie and his shirt sticking out of his pants.

Jack Morgan was sitting on the bed, with an overcoat thrown over his pajamas, rubbing Jennine’s limbs. “Where the hell have you been? I called you an hour ago.”

JK started talking about the oxygen tank, and batches of contaminated nitrogen tet, and all the rest of it; but Jack just glared at him.

So JK broke off, and then he started trying to take command. “Have you called a hospital? What about a stomach pump?” It was typical JK. Arrive too late, then order everyone else around.

“She doesn’t need a pump,” Jack snapped back at him. “But she’s going to sleep for a hell of a long time. She should be asleep now. And then I want her to go into the hospital, for observation.” He nodded at the bedside table. “I’ve left a number there.”

JK, looking restless and bewildered, sat on the bed. Then he took Jennine’s hand and began to rub, as Jack had been doing, along the length of her forearm. His hands were warm, but they were trembling, and his touch was uncertain, wavering between too hard and too soft. She managed to smile at him, and he seemed to get a little confidence, and the strokes evened out.

“This is a hell of a thing,” he said, his voice thin. “A hell of a thing.”

“Listen to me,” Jack Morgan said. “You’ve got to get your head out of your ass, JK. You’ve got to start paying some attention to your family. And yourself, come to that. Or Jennine is going to walk out on you, and nobody’s going to blame her. In fact, I’ll be here to drive her away.

“I’ll come back in a couple of hours. You take care, Jennine.” And he went to get his coat, and she heard the door bang behind him.

JK looked devastated. He really hadn’t seen this coming, she realized.

“So,” he said stiffly. “I guess it was a cry for help, huh.”

Oh, JK. Pop psychology slogans. She closed her eyes and thought of the face in the mirror, the steady stream of pills passing her lips. Have I really become such a clichй?

JK sat silently for a while, rubbing her arm. And then he began jabbering about the tank failure. “It was amazing,” he said. “The tanks only blew when they were filled with nitrogen tet. So we knew there had to be some kind of chemical thing going on. But the tanks would only blow here, at Newport. We ran identical tests over at the manufacturers’, in Indianapolis, and zippo.

“So we started doing a trace on the nitrogen tet. It comes from a big refinery run by the Air Force. And guess what we found? The stuff we had at Newport was from a later batch than the stuff at Indianapolis. Our stuff was purer. The Indianapolis batch had impurities, a tiny amount of water in it. So we set up another lab test back at Newport. And we found that when the nitrogen tet is too pure — better than 99 percent — it becomes corrosive! It attacks titanium! But add a dash of water, like in the Indianapolis batch, and the problem goes away. Anyhow, to hell with it. I think we’re going to switch to oxygen-methane for our propellant. The performance is okay, and it’s nontoxic, and we can store it easily for months in space, even if it isn’t hypergolic…”

Jennine lay there listening to this, with her arm in JK’s hands. He was full of his story by now, with the technological sleuthing and all the rest of it, and she could feel his hand jerk around, animated by the storytelling, quite oblivious of her flesh lying passively inside his.

She thought of the immense project, the pieces of the Mars ship flowing into the Newport assembly bays from every state in the Union: fuel and oxygen tanks from Buffalo and Boulder, instruments from Newark and Cedar Rapids, valves from San Fernando, electronics from Kalamazoo and Lima. And probably every one of those pieces left an invisible trail behind it, of drunkenness, and heart attacks, and smashed-up marriages.

She thought, oddly, that JK really ought to understand what had happened to her.

It’s destructive testing, JK. That’s all. Destructive testing.

Tuesday, August 10, 1982

“You’re not going to let me fly.”

Joe Muldoon sat back in his office chair, which creaked under his weight. There was an empty Dr. Pepper can on his desk, out of place among the executive stationery and leather blotters; he grabbed the can and crushed it with a quick movement. “It isn’t like that, Natalie. I told you; I wanted to explain all this to you in person, myself, rather than let you hear it another way…”

“I appreciate that. But you’re not going to let me fly.”

“You’re not going to be the only disappointed dude in JSC. Look, I told you: because we lost that damn Saturn VB, and because we’ve had our budget pared even more — goddamn it, Natalie, the whole country’s been in recession for a year; that’s hardly my fault — because of all that we’re having to compress the schedule. And we’ve still got a deadline to meet. The crew of the first E-class mission will now fly a mission we’re calling D-prime, which will combine the objectives of the old D and E-classes. And—”

“So the D mission, my space soak mission, is gone. Joe, I know as much about Mars as anyone in the Astronaut Office. And you’re not going to let me fly.”

Muldoon made a visible effort to control himself. “Natalie, you have to believe this. It isn’t personal. Except that I don’t think this is such a loss. It’s precisely because you know so much that you’re a lot more use to me here, on the ground, than hanging around in some tin can in LEO watching the paintwork yellow. I need you here, Natalie. To teach us about Mars. To remind us why we’re going there in the first place.”

She thought it over, trying to contain her anger. “All right. What choice have I got? But I’m going to continue with my training, and my time in the sims, and I’m going to grab every bit of flight experience I can. And if you’re telling me now you’re going to stop me doing that, I’ll be walking out of that door, and I won’t be back. Mars expert or not.”

He held his hands up. “Enough! You’ve got yourself a deal, Natalie.”

She narrowed her eyes as a new suspicion entered her head. “ERA,” she said.

He looked baffled. “Huh?”

“The Equal Rights Amendment. It was thrown out in June.” She felt her anger blossom inside her, an unreasonable rage. “The political climate’s changing. Is that why you feel able to pick on me now?”

“Fuck it, Natalie, that’s got nothing to do with it!” He leaned forward, visibly angry, unhappy. “You know, you, and the other women, would get on a lot better around here if you didn’t walk around with such goddamn immense chips on your shoulders.”

She glared at him. Muldoon sat tall in his chair, trim, sharp, irritated, studying her frankly, his blue eyes empty of calculation. He really believed that he was benefiting her with such advice, she saw; he couldn’t see anything wrong with what he’d said.

She didn’t trust herself to speak.

Later, in the dingy apartment she was renting in Timber Cove, she tried to get drunk, and failed.

Her life was going steadily down the toilet. At thirty-four she was getting old as a practicing scientist, and her academic career was probably beyond repair; her commitment to the space program — all those hours in sims and survival training — meant the time and energy she’d had to devote to her research just wasn’t enough, and she knew that her papers, briefer and sparser every year, just weren’t enough to enable her to prosper if she returned to a university.

And what had it all been for? She’d just lost her one chance — limited as it was — to get some genuine space experience.

She was farther from Mars than ever.

It looked as if she’d blown it, as if she’d made one damn foul-up in her life after another.

Mike Conlig was ancient history. But she was still on her own. Generally that suited her.

But, God, she missed Ben.

Monday, December 6, 1982

The MEM simulator at Newport was an ungainly assemblage, without much resemblance to the sleek lines of the final spacecraft shape. It looked like a car smash, surrounded by the blocky forms of mainframe computers, all laid out in this corner of the echoing, refurbished manufacturing shop.

Ralph Gershon clambered out of the simulator, pissed as all hell. “That fucking thing is a lemon,” Gershon said. “A big fat lemon, JK.”

JK Lee was waiting for him at the hatch, his round face creased with anxiety. “Christ. Talk to me, Ralph.”

“Look,” Gershon said, “the simulator’s supposed to match the real thing — that’s the whole point — it’s no good looking for your left-hand joystick here when on the real thing it would be placed over there. JK, you have to keep these things up-to-date with the changes you’re making to the design.”

“Hell, I know that, Ralph. But what can I do? The MEM design is still so fluid that there are always a couple of hundred changes outstanding, and so the sim never catches up with the real thing…”

“Oh, it’s worse than that,” Gershon said. He pulled off his gloves and jammed them in his helmet. “This thing doesn’t even make sense in itself. The changes you have made aren’t consistent.” He looked into Lee’s anguished, stressed-out face; his sympathy for the man struggled with his anger. “Look, Lee, I’m going to raise Cain about this. That’s my job, damn it. It’s impossible to gain genuine experience with such a flawed sim — in fact, in my view the simulator itself is a severe danger to the overall progress of the project.”

Lee led him away from the sim and lit up a cigarette. “Oh, Christ, tell me about it. Change is my bugbear, Ralph. Change is killing me.” He painted a picture of a whole industry plowing its way toward Mars, a vast national network of craftsmanship and expertise slowly coming to focus on a single problem, and all of it flowing through this one site. “We’re working in places no one has touched before,” Lee said. “It’s not surprising nothing is right the first time. So we get a thousand change requests a week, from all across the country. And every time we change something, every piece that component touches has to be modified as well. And I’ll tell you who the worst offenders are.” He eyed Gershon. “Your good buddies in the Astronaut Office.”

Gershon laughed. He wasn’t surprised to hear it.

The astronauts still exerted a lot of power, official and unofficial. It was their asses on the line, after all. Lee was trying to get them all to submit to his change request process, just like everybody else, to keep everything orderly. But he was also aware of the need to keep this key group sweet. So he’d set up a private lounge for the astronauts, just down from his office, with a shower and a couple of fold-out beds, a place where they could sack out and hide from the press. And he’d take them home with him and have Jennine throw swank dinner parties for them, and make a hell of a fuss over them, and laud them to the skies. And the astronauts would come away thinking IK Lee was the greatest thing to have happened to the space program since the invention of Velcro.

At least, Gershon reflected, until he bounced their next request for a change.

Then Lee spotted something else, in another part of the shop floor. He stalked over to an operator of a six-ton turret lathe, who was shaving thin slices off an intricate aluminum sculpture. The thing looked beautiful, like a work of art in itself; Gershon, who was supposed to be an expert on MEM systems, couldn’t place it or identify its function. Lee picked up the engineering drawing the guy was working from. Then he called Gershon over; Lee was agitated, and the operator avoided Gershon’s eyes, obviously embarrassed. Gershon felt sorry for him.

“Look at this,” Lee said, waving the drawing in front of Gershon.

“What about it?”

“We’ve got a policy that any drawing with more than a dozen changes has to be redrawn. This one must have over a hundred, for Christ’s sake. And that’s not the worst of it.” He picked up the component the operator had been modifying. “This fucking thing is obsolete! I know it is! Even before it’s been manufactured!” He threw the thing to the floor, where it landed with a clatter.

The operator, baffled, wiped his hands on a rag and looked around for his supervisor.

Lee stalked away, a tight little knot of tension; Gershon walked with him, his flight helmet under his arm.

Lee looked quite gaunt, his skin stretched tight as if by wires under the flesh, and his posture was stooped over. Lee was a man just eaten up by nervous energy and adrenaline.

Gershon had come to spend a lot of time at Newport as the MEM had moved through its development. He’d served as a guinea pig for the life sciences boys, and he’d crawled in and out of hatches and down ladders to sandpits stained red like Mars dust.

He’d spent hours in plywood-and-paint mock-ups of the spacecraft interior, trying to imagine that this was real, that he was all but alone on the far side of the Solar System, trying to bring a spacecraft down to Mars. Just like Pete Conrad.

He wanted nobody to know the MEM better than he did. And he was achieving his goal.

He’d become aware that the whole place, the whole of Columbia Aviation, was kind of high-octane, driven forward by the relentless, destructive energy of JK Lee. And under the high pressure and the enormous complexity of the project, the place always seemed on the point of being overwhelmed.

But Gershon still believed, as he had at the time of the RFP, that the Columbia vision of the MEM — inspired and led by JK Lee — was the best shot they had of building something that might actually work sufficiently well to fly people down to Mars a few years from, now.

Gershon had been tough on Columbia himself. But basically he wanted the project to succeed. He wanted to fly to Mars, damn it, not hang JK Lee’s scalp on his wall.

But, even as he framed that thought, he tripped over a wire, stretched across the floor. And when he looked down he saw more wires and loose components and discarded equipment: bits of spacecraft, scattered over the floor like detritus, washed up by the overwhelming tide of specification changes

Monday, February 21, 1983

Gershon, flight helmet under his arm, walked around the training vehicle. Natalie York walked with him, her hair lifted by the breeze, her sunglasses hiding her eyes.

Ralph Gershon couldn’t help himself. “That’s the MLTV? Holy shit,” he said.

Ted Curval, from Phil Stone’s prime crew, was the senior astronaut assigned to oversee them for the day. He just grinned. “Your regulation Mars Landing Training Vehicle, Number Three. Brutal, ain’t she?”

The Mars Landing Training Vehicle was an open framework, set on six landing legs. Gershon could see a down-pointing jet at the center, surrounded by a cluster of fuel tanks. Reaction control nozzles were clustered at the four corners of the frame, like bunches of metallic berries, and there were two big auxiliary rockets, also downward-pointing. The pilot’s cockpit was an ejector seat partially enclosed by aluminum walls, with a big, bold NASA logo painted on the side, under a black-stenciled “three.” The whole thing stood maybe ten feet high, with the legs around twelve feet apart. There was no skin, so you could see into the guts of the thing, jet and rockets and fuel tanks and plumbing and cabling and all; it was somehow obscene, as if splayed.

In the low morning sunlight the bird’s complicated shadow stretched off across the tarmac of the wide runway.

“Shit,” Gershon said again, coming back to Curval. “It’s like something out of a fucking circus.”

“Tell me about it,” said Curval. “But it’s the nearest thing we have to a MEM trainer. You want to fly a MEM, you have to learn to handle one of these things, guy.” Curval was grinning, laughing at him.

Ted Curval was one of the Old Heads. A classic astronaut profile: a Navy test pilot, he’d even been an instructor at Pax River, and he’d logged a lot of time in space already. In the endless battle to climb up the Ares selection ladder, Curval had the great advantage of being from an earlier recruitment class than Gershon, and had already accrued plenty of live, free-flying MLTV experience. While the best Gershon had managed, for all his angling and hours spent at Columbia, had been some time on the tethered facility at Langley, where a MEM-type mock-up dangled from cables.

So Curval was in Phil Stone’s crew and was on his way to Mars. And Ralph Gershon was still on the outside looking in.

But what the hell. As of today, Ralph Gershon would be able to add MLTV experience to his list of accomplishments. So screw Ted Curval, and all the other complacent assholes.

As far as Gershon was concerned the contest wasn’t over until the bird left the pad, on April 21, 1985.

Gershon jammed his helmet on his head. He jumped up into the MLTV’s open frame. With a single twist he was able to lower himself into the single seat. “How about that. Just my size.”

Curval stepped forward. “Hey, Gershon—”

Gershon was strapping himself in. “The seat’s a Weber zero-zero, right?”

“Come on down from there, man, you’re not prepared. You’re not supposed to—”

“And the jet back there is a General Electric CF-700-2V turbofan. Come on, Ted, I know the equipment. I’ve come out here to fly the thing, not listen to you yack about it.” He glanced down at the control panel: a few instruments, a CRT, a couple of handsets. Just like the sims.

He found himself blinking; the sun was strong, almost directly in his face, and his eyes hurt. On the Plexiglas windshield in front of him he could see reticles — fine lines — etched in there, labeled with numbers -

But suddenly the pain in his eyes amplified. “Yow.” He threw his arm across his face. His eyes itched unbearably, and started to flood.

“For a start,” Curval called up drily, “you can close up your visor. You’re being hit by hydrogen peroxide leaking from the attitude controls. You sure you know what you’re doing, guy?”

Gershon snapped shut his visor and squeezed his eyes closed. “Let me bust my neck, Ted. It’s my neck. What do you care?”

“Okay,” Curval said at length. “Okay, you win.”

Curval, with York, went over to the control truck and clambered in the back. In a moment, Gershon heard Curval’s crisp voice sounding in his flight headset. “Okay, Ralph. What we’re going to do is take the MLTV up fifty feet, twice around the block, and back home again, just as nice as pie. Just to let you get the feel of her. And then you’re coming out for an eye bath. You got that?”

“Sure.”

Gershon kicked in the jet, and there was a roar at his back. Dust billowed up off the ground, into his face. Vapor puffed out of the attitude nozzles, as if this was some unlikely steam engine, a Victorian engineer’s fantasy of flight.

The runway tarmac fell away. The lift was a brief, comforting surge. The MLTV was like a noisy elevator.

Gershon whooped. “Whee-hoo! Now we is hangin’ loose!”

Of MLTV Number Three’s four cousins, two had crashed during the last half year. The pilots had ejected and walked away. Nobody was sure about the cause. Well, vertical takeoff and land vehicles were notoriously unstable; maybe you had to expect a percentage of failures. The hope was that these crashes weren’t showing up fundamental flaws in the design of the MEM itself.

Anyhow, the MLTV itself still needed test flights. Nobody was too keen to risk it, so far away from the Mars landing itself.

Nobody except somebody so desperate to get on the selection roster he’d do almost anything.

Gershon took the MLTV up to maybe sixty feet and slowed the ascent.

The principles of the strange craft were obvious enough. You stood on your jet’s tail. You kept yourself stable with the four peroxide reaction clusters, the little vernier rockets spaced around the frame, squirting them here and there. In fact, he found, he didn’t even need to work the RCS control when he was trying to hold the craft level; the little rockets would fire by themselves, in little solenoid bangs and gas hisses.

He experimented with his controls. He had a full 360-degree yaw capability, he found; he could make the MLTV rotate around its vertical axis, back and forth. He whooped as the world wheeled around him. And he had some pitch and roll control: he could make the vehicle tip this way and that. But when he tried it, of course, the thrust of his single big downward jet was at an angle to the vertical, and he’d find himself shooting forward, or sideways, or backward across the painted tarmac -

Curval shouted in his ear. “Hey, take it easy!”

— and that was evidently the way you had to fly a MEM. But he had to take care not to tip too far in any direction, or he could feel the stability start to go.

The low sunlight got in his eyes, which were still watering, and made it hard to read his instruments.

He came to rest perhaps a hundred feet above the ground, facing the control truck.

“Maybe you should get back down here for that eye bath, Ralph,” Curval said.

“So how much fuel does this thing carry?”

“Enough for maybe seven minutes.”

“And how long would a landing sequence take?”

“Ralph—”

“Tell me.”

“Three, four minutes.”

He checked his watch; he’d been up no more than two minutes. Time to spare.

He took the MLTV straight up in the air.

“Ralph, get your ass down here!”

“There’s only one way I’m coming down, bubba, and that’s by a Powered Descent.”

“You’re not trained for this.”

“I’ve done over fifty sims. Come on, man. I know what I’m doing. This bird is working as sweet as a clock. Let me bring her in.”

Curval sounded as if he was choking. “Goddamn it, you asshole, you smash up that trainer, and I’ll sue you myself.”

Gershon grinned. “Sure.” What, after all, could Curval do? Nothing, as long as Gershon was in the trainer, and Curval was stuck on the ground.

Gershon took her to three hundred feet. “This high enough to initiate?”

He could hear Curval take a few breaths. “Find the button for the automatic control sequence.”

Gershon found it and pushed. The jet throttled back, and the MLTV dipped briefly. Then a new, throaty rocket roar opened up, and the trainer stabilized.

“All right,” Curval said. “Now, the secret of the MLTV is that it has two independent propulsion systems. Right now, your turbofan jet is throttling back to absorb two-thirds of your weight. So if everything else cut out, you’d fall under one-third of a G — just like on Mars. You got that? The jet is knocking out gravity, just enough to make it feel like Mars.”

“Sure.”

“But you don’t fall, because of the two hydrogen peroxide lift rockets under your ass which have just cut in to hold you up. And it’s the lift rockets which are emulating the landing system of the MEM, and that’s what you have to control to bring her in to land. You throttle down the rockets until you land. Like an ICBM trying to land on its tail.”

“Okay.”

“You have two more controls there, Ralph. Your attitude control on the right, and your thrust control on the left. You want to try those babies out?”

“Sure.”

The controls were familiar to Gershon from his sim runs. The attitude control moved in clicks; every time he turned the control the reaction rockets would bang and the MLTV would tip over, by a degree at a time. The thrust control was a toggle switch; every time Gershon closed it the lift rockets roared, to give it a delta-vee of a foot per second.

After the free-flight mode it was surprisingly difficult to handle the trainer; it was like being immersed in some viscous, sticky liquid. Because of the one-third effective gravity, he had to tip the bird three times as far as before to get the same push in any direction. And once he started moving, he just kept on going, until he changed the attitude again, and the craft took some time to respond because of the sluggishness. He found that he had to think out the simplest maneuver well in advance.

Flying like this — balancing on a rocket — was harder than he’d expected, harder than any of the sims had led him to believe. Everything he had painfully learned in a lifetime of flying planes, he realized, was useless.

“Okay, guy. Now, you’ve got a little computer up there running a PGNS program for you.” Curval pronounced it pings. PGNS was a guidance and navigation software package. “If you’re such a hotshot sim jockey, you don’t need me to tell you how you have to let the computer fly you down. All you get to do is to point and squirt—”

“I know it. Come on, Ted. I’m running out of juice out here. Let me bring this thing down.”

“Okay. First off, look through your windshield and pick a place you want to come down. And you’ll see a number on your CRT—”

Gershon peered out. He saw a fat number “three” stenciled on the tarmac, maybe a quarter mile away; it would be kind of fitting to come down slap in the middle of that, in this MLTV Number Three.

He used his attitude controller to tip up the MLTV until the numbered marking on his windshield overlying the target matched the number displayed by the computer on the CRT. “Thirty-eight,” he called out to Curval.

The MLTV started to float toward the target. Now, the PGNS program was computing a trajectory to take him to the “three” — or rather, to a position just above it.

“I don’t know the math behind it,” Curval said, “but you’ve got to know the basics, Ralph, to follow the logic of this thing, here.”

“I know it.”

“The PGNS works by the same system, basically, as the old Lunar Module. And there’s enough equipment on the MLTV, a computer and a radar, to let you do a complete Powered Descent. What you have is your computer taking your current position and velocity, and your target vector — which will be hovering, just above the ground — and it works out a nice smooth curve between the two for you to follow. Every couple of seconds, it recomputes, and figures out another curve. And the numbers it flashes up on the CRT tell you where to look on your reticles, and you should see your computed landing site right there, behind the mark.”

“I got it.” He swept across the tarmac, smooth, easy.

“If you want to change the landing site, you just use your attitude control to swivel and point your window, and the PGNS starts recomputing. You can set to ATTITUDE HOLD and just glide for a while, if you like. And you can change your down velocity by—”

“I know it, Ted. I—”

York came on the line. “Ralph. It’s Natalie. I think you ought to pull out.”

“Huh? Why?”

“You’re coming in too fast. Too low.”

He checked over the crude instrument panel. Everything looked fine to him. It was true he was coming in low and fast, but that was intentional; he knew all of Curval’s gassing hadn’t left him a lot of time, and he didn’t want to run out of fuel. “What’s your problem, York?”

“I think you’re going to overload the PGNS.”

“Come on. Everything up here is sweet as a nut.”

“It’s not as simple as that, Ralph.” She started gassing about best-fitting polynomials and higher-order curves, and a lot of other crap that went right over Gershon’s head.

He just tuned her out.

He watched the tarmac roll away under him. He swept along, the PGNS working smoothly; he barely needed to touch his controls. He felt a surge of success, of achievement. Here’s something else I can do, Ma. Another step on the long fucking ladder I’m climbing to Mars.

He’d just let her land, this first time through. He’d made his point; he didn’t want to antagonize Curval too much. Maybe he could persuade Curval to get the MLTV refueled and he could take her up again. Next time he’d try changing the landing site a couple of times.

That big old “three” started to loom up toward him, upside down as he looked at it, slightly obscured by the dust his rockets and the jet were kicking up.

The MLTV tipped itself back, to slow his forward velocity. He checked his numbers; the CRT display evolved smoothly to match what he saw through his Plexiglas screen.

The MLTV started to drop down as the auxiliary thrusters throttled themselves back.

Maybe that dip down was a little sharp.

York was still yammering in his ear. He needed to think. He watched his trajectory and tried to visualize where he was going.

Something was wrong, for sure. He was coming down too quickly.

He let another couple of seconds pass, checking his instinct. Yes: his trajectory was a tight downward curve that would bring him to the ground maybe a hundred yards short of the “three.”

Well, so what? Maybe the PGNS was out by a little; maybe all these damn reticles on the window needed recalibrating. If he came to a smooth halt in midair, but short of his target, he could blame fucked-up equipment…

But he wasn’t coming to any smooth halt. The lift rockets were cutting right back, and he was starting to fall, hard, toward the ground.

York and Curval were both shouting at him.

He watched the ground explode toward him, resolving into unwelcome detail, bits of dirt and dust and concrete ridging highlighted by the low morning sun.

He pushed the button to disable the automatics.

He didn’t waste time trying to straighten up the MLTV’s attitude; instead he just throttled up the turbofan jet and let it push him away from the ground. He felt a surge of acceleration, a good crisp couple of Gs, strong enough to keep him away from Earth’s unwelcome clutch.

He pulled up maybe a hundred feet from the ground. He throttled back the turbofan, and landed softly.

York ran toward the downed MLTV.

Technicians in white protective suits surrounded the trainer. Ralph Gershon had already climbed out. His hair had been compressed flat by his flight helmet, and his face, released from behind the visor, was round and shining with sweat. His eyes were bright red, she guessed from the dose of peroxide he’d taken earlier.

“You asshole, Gershon,” Curval said. “I told you that if you wrecked the trainer—” Curval towered over Gershon, his hands bunched into heavy fists. He started to chew out Gershon.

In a way the anger was justified, York knew; if Gershon, with his gung-ho heroics, had gotten himself killed, or smashed up a key piece of equipment like the MLTV, he could have put the whole program back a long way. York decided Gershon needed the bawling out, and she let it run on for a couple of minutes.

Then she stepped forward, putting herself between the two of them. “Actually,” she said, “none of it was Ralph’s fault.”

Curval turned to face her, still high on his anger.

“It was the landing program. I think it has a bug, Ralph. It nearly killed you.” She turned to Curval. “We can prove it by running Ralph’s trajectory through the sims a couple of times.”

Curval said, “What the hell do you know about programming?”

She sighed. “Not a hell of a lot. But I’m the big-brained, tight-assed college girl, remember? It’s not my field, but I’ve done enough math to know how routines like the PGNS work.

“Look.” She mimed the MLTV coming down. “The PGNS tries to fit a smooth curve between your position and velocity, at any time, and your destination. But it isn’t magic. It’s just math. And it has its limitations.

“The curves the program uses are polynomials. Smooth curves, with wiggles. The higher the order of the polynomial, the more the curve will wiggle about. You don’t have an infinite choice of curves; it’s like trying to fit a template out of a fixed set to suit the job. And the more complicated the data you feed the program, the more the polynomial will have to wiggle to fit your data points. You see?”

“So why is this bad?” Gershon asked with a kind of fake innocence. “And why do I need to know about it?”

She struggled to keep her patience. “Because the program doesn’t know the ground is there. It’s not like a human pilot, Ralph. It’s really pretty dumb. All PGNS is doing is fitting a curve to two positions in space. It doesn’t care how much the curve wiggles in between. And if one of those oscillations happens to carry you down into the ground, and up again—”

Curval whistled. “So because Ralph was flying low and fast—”

“The polynomial solutions, the best the PGNS could come up with, were high order. Full of wiggles.”

“Helicopter experience,” Gershon muttered.

York was confused by the non sequitur. “Huh?”

“Helicopter experience. That’s a nice bird, and it’s easy enough to fly. But it goes against everything, every instinct you build up flying a plane.” He obviously hadn’t listened to her. Or maybe he had taken in what she’d said, as much as he felt he needed to know, and had moved on to his next thought, the next step of his inexorable approach to Mars. “If that’s the way the MEM is going to handle, anybody with a lot of chopper proficiency is going to have an edge. That’s obvious.”

“And you have, I suppose?”

“No. But I will soon.”

His helmet under his arm, he stalked off across the tarmac, short, purposeful, bristling with determination, back toward the MLTV.

Curval scratched the back of his crew-cut head. “What a day. What an asshole.”

Maybe, York thought. But he looks to me like an asshole who is going to Mars.

November 1983

As he walked into the low fieldstone building that served as office space for Columbia’s executives, Gershon could all but smell the tension in the air.

The CARR was to be held in a big bleak conference room here. The CARR, the Contractor’s Acceptance Readiness Review, was a major event in the life of a spacecraft, the moment when it was judged to have met the specifications of the contract and became the property of the United States government. And since Spacecraft 009 was the first MEM designated for a manned mission — the man-rating D-prime flight — the pressure on Columbia Aviation to get this CARR right was intense.

There were a dozen senior NASA managers and a lot of the top people from Columbia involved in the project: Chaushui Xu, Bob Rowen, Julie Lye, and others. People Gershon had gotten to know well.

But the CARR was starting late.

JK Lee, the chairman for the day, hadn’t turned up for work yet. In fact, the word was, he hadn’t shown up at all since Friday afternoon. It was Monday morning, and everyone knew that Lee normally worked right through the weekend. Gershon felt vaguely disturbed. This sure as hell wasn’t like Lee.

Gershon got himself a coffee and a bag of peanuts from one of the ubiquitous vending machines.

Without a single article having yet left the ground for a flight test, the MEM program was suffering very visible delays and failures and cost overruns. Columbia was coming in for a huge amount of criticism: from NASA, from Congress, from other subcontractors. Even NASA’s redesign around JK’s three-man strategy was being picked over. In the Astronaut Office, the fury at the reduction of Muldoon’s four-man crews to three still hadn’t subsided…

In fact Gershon knew that Joe Muldoon had gotten so impatient with what he saw as lax management of the project that he’d ordered a “tiger team” review of the whole thing. It was a technique NASA had borrowed from the Air Force. The tiger team, led by Phil Stone, had a free hand to descend on Columbia’s plant and rake through any and all aspects of the operation. Gershon knew that the tiger team was likely to be here today, even in the middle of the CARR review; and their draft summary report was all but completed. This, and the CARR, were in addition to the usual review process, which might involve as many as four hundred NASA staff out here at Newport, looking over the shoulders of the Columbia staff. It all added to the pressures, already barely tolerable, on JK Lee and his people.

Then JK Lee came bustling in at last, his tie on crooked, a fat stack of papers under his right arm. He was holding his left arm a little stiffly, Gershon thought. He dumped his papers on a lectern at the front of the room and spent a few minutes glad-handing some of the NASA people.

Then he went up to the lectern and called for order.

“Okay,” he opened. “This is the CARR for Spacecraft 009. It’s a meeting specifically concerned with 009 and its suitability to leave the plant, here, and begin the checkout procedures and booster-mating procedures down at the Cape. We should try not to get ourselves tangled up with design changes; we’re concerned with the specific checkout of this spacecraft as it is presently configured.”

He faced his audience. “Now, it’s not a meeting where I want to see us bring up old bitches. We know the ship has been moving slowly. I acknowledge that. In fact it’s still not completely through all of its tests, so the CARR is in that sense somewhat provisional. But I intend to go ahead with it anyway…”

There was some grumbling at that, but nobody protested out loud.

Gershon picked up his thick briefing papers.

Under Lee’s bustling chairmanship, the meeting began to work its way through the list of problems. Most of them were minor, and had been hashed over in previous sessions. Lee tried to keep the discussion short on each point, cutting off arguments and summarizing the mood of the group in a series of Action Responses for each itemized problem.

Even so, the list of items to be reviewed was so long that it was soon obvious to Gershon that the CARR was going to go on for many hours; maybe it wouldn’t even finish that day.

Still, Lee was in good form today, Gershon thought. He was hyped up, but he took them briskly through the items. He arbitrated disagreements, joking and laughing. It made for a good atmosphere, relaxed and constructive, with plenty of humor.

But Lee still seemed to be having trouble with that left arm of his. He rubbed it frequently, up around the armpit, and he was having difficulty standing for long periods.

Lunch was a finger buffet. Gershon gulped down a quick plateful. Lee sought him out and invited him to take a walk around the plant. Gershon appreciated that and accepted. Just now it might have been more politically astute for Lee to be oiling up to the NASA bigwigs. And Gershon hadn’t exactly been uncritical of Columbia over the years. But Lee had evidently never forgotten the favor that Gershon had done him, by pushing the MEM RFP his way in the first place.

They reached the Clean Room. The four flight test articles were being assembled here, in antiseptic conditions. Lee and Gershon had to sign in, and they had to put on white coats and soft plastic overshoes and tuck their hair inside little plastic caps with elasticized brims. They were given strict instructions by the foreman to keep to the marked paths, and away from the spacecraft if you please.

The room stretched off in all directions, white-walled and illuminated by brilliant fluorescents. Clusters of workmen, all kitted out in soft hats and overshoes, toiled at huge pieces of equipment. There was a soft murmur of conversation, a clank of metal on metal, a whir of machinery. Huge winches and cranes dangled from the reinforced roof, empty and potent.

The Clean Room reminded Gershon more of a sculptor’s foundry than a factory; there was no sense of the routine here. Only a handful of MEMs would ever be built, and so everything here was new, special, a one-of-a-kind.

And in the middle of all this, four conical shapes were starting to emerge, as if crystallizing from some superconcentrated solution. They looked like religious artifacts, Gershon thought, like four pyramids in a row, with their silvery, shining skins punctured by mysterious nozzles and inscribed windows.

This was the mark of Lee’s achievement, Gershon reflected. Amid all the management chaos — and blizzards of changes, and balky subcontractors, and awkward customers, and engineering unknowns, and cost overruns — JK Lee was creating something magical: four Mars ships, coalescing on a factory floor in Newport Beach.

Beside each of the cones there was a sign: This is a Manned Spacecraft. Your PRIDE — Personal Responsibility In Daily Effort — will ensure their safe return.

Lee grinned. “Something I stole from McDonnell,” he said. He kept on rubbing his arm, and he looked drawn and tired, with none of the intense energy Gershon had come to associate with him. Maybe the CARR was taking it out of him.

They stopped alongside one of the four glittering spacecraft. “Spacecraft 009,” Lee said. “The subject of the CARR today; the first MEM intended to carry a crew. How about that.”

The MEM loomed over Gershon, all of thirty feet tall, like some fat metal teepee. The shining heat-resistant skin was incomplete in many places, and he was able to see the subsystems in the interior, exposed as if this was some big cutaway model.

He could make out the overall layout of the ship. There was the slim shaft of the ascent stage at the axis of the teepee — a spacecraft buried within a spacecraft — with the angular, truncated crew cabin at its tip. And there, at the base of the MEM, was the fat half torus that was the surface shelter, with the curving access tunnel snaking upward to the ascent-stage cabin at the top of the stack. And opposite the shelter, balancing its weight, were propellant and oxidant tanks: big spheres for the descent stage, squat cylinders for the ascent stage, grouped in an asymmetrical cluster like big shining berries.

A service platform, on wheels, had been set up beside the MEM. Corrugated walkways snaked over from the platform into the interior of the MEM, and Gershon could see workmen in white coveralls on their bellies in there, laboring over wiring, control panels, ducts, and pipes, like little worms crawling around inside the gleaming machine.

Gershon ducked down to get a view of the interior of the surface shelter. He could see the big storage lockers, which would hold the Mars surface suits and EVA equipment. The pale green walls of the shelter were encrusted with control panels, twenty-four of them, and five hundred switches. There were warning lights everywhere. Here and there loose wiring spilled out of an open panel, but some of the panels and lights were already operational, and they glowed softly, sending complex highlights off the experiment tables and science equipment.

Gershon could have drawn this layout blindfolded. After so many years with Columbia, so many hours in simulators here and at the Cape and Houston, he knew the position of every damn switch. He could even lay claim to have designed half the panels he saw.

There was a scent of wiring, of lubricant, of ozone, of fresh-milled metal. The MEM was unfinished, but it had a live feel to it, much more so than any simulator. It was like the cockpit of a new, gleaming aircraft.

And it was homely. It was the kind of den Gershon would have loved to have owned as a kid, a mixture of workshop, radio station, and clubhouse.

He would have no trouble living in here for a month, on Mars, he realized; no trouble at all.

If he got himself the chance.

There was some kind of commotion going on, and Gershon straightened up to see.

Jack Morgan stalked down toward Lee and Gershon with a document in his hand. “JK! Have you seen this?”

Gershon recognized the document as a draft summary of Phil Stone’s tiger team review of the MEM program. It was a photocopy marked “Confidential”; Gershon guessed that some sympathizer inside NASA had leaked it to the Columbia people.

Lee started flicking through it, speed-reading. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “Jesus Christ.”

Jack Morgan stood there, clenching and unclenching his fists.

Lee looked to Gershon like he was trembling, and he kept twitching that left arm, as if it was giving him severe pain. “Listen to this. ‘I am definitely not satisfied with the progress and outlook of the program… I could not find a substantive basis for confidence in future performance’… Paper-pushing cocksucker! ‘My people and I have completely lost confidence in the ability of Columbia Aviation as an organization… I seriously question whether there is any sincere intent and determination by Columbia to do this job properly…’ ”

Jack Morgan’s own anger seemed to have dissipated as he studied Lee. “JK, what is it with you and that arm?”

Lee waved both arms in the air. “Screw my arms! Listen to this: ‘I think NASA has to resort to very drastic measures, including the possibility of shifting to a new contractor…’ ”

Morgan, frowning, grabbed Lee’s right elbow. “Listen to me, asshole. You’re coming to my office right now.”

Lee tried to shake loose, but Morgan wouldn’t let go, and with a nod he instructed Gershon to get a hold of the other arm.

Gershon, hesitantly, got hold of Lee’s bony elbow.

So Morgan and Gershon frog-marched JK Lee out of the Clean Room, past goggling technicians, all three of them still in their soft shoes and their hats and white coats.

Lee waved the report around, shouting like some Old Testament prophet. ” ‘For me, it is just unbearable to deal further with a nonperforming contractor who has the government over a barrel when it comes to a multibillion-dollar venture of such national importance’… And screw you, too, Mr. Phil Fucking Stone!”

They reached Morgan’s office, and Morgan pulled up a portable EKG machine.

Lee eyed the machine. “What’s this?”

“Roll up your sleeves, JK.”

“There’s nothing wrong with my heart.” Lee dropped to the floor and, to Gershon’s astonishment, started doing push-ups. “Look at this!” Lee shouted up at Morgan, twisting his head. “If I was having a heart attack, this would kill me.”

Jack Morgan ignored Lee’s antics. He bent down and grabbed Lee by the collar and simply hauled him to his feet. He shoved Lee into a chair and began to strap in the EKG leads.

Lee still had the Stone report. “Look at this! He’s even put on a list of the people who should be fired! Including you and me, Jack! Cocksucker!”

Morgan read the EKG trace. He looked at Lee. “You’re going to the hospital.”

“Bullshit,” Lee snapped. “I’m in the middle of a fucking CARR.” He got up and headed for the door.

Morgan simply blocked the door with his body. He nodded to Gershon. “Get on the phone to Mr. Cane,” he ordered. “Tell him he has to speak to Lee.” And he turned and shouted to an assistant to send for the paramedics.

Uncertain of what he was getting himself into, Gershon picked up the phone.

Lee kept reading the report. “Look at this shit. Missed deadlines. Late drawing releases. Cost overruns. Yeah, yeah. But don’t they understand how complex this thing is? Or what chaos their own people create down here every time they push through another change? Look, you can comb through the paper trail all you want, but you have to look at the fucking hardware. Sure, we’re behind schedule. But this is a joke.” He appealed to Morgan. “It’s a fucking witchhunt, Jack. That’s what it is. A witch-hunt.”

Gershon held the phone out to Lee. “Art Cane wants to talk to you.”

Lee took the phone.

Art Cane ordered him to leave the plant.

A couple of paramedics came running up the corridor. They had a wheelchair with them.

IK Lee looked around, bewildered, still wearing his Clean Room overshoes and plastic hat.

The paramedics got him into the chair, ignoring his vague protests, and rushed him out.

Morgan lit up a cigarette, his hands trembling.

Gershon found he was shaking, too. “Christ,” he said to Morgan. “I didn’t know.”

Morgan pulled off his plastic hat. “Really? Hell, JK’s not the only one who’s nearly killed himself on this fucking program. Haven’t you heard about it? They call it the Ares Syndrome.”

It had been a coronary, all right; it hit Lee soon after the medics got him to the hospital.

When Lee came to himself — a few days later, flat on his back in the hospital — the first thing he did was get a secure phone installed in his room, and he started calling the plant.

He found the place in an uproar.

The final draft of Phil Stone’s tiger team report was, if anything, even more damning than that leaked early summary. And there was a lot of wild talk in the press of NASA going to another contractor for the MEM.

After a point the speculation seemed to feed on itself — Lee had even seen articles about the number of articles that had appeared on the MEM problems. It seemed to Lee that his people were spending more time on rooting through all the press garbage and the gossip from NASA and in-house than they were on building a spacecraft.

Well, as far as Lee was concerned, it was all a lot of bull; there was no way NASA could pull out of Columbia if it wanted to preserve anything like its 1986 Mars landing target. It was just bullying, industrial blackmail.

But Columbia had to respond.

Art Cane, in Lee’s absence, ordered yet another internal audit.

In the days that followed, a high-powered team went right through the whole program, interviewing hundreds of people. They had kept everything confidential; they’d even used rooms which they’d checked were clear of bugs in advance. That was supposed to reassure the employees, but Lee knew that sure as hell it would scare the life out of them.

And the early results of that audit looked like being as hard-hitting as Stone’s.

Lee, lying there helpless, seethed. There’s nothing wrong with the goddamn program. They’re pulling my organization apart for nothing. This is a witch-hunt.

And all of it while Lee was conveniently out of the office. All his people were worried about their own positions, and about the future of Lee himself.

So Lee called up Jack Morgan and told him he wanted out.

Morgan protested, of course. Lee had been in the hospital little more than two weeks.

Morgan came to the hospital, and he brought Jennine, to try to persuade him to stay.

“JK, you’re stuck here for another two weeks at least, maybe a month.”

Lee was furious. His anger at the betrayal by his own body seemed to course through him like nitrogen tetroxide, a volatile substance that was burning him up. He got out of bed and started doing push-ups again. “See?” he gasped. “For Christ’s sake, what is wrong with you people? Can’t you see—”

But Jennine was screaming. She had her hands clasped to her cheeks, so that her face was a thin, moist ribbon, compressed between the palms of her hands.

“Stop it. Stop it, JK.”

They came to a compromise. He was out of there three weeks after the attack.

The deal was that he was supposed to stay at home, working if he really had to, for another couple of weeks at least.

He tried to watch TV. There was some god-awful depressing thing called The Day After, about a nuclear attack on Lawrence, Kansas; everyone said he should watch it.

After the first hour he threw the remote across the room. He’d always hated Jason Robards, anyhow.

After two days he couldn’t stand the isolation anymore, and he got the T-bird out of the garage.

Jennine didn’t try to stop him. She just watched him preparing to go. It made him uncomfortable to look her in the eye, to meet that bruised look there.

When he got to work the plant was in chaos. It was worse than he had expected, with NASA people still crawling all over the goddamn place, and Art Cane bouncing off the walls of his office, convinced he was going to lose the MEM contract.

So Lee tried to get a hold of his program again.

First he kicked out all the outsiders, the NASA people and the rest, whom he regarded as not strictly necessary for the progress of the MEM. It took him a day just to do that, and he had a lot of opposition from the NASA bigwigs, of course, but he did it anyhow.

Still, it worried him a little that Art Cane’s backing in this was muted.

Then he spent a couple of days working through the two audit reports, and blue-penciling the politics and the waffle and the ill-informed and the downright goddamn stupid. And there was a hell of a lot of that.

The auditors, both internal and external, had gone for what he considered to be easy meat: schedule delays and paperwork snarl-ups and procedural problems. To Lee, schedules on paper were all very well — you had to produce them for senior management, and they were always the best guess you could make, and you had to keep a weather eye on them — but the fact was, half the time Columbia didn’t know what they were trying to build here, or what the latest batch of test results would throw at them, or what the latest flood of changes from the design teams at Marshall, Houston, and elsewhere would bring. In a program like the MEM you couldn’t expect actually to stick to a schedule. The delays certainly weren’t a question of his people’s competence, as far as Lee was concerned; they were more a measure of the inherent complexity of what they were trying to do.

Columbia was building a spacecraft, for God’s sake; and you only had to walk through the Clean Room, to see the four beautiful test articles emerging, to understand that basically, at the heart of all the paper storms, JK Lee was succeeding.

He tried to distill the reports down to what he considered to be the elements of common sense, of valid criticism, and then act on them. For instance the auditors had found poor demarcation of work areas, and sloppy handling of materials, and so forth. Well, he wasn’t going to argue about that kind of thing. Lee fired off memos, and called in people to chew ass, and demanded some fixing.

After a few days of this he went to see Art Cane, and he was able to throw the two fat audit reports across the desk at Art. Every paragraph of each report had been blue-penciled by Lee, either as completed, with a fat tick, or as irrelevant bullshit, in which case he’d just scribbled it out.

Cane leafed through the stuff, looking a little dubious; but he accepted what Lee had given him, and told him to write up his responses to the reports formally.

Next, Lee got everyone at the plant involved in the MEM program — there was almost a thousand of them — to come squeezing into the big, roomy old canteen. The room was still used as the main conference room, and its walls were lined with multicolored schedule boards and progress charts. Lee got a photograph of their prime MEM, Spacecraft 009, blown up so it covered the wall behind him — the great complex silver pyramid made a beautiful image — and he stood on a table in front of his people. He put his hands on his hips, and glared out at the sea of pinched-up, worried faces around him.

“Now, I know times have been tough for you guys. I know you’ve got a lot of people crawling all over you saying you don’t know your butts from third base. And we did get some things wrong. But now we’re fixing them, and that’s healthy. And I know, deep down — and you know — that there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the way we’re working here. And I know there’s nothing wrong with the spacecraft, either. If NASA wants to fly in April” — the target date for the D-prime mission, the first manned flight — “then we’ll be ready for them.

“I want you to forget about everything else, now, except that first flight. We’re going to focus on this one spacecraft here, and make it work; because if we can complete that flight well, believe me, all the rest of the program is going to slot into place, bang bang bang, just like that.

“And I know one thing more.” He looked around at their faces, all somehow smoothed out by the way they were tilted up at him, made to look younger; he felt a surge of protectiveness. “One thing more. I know I couldn’t ask for a better group of people to work with. Now, let’s get back to work, and let’s make history.”

Well, this was a standard spiel for Lee, a version of a talk he’d used at tough times on many projects. A standard-issue motivator. On the B-70, it had even gotten him a cheer.

But this time, although there were a lot of nodding heads, nobody cheered; and when he was done, they just turned away, and drifted back to their workstations.

He got down off the rickety table with a hand from Jack Morgan. He had a sick feeling, deep in the pit of his stomach. He felt isolated, somehow vulnerable.

Maybe it was his heart, letting him down again.

The hell with it. Leaning a little on Jack Morgan, he started prowling around the plant, trying to pinpoint problems, bawling out technicians, riding herd on his program managers as hard as he could.

Tuesday, November 8, 1983

Joe Muldoon wasn’t a happy man.

He had a decision to make, and today was the day he had to make it.

He had the three names of his prime Ares crew — the Commander, the Mission Specialist, and the Mars Excursion Module Pilot — written out on a piece of paper on his desk.

CDR: Stone. MSP: Bleeker. MMP: Curval.

Less than eighteen months before Ares was supposed to leave the ground, the heat was on NASA over its crew selection — which still hadn’t been announced to the public — and NASA, in turn, was turning up the heat on Joe Muldoon, who was responsible for that selection.

The scientific community was going ape-shit about the fact that all three astronauts on the prime Mars crew were from the military. Adam Bleeker — while he was doing fine in the freshman-standard geology classes York was mounting, and while everyone acknowledged he was an intelligent, competent, experienced astronaut — was, according to the eggheads, a completely crazy choice for the Mission Specialist slot. The National Academy of Sciences and the U.S. Geological Survey were throwing around a lot of crap about the fact that NASA even had a fully qualified Mars surface scientist, in Natalie York, but wasn’t planning to give her a seat on the mission. And all the other scientists in the corps, the geochemists and geophysicists and life scientists, had been overlooked as well.

It was Apollo all over again, they said.

Well, York had shown she could do a good job under pressure, on her assignment as Apollo-N capcom for instance, and she’d been putting in an impressive amount of time in the sims. She could probably handle the flight.

Muldoon knew that putting York on the mission as the MSP would shut up the science lobby for sure. And, he reflected, assigning York would have the side benefit of closing down another couple of lobbies — the minority interest ones — which complained long and hard about the way NASA still supposedly discriminated in favor of sending up white males.

He wrote out that list of names, now, to see how it would look:

CDR: Stone. MSP: York. MMP: Curval.

But York was a rookie.

He remembered what York herself had said, back at the time of her selection interviews. We need to get a scientist on Mars. But a dead scientist on Mars wouldn’t do anybody any good. The fact was, you weren’t talking about a trolley-car ride but an extended deep-space mission using complex, edge-of-the-envelope technology.

Sometimes, when he reflected on what they were doing, it grabbed at his imagination. They were planning to send three people in a fragile collection of tin cans across forty million miles — and then hope that the engineering being cooked up in Lee’s ramshackle operation in Newport Beach, and whatever discipline could be adapted from a lifetime of aviation in Earth’s atmosphere, were capable of bringing them safely down to the surface of an alien world. Plumbing, TV cameras, and all.

The scale — the audacity of it all — stunned him, when he let himself think about it. And Muldoon, he reminded himself, had walked on the Moon.

Maybe, as many people argued, they were going too far, too fast…

He shrugged that off. Be that as it may, they were going.

As far as Muldoon was concerned it was better to get somebody down to that surface to do at least some science, no matter how dumb. And, the way he saw it, the way to maximize the chances of achieving that was to send up his three best aviators: people who had cut their teeth in the most extraordinary physical situations the home planet had to offer. And hope that was enough for Mars…

Also, while he was impressed by York, there was something about her which unsettled him a little. All that intensity. She’d come into NASA with a great big grudge against the world, and it was still there, and getting bigger all the time, as far as he could see. Those goddamn twitching eyebrows of hers. She would drive her crewmates crazy in a month.

York wasn’t ready. It was a shame.

He crossed out the draft list.

Anyhow, it wasn’t the MSP but the MMP seat that was giving him the most grief at the moment.

He was hearing a lot of bad things from the mission controllers, and others, about Ted Curval’s performance.

Curval was one of the best test pilots Muldoon had worked with. And Phil Stone, his commander, was intensely loyal to him. But Curval’s attitude looked to be a little bit off beam.

Curval was fucking arrogant. He was taking his seat for granted. He seemed to feel it was sufficient to just turn up, and laugh his way through the training, and expect just to be able to crawl into the MEM when the time came, and everything would be fine. His performance in the sims, for instance, was well below the target the SimSups expected.

Muldoon had been on Stone’s back about this; as Stone was commander of the crew, in Muldoon’s mind it was up to Stone to get Curval in gear. And he knew, for instance, that Stone had been instructing the SimSups to give Curval all the help he needed.

Everybody understood how tough it was, to learn to handle a system orders of magnitude more complex than any spacecraft which had yet flown. But it was up to Curval to apply himself. And Curval didn’t show any sign of improving. Or even of understanding the importance of improving.

In his own mind, Muldoon kept comparing Curval with another good pilot: Ralph Gershon.

Muldoon had been keeping a weather eye on Gershon for a while. He’d shown himself to be willing to work at anything he was asked to. Muldoon had followed Gershon’s performance in the sims, and he’d heard — ironically, from Ted Curval himself — how determined Gershon had been to get on the Mars Landing Training Vehicle, and then, once he was there, to make that baby his own. And he’d spent a hell of a lot of his time out at Newport Beach, working on the long, slow grind of MEM development.

Gershon was gradually putting himself into the position of being the automatic choice as MEM pilot.

He was surely aware he was doing that — he was probably even planning for it — but in Muldoon’s eyes that was no bad thing. It showed Gershon was figuring out the system, and knew how to apply himself.

The contrast with the complacent Curval was marked. In Muldoon’s opinion, Gershon’s potential as a pilot wasn’t quite that of Curval, but then Curval showed no signs of realizing the potential he had.

Flying Gershon would shut up another corner of the minority rights lobby, anyhow. America’s first black face in space… But Muldoon wasn’t about to let that influence his decision one way or the other. If Gershon was seen to be getting preference he didn’t deserve — if he was appointed to a mission ahead of guys who were better qualified — then a hundred resignations would be hitting Muldoon’s desk within a day. And Muldoon would be banding them together and sending them on to Josephson, with his own stapled to the front. He was absolutely clear in his own mind about that issue.

What was of a lot more concern to him was the fact that Gershon was a rookie. And, of course — and a big reason why Gershon was still grounded after so long in the corps — there was the question of Gershon’s stability.

Gershon had been through Vietnam.

That was a different type of war from what some of the older guys remembered. Gershon was a loner, a bachelor, too wild and eccentric for many of the guys — particularly the older ones who, in their own way, were deeply conservative.

Gershon was a risk, then. But the bottom line was that Gershon could probably land the MEM in situations where a lot of other guys would abort, or even crash.

And if Muldoon bumped him onto the upcoming D-prime mission, let him fly the test MEM in Earth orbit, he could maybe prove that quickly, and he wouldn’t be a rookie anymore.

Muldoon wrote out three names.

CDR: Stone. MSP: Bleeker. MMP: Gershon.

It didn’t look so bad. It was still a crew of pilots. All USAF, actually. You had a streak of brilliance in Gershon, which was missing in Curval, and which might make a lot of difference if it came down to the wire, forty million miles away on Mars. And, unlike Curval, Muldoon knew he could rely on Gershon to apply himself to every aspect of the mission, including all the dull shitty stuff. Like the geology.

And he could expect Stone and Bleeker, both calm and unflappable, to compensate for Gershon’s instability.

Gershon, then.

It didn’t go any way toward satisfying the carping scientists; but, hell, he’d just have to absorb the flak about that. Bleeker was a good man, and there was no way he was going to bounce him.

And, of course, he reflected, with Gershon being a rookie that definitely ruled out any chances of selecting Natalie York, even if he could get Gershon some experience on the D-prime. One rookie, or near-rookie, on the crew was bad enough; two would be laughable, in his opinion.

He picked up the phone and asked Mabel to set up calls to Stone, Bleeker, Gershon, and Curval.

He wondered if he should call York. He decided there was no need.

Thursday, July 12, 1984

Although it wasn’t yet 10 A.M., the sun was already intense on Phil Stone’s head and back. He could feel the sweat pool beneath his collar and under his light Snoopy helmet, and it soaked into the shirt on his back, under the heavy pack.

The ground was just black rock, it seemed to him, and the heat from the cloudless furnace of a sky came blasting straight back up at him. There was nothing but rock, scrubby grass, and smashed-up gravel for miles around.

Dangling in a plastic wallet at Stone’s belt there was a pack of aerial photographs of the area, together with a couple of outline U.S. Geological Survey maps. He unclipped the pack and looked around, trying to figure how the features he saw compared to the photographs and maps. The photographs had been blurred, artificially, so that he couldn’t see any detail finer than would be shown in Mariner photos of the surface of Mars.

The landscape here was extraordinary. Sculpted, full of knobby hills and canyons, some cut right into the bedrock. He’d never seen anything like it.

“I don’t know where the hell we are,” he admitted. “It’s damned difficult. Everything looks different, from the ground.”

Adam Bleeker, hiking beside Stone and similarly laden with helmet, pack, and Mars boots, came to a halt. Bleeker was towing a two-wheeled cart called a MET, a Modular Equipment Transporter. Bleeker leaned forward, propping his hands on his knees. His blond hair seemed to be on fire in the sunlight. “I can figure where we are,” Bleeker said wearily.

“Huh?”

“About a mile to the east of the Union Pacific. I just heard a whistle.”

Natalie York’s radio voice crackled in Stone’s headset. “Say again please, EV2; I do not copy.” York was playing capcom in the comparative comfort of her tent.

Bleeker straightened up. He caught Stone’s eye and mouthed an obscenity.

Stone said, “Roger, Natalie. We’re both a little weary here, on the surface of Mars. I guess we’re using up our consumables at a heavy rate.”

“Then take a drink, you babies.”

Bleeker mouthed more obscenities, but Stone waved him silent. “She’s right, goddamn it. Come on.” He reached behind his head, to where two short plastic tubes dangled from his backpack. He pulled one of them to his mouth and sucked; tepid Tang squirted over his tongue.

Bleeker took a mouthful of water from his own plastic spigot, swilled it around, and spit it onto the black rock underfoot, where it sizzled, running away and drying quickly.

“Try some Tang,” Stone said.

“Tang gives me the farts.”

“Yeah, but you need to replace the potassium you sweat out. Good for the heart…”

“You two heroes ready to carry on?”

“Oh, up yours, York,” Stone said.

They straightened up and walked on.

They came to a bed of gravel and clay, broad and sweeping; the bedrock thrust through it like blackened, exposed bone. “We’ve found what looks like loess, Natalie,” Stone said. “River valley deposit.” He found he was breathing hard, and he was aware that Bleeker, struggling with the heavy MET, was sweating so heavily he had soaked right through his thin T-shirt. “I think we should go for a SEP setup.”

“Roger, EV1.”

Damn right it’s “Roger.” Staying in one place and playing at scientists for a while was going to be a hell of a lot easier than footslogging across this goddamn volcanic battleground. After all, this was worse than the real thing; his Mars suit would be air-conditioned, for God’s sake.

“Adam, why don’t you scout on ahead. Go that way, up across the loess.”

“Okay.” Bleeker set down the MET’s handle, hitched his pack on his shoulders, and set off along the loess, his blue Mars boots stained and muddy.

Stone dug out a set of gloves from the MET. The gloves were thick and stiffened with wire, to simulate the pressurized gloves he’d have to wear on Mars. With the gloves on he picked the SEP out of the buggy. The SEP — the Surface Experimental Package, a suite of scientific instruments — was folded up into a heavy dumbbell shape, weighted to mirror how the real thing would feel under Martian gravity.

Bleeker had walked maybe a hundred feet down the loess. “Over here,” he called. “This is good and flat.”

Stone began to walk toward him. “Okay, Natalie, I’m deploying the SEP now.”

“Rog.”

It was a real effort to grip the bar of the dumbbell through his stiffened gloves and to hold the packages away from him. After maybe thirty feet, he stopped and put the SEP down.

Bleeker laughed. “It’s only plywood, Phil.”

“Goddamn it,” Stone shouted at him, “do you have to walk so far?”

“You know I do.”

Of course, Bleeker was right; on Mars they would have to carry the SEPs far enough from their MEM, or from the Mars Rover, that they could be sure to find a piece of surface undisturbed by the dust kicked up by their vehicles.

He pulled off the gloves and threw them in the general direction of the MET; he didn’t bother to look where they’d gone.

Bleeker whistled. “Are you supposed to do that, skipper?”

“Sue me.”

He brought the SEP mock-up to Bleeker and set it down; together, they began to deploy the instruments.

Assembling the SEP was like setting up a home barbecue. Undo the bolts. Take the packages out of their Styrofoam blocks. Tamp down the dirt to make the ground flat — actually that wasn’t so easy here; the loess was gravelly and unforgiving — and set the instruments level. Make sure each instrument is pointed the right way, and is the right distance from the others. And don’t let them get coated in dirt, goddamn it.

When they’d finished, the SEP looked like an odd, multipointed star, with the radioisotope power package at the center, and the instruments set up on the ground all around it, connected by fine orange cables. The seismometer was that silvery paint tin. A little meteorology boom stuck up in the air — the SEPs would act as weather stations for the astronauts during their stay on Mars — and that spidery gold-leaf sculpture was a magnetometer. At the front of the assembly was a pair of tall, thin stereoscopic color cameras. And on top of the whole thing sat a delicate S-band antenna, pointing to an imaginary Earth.

The SEPs would be placed at a variety of sites, as the astronauts completed their traverses. There was every hope that the SEPs could send back data long after Stone and his crew had returned to Earth. It would be kind of a neat memorial to the mission; looking down at the installed balsa-and-card mock-up of the SEP, Stone felt a certain pride in his accomplishment, in a task done well.

“Okay, Natalie, the SEP’s installed,” he said. “What next?”

“Rog. According to our checklist, here, one of you should be setting up the CELSS, and the other taking samples.”

“It ain’t time for lunch yet?” Bleeker asked plaintively.

Stone laughed. “I’ll do you a favor, Adam. You set up the CELSS, and I’ll hike around for the goddamn samples.”

They trudged back to the MET, and Stone sucked a little more of the flat, tasteless Tang from the tube at his neck.

I’d sure rather be watching the Olympics with a couple of cold ones at my side, he thought. But there just wasn’t the time. He’d had no time of his own, it felt like, since he’d joined the Agency.

Stone helped Bleeker haul the mock-up CELSS kit out of the MET. The CELSS, the Controlled Environment Life Support System, was a small inflatable greenhouse. It came packaged as a disk of plastic. Stone and Bleeker laid the disk out on the ground and Bleeker went to work on a small foot pump, pushing air into the ribbing of the greenhouse; soon a dome maybe four feet high had taken shape.

By the time he was done Bleeker was sweating even harder. “My God, Phil, it’s real work operating that damned pump in these boots.”

“You want to go rockhounding instead?”

“No, no,” Bleeker said. “Leave me to my darn vegetable patch.”

He pulled a simple aluminum spade out of the MET and began to scrape without enthusiasm at the soil. Later he’d set up a little water sprinkler inside the dome, and he’d be planting crops — soybeans and potatoes. The idea was that the carbon-dioxide-rich Martian air would be able to reach the plants through the permeable walls of the greenhouse, and the plastic dome would trap a lot of the heat of the sun. Martian soil, it seemed from the limited Soviet lander results, contained most everything needed to grow crops save for phosphorus and free water, so Bleeker would be doping the soil with a nutrient additive.

This CELSS kit was just an experiment; there was no intention of growing foodstuffs to supply the first expedition. The point was to prove that crops could be grown on Mars; it would point the way to techniques for future, longer-term missions — and even the first permanent colony, off in an unknowable future.

Likewise, Ares would be carrying another long-term experiment called ISPP, for In Situ Propellant Production. The crew would set up kits designed to extract oxygen from compressed Martian air, and maybe hydrogen and oxygen from any accessible under-surface water. If it could be shown that propellants and oxidizers for the return journey could be manufactured on Mars, the weight and costs of future trips there could be cut by more than half.

Dragging the MET, Stone began to walk, more or less north of Bleeker.

“Okay, Natalie. I’m coming off this layer of loess, now. I’m arriving on what looks like a gravel bed, loosely compacted. I can see striations. Kind of streamlined, like scour marks. It looks as if water has flowed here…”

York called, “Why don’t you make a sample stop?”

“Rog.”

He picked a spot, reasonably level, and set up the calibrating gnomon. He walked around the gnomon, carefully photographing it from every side. Next he worked the mechanical tests. He pressed a spring-loaded metal plate against the soil, and thrust a cylindrical probe into the ground. Then he put a lump of aggregate into a crusher, a handheld nutcracker affair. He called out readings to Natalie York as he worked.

When he’d fully documented his site he took samples from the surface. He picked up loose material with tongs, rakes, and scoops, and tried breaking a piece off a larger rock with a hammer.

Actually, the landscape baffled Stone. He’d been taking a geology field trip each month for the last year, and he’d gotten familiar with the subject to some extent. But he’d never seen an area like this.

Most EVA training was taking place out in the high deserts in the western USA. At one site, in Nevada, half a square mile of desert had been faked up to simulate the Martian surface as observed by the Soviets, with fine sand raked in, large boulders set deliberately on the surface. There was even a fake MEM descent stage set up there, a mock-up of wood and paint. The MEM had a compartment for a full-scale Mars Rover, which you could pull down and unfold, just like the real thing. That was a sim exercise Stone could appreciate: bouncing across a fake, but recognizably Martian desert, in a four-wheel-drive Rover…

But he really did not know what the hell was going on today. How was this piece of shit in Washington State, across which they were dragging this fucking Apollo-class golf cart, supposed to relate to whatever the hell was waiting for them on Mars?

After maybe half an hour, he’d piled the MET with carefully selected — and uniformly worthless — samples of Washington State. “Okay, Natalie, I figure I’m done here.”

“Well done, Phil. We’ll make a rock hound out of you yet. But I still haven’t heard much about the morphology of your site.”

He growled, and wiped sweat from his brow with a dusty hand. “Give me a break.”

“Come on now, Phil. Taking samples isn’t enough — you ought to know that by now — what’s crucial for the geologists is the context. Tell me what you see.”

Stone began to walk forward again. His pack chafed at his shoulders, but looking around more systematically, he began to see some pattern, some logic underlying the landscape formations; and as he did so, he began to forget his discomfort.

“I see a mix of landscape here. I see what looks like bare bedrock, and sedimentary stuff that’s been scoured out, and depositional material. As if left behind by running water.”

“Good.”

“The land here can’t be of much value. Light pasture, maybe; there isn’t much growing, certainly not in the bare rock faces. I think the rock is basalt. Volcanic, anyhow. The macroforms in the bedrock are mostly channels. The channels are pretty straight: not much sinuosity. They look as if they are basically river valleys, but widened and deepened. Maybe by glaciation?” Great tongues of ice, flattening and deepening valleys, scouring down to the bedrock -

“Don’t speculate, Phil. The goddamn Apollo astronauts speculated all the time, and they confused the hell out of everybody. Just observe.”

“Sure.” Speculating test pilots on Mars. Natalie’s number one nightmare. “I see evidence of channel anastomosis. And uplands left isolated between the channels.”

Back at the CELSS, Bleeker looked up skeptically. He called, “Anasto-who?”

Stone imagined York’s chagrin at that remark. Bleeker’s comparative backwardness at the geology wasn’t surprising. The guy was under real pressure; as well as field trips like this in support of the eventual landing mission, Bleeker was also working toward the D-prime Earth-orbit mission next month.

But then, Stone reflected, Bleeker was supposed to be the landing mission surface specialist.

“Anastomosis, asshole. It’s all in your Boy’s Coloring Book of Geology. Where a channel has been breached, and cut a branch through into another channel. Look. See the way the channels over there seem to diverge, then join up again. And you can see over there, where that bit of plateau has been left isolated. Cut off by the new channels.”

The isolated upland was like a tabletop of rock, stuck in the middle of the plain.

“Yeah. Okay, I see it. So what caused the breach?”

“Phil—”

“Okay, okay, Natalie. Don’t ask me questions like that, Adam. I won’t speculate.” It could be glaciation, though. Must be. What the hell else could have caused so much damage to the landscape? A lava flow, maybe?

“What other macroforms?” York asked.

Stone climbed on top of a rock, the heavy pack banging against his back, and peered around. “More uplands, carved out of the sedimentary stuff. They look—”

“What?”

“Smooth. Streamlined.” Like islands, their flanks smoothed out, left stranded by the drying out of a parent river. “And I can see what look like bars of gravel, some maybe twenty, thirty feet high. Kind of like sandbanks. They seem to have formed behind outcroppings, maybe of loess, or bedrock. Like tails. The rock has grooves scoured in it. Longitudinal. The grooves flow past the islands, and the gravel bars.”

He came to a bed of loose clay and sand. “This is more loess, I think. I see—”

“What?”

“Ripples. Kind of frozen here, in the loess. Like small dunes, I guess. The dunes are stratified. It looks as if a river has dried out here.” He stalked on over the rock. “I have pits in the rock surface. Circular, a few inches deep, width from a foot wide upward. Scallop pits, I think.” Gouged out by pebbles, carried by turbulence… “The whole place is kind of like a river bottom,” he said. “Yeah. You basically have the topography of a dried-out river bottom — but magnified. Channels and bars and islands. All shaped by flowing water on a massive scale…”

He looked around with a new excitement, seeing the geology with new eyes, with Natalie York’s eyes: the deep-carved, breached channels, the huge deposits of loess, the carved-out islands. “Christ. Is that it, Natalie? Is that what you’ve brought us out here to see? Was all of this region formed by a flood?”

“You’re speculating again, Stone.”

“Oh, come on, York.”

“Okay. You’re right, Phil. At least, that’s the favored hypothesis.”

Bleeker gave up on the half-assembled CELSS, and came to stand close to Stone. “What is?”

York said, “In the Late Pleistocene — maybe twenty thousand years ago — much of Idaho and west Montana was covered by an immense lake. Called Missoula. Thousands of square miles of it. The lake was contained by an ice dam. The dam eventually burst, and released a catastrophic flood that swept over this area. Tens of millions of cubic yards per second, maybe a thousand times as much as the Amazon’s discharge rate—”

“Jesus,” Stone said.

“Yeah. The existing streamways couldn’t cope with the sudden volume, so they burst; the valleys were widened and deepened, and interconnecting channels were cut — all the way into the bedrock — in hundreds of places. Thousands of square miles were swept clean of the superficial structures, right down to the basalt bedrock, and another thousand square miles were buried in river-bottom debris.

“We’re left with hundreds of cataract ledges, basins, and canyons eroded into the bedrock, isolated buttes and uplands, gravel bars thirty or forty yards high.

“This is the scabland, Phil. There are only a handful of areas on Earth which show the effects of large-scale, catastrophic flooding so well.”

Bleeker pushed back his Snoopy hat and scratched his blond head. “It’s fascinating, Natalie. But I don’t see what it has to do with us.”

“Okay. Phil, I’ve given you another pack of photographs. In the left side-pocket of Adam’s pack.”

Stone dug into Bleeker’s pocket and pulled out a plastic packet of black-and-white photographs. He leafed through them quickly, showing them to Bleeker.

Cratered plains: the images were of Mars, clearly enough. But there was a channel cut deeply into what looked like the tough, ancient landscape of the southern hemisphere. There was a crater complex, overlaid by anastomosed channels. There was a crater with a teardrop-shaped, streamlined island, like a gravel bar, collected in its wake; and “downstream” of the crater, there were scour marks, running parallel to the island…

Stone was having trouble making sense of what he saw and heard. “Are you saying that Mars has suffered catastrophic flooding — like the scabland here, in Washington State?”

York hesitated. “I believe so. A lot of us have argued that, since the Mariner pictures came in. I’ve been studying the area you’re looking at, in those photos, since 1973. I guess I’m the leading expert on it, now. And it seems to me the analogy between the terrestrial scabland features and the Martian morphology is too striking to be a coincidence.”

“But not everybody agrees,” Stone hazarded.

“No,” she conceded. “Some say the Martian ‘scabland’ features are too big to have been formed by water. Schumm, for instance.”

“Who?” Bleeker asked.

“Schumm says the Martian channels must have been formed by tensional factors in the planet’s surface. Cracks, modified later, maybe, by vulcanism and the action of the wind.”

“Sounds like an asshole to me,” Stone said, peering at the pictures. “I’m with you, Natalie.”

“But if these Martian channels were formed by flooding,” Bleeker said, “where the hell did the water come from? And where did it go?”

“I’ll bet she has a theory about that, too,” Stone muttered.

“I didn’t copy, EV1.”

“Go ahead, Natalie.”

“Underground aquifers. Contained by tough bedrock below — maybe ten miles deep — and a cap of thick ice in the regolith above. Whatever lifted up Tharsis — a convection process in the mantle, maybe — must have caused the faulting that led to the flooding. The pressure of the water has to exceed the pressure of the rocks. All you’d need would be a breach on the subsurface ice cap for the water to gush to the surface, under high pressure.”

“My God,” Stone said. “Oceans, buried in the Martian rocks. How can we find out if you’re right, Natalie?”

“What we need is for three guys to land there in a MEM, and dig a few deep cores.”

Stone started to see where all this was leading. He leafed through the photos again. “What area are these photos of?”

“That’s one of the most striking outflow channels. It’s Mangala Vallis, Phil. Martian scabland: your landing area.”

Stone grinned. She’s doing it again. Mangala Vallis. On which Natalie York, leading light of the site selection committee and would-be Mars voyager, just happens to be the world’s top expert.

And Adam Bleeker still doesn’t know what anastomosis is. I hope the guy’s watching his back. Mission Elapsed Time [Day/Hr:Min:Sec] Plus 349/11:14:03

Two months out, Mars had been the brightest object in the sky save the sun, but still a starlike point. Then — twenty days from orbit insertion — Mars had opened out into a disk. And where the line between light and dark crossed the planet, she could see, with her naked eye, wrinkles and bumps: craters and canyons, catching the light of the sun.

Gradually, as the days had unfolded, she’d made out more and more recognizable detail on the surface. There was the huge gouge of the Valles Marineris — a wound visible even from a million miles out — and the polar cap in the north, swelling with water ice in advance of the coming winter, and the great black calderas of the Tharsis volcanoes.

It was remarkable how much she could recognize. Almost as if she had been here before.

Mars was clearly a small world, she thought. Some of the features — Tharsis, the Marineris canyons, Syrtis, the great iced pit of Hellas in the south — sprawled around the globe, outsized, dominating the curvature.

In some ways Mars was as she had expected. It looked a lot like the big photomosaic globes at JPL. But there were surprising differences, too. Mars wasn’t red so much as predominantly brown, a surface wrought out of subtle shadings of tan and ocher and rust. There was a sharp visible difference between northern and southern hemispheres, with the younger lands to the north of the equatorial line being brighter in color, almost yellow.

Ares was approaching the planet at an angle to the sunlight, so Mars was gibbous, with a fat slice of the night hemisphere turned toward the spacecraft. And the ocher shading seemed to deepen at the planet’s limb, and at low sun angles. These features gave the little globe a three-dimensional effect, a marked roundness. Mars was a little round orange, the only object apart from the sun in all the 360-degree sky visible as other than a point of light.

In the depths of the mission — suspended between planets, with nothing visible but sun and stars beyond the walls of the craft, and ground down by the stultifying routine of long-duration flight — York had suffered some deep depressions. She’d shrunk into herself, going through her assignments on autopilot, shunning the company of her crewmates. She suspected they’d suffered similarly, but they seemed to have found ways to cope: Gershon with his love of the machinery around them, Stone with his little pet pea plants.

Already she was dreading the return journey; it loomed in her imagination, a huge black barrier.

But that was for the future. Just then she was climbing out of the pit, up toward the warm ocher light of Mars.

She spent as much time as she could just staring at the approaching globe, identifying sites no naked human eye had seen before, as if claiming more and more of Mars for herself.

Monday, August 6, 1984

As they prepared for the ignition, Bleeker had “Born in the USA” playing on the cabin’s little tape deck. It drowned out the clicks and whirs of the MEM’s equipment.

Bleeker said, “Ascent propulsion system propellant tanks pressurized.”

“Rager,” Gershon replied.

“Ascent feeds are open, shutoffs are closed.”

On the ground, Ted Curval was capcom today. “Iowa, this is Houston. Less than ten minutes here. Everything looks good. Just a reminder. We want the rendezvous radar mode switch in LGC just as it is on surface fifty-nine… We assume the steerable is in track mode auto.”

Gershon said, “Stop, push-button reset, abort to abort stage reset.”

Bleeker pushed his buttons. “Reset.”

Curval said, “Our guidance recommendation is PGNS, and you’re cleared for ignition.”

“Rog. We’re number one on the runway…”

A hundred miles above the Earth, as Gershon and Bleeker worked through the litany of the preburn checklist, MEM and Apollo drifted in formation. The Apollo, containing Command Module Pilot Bob Crippen, was an exquisitely jeweled silver toy, drifting against the luminous carpet of Earth. And the MEM was a great shining cone, at thirty feet tall dwarfing Apollo, surrounded by discarded Mars heat-shield panels and rippling with foil.

Its six squat landing legs were folded out and extended. But MEM 009 was destined to land nowhere.

Gershon stood harnessed in place beside Bleeker in the cramped little cabin of the MEM’s ascent stage. He felt bulky, awkward in his orange pressure suit. In front of Gershon was a square instrument panel, packed with dials and switches and instruments. There were two sets of hand controllers, one for each man. More circuit breakers coated the walls, and there were uncovered bundles of wiring and plumbing along the floor.

The cabin had two small triangular windows, one to either side of the main panel, calibrated with the spidery markings that would help guide a landing on Mars. Blue Earthlight shone through the windows, dappling the cabin’s panels.

Behind Gershon there were three acceleration couches, two of them folded up. On a landing flight there would be a third crewman in here, the mission specialist, a passenger during the MEM’s single brief flight.

The cabin’s surfaces were utilitarian, functional, mostly unpainted. The metal panels were just bolted together, the bundles of wires lashed in place by hand. You could see that the MEM was an experimental ship: the product of handcrafting, of thousands of man-hours of patient labor, and based on conservative designs, stuff that had worked before.

The apparent coarseness of the construction, with everything riveted together as if in a home workshop, was the feature of space hardware that most surprised people used to sleek mass-produced technology. It was nothing like Star Trek.

But to Gershon the MEM was real, almost earthy.

To descend to Mars, in a ship assembled by the hands and muscles of humans: to Gershon, still elated to be in space at all, there was something wonderful about the thought.

As long as the mother worked, of course.

“Coming up on two minutes,” Curval called up. “Mark, T minus two minutes.”

“Roger,” Bleeker said. He turned off the tape.

Glancing at his panel, Gershon could see that the ascent stage was powered up, no longer drawing any juice from the lower stage’s batteries. It was preparing to become an independent spacecraft for the first time.

In this test, simulating a launch from the Martian surface, the whole unlikely MEM assemblage was supposed to come apart, releasing the sticklike ascent stage with its ungainly, strap-on propellant tanks.

Gershon knew this was the moment on the mission that was most feared by the engineers at Columbia and Marshall. There were too many ways for the fucking thing to go wrong. Like, the ascent-stage ignition would take place with the engine bell still buried within the guts of the MEM’s descent stage. What if there was a blowback, an overpressure of some kind, before the ascent stage got clear?…

Well, they were soon going to find out.

Bleeker said, “Guidance steering in the PGNS. Deadband minimum, ATT control, mode control auto.”

“Auto,” Gershon responded.

“One minute,” the capcom said.

“Got the steering in the abort guidance.”

Gershon armed the ignition. “Okay, master arm on.”

“Rog.”

“You’re go, Iowa,” said Curval.

“Rager. Clear the runway.”

Bleeker turned to him. “You ready?”

“Sure.”

“That mother may give us a kick.” Bleeker reminded him of the drill. “Okay, Ralph. At five seconds I’m going to hit ABORT STAGE and ENGINE ARM. And you’ll hit PROCEED.”

“Rager.”

“Here we go. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five.”

Beyond the small window in front of Gershon’s face, the shining blue horizon of Earth drifted by, a complex, clearly three-dimensional sculpture of cloud over sea.

The computer display in front of Gershon flashed a “99,” a request to proceed. He glanced across at Bleeker.

Bleeker closed the master firing arm. “Engine arm ascent.”

Gershon pressed the PROCEED button.

There was a loud bang, a rattle around the floor of the cabin. Pyrotechnic guillotines were blowing away the nuts, bolts, wires, and water hoses connecting the upper and lower stages of the MEM.

A weight descended smoothly on Gershon’s shoulders.

“First-stage engine on ascent,” Bleeker said. “Here we go.” He smiled. “Beautiful.”

After his unexpected assignment to the prime Mars crew, Gershon had been happy to be bumped onto this D-prime test mission. His first flight into space might not have been the most glamorous in the MEM test program — that would probably be the one remaining E mission, the attempt to bring a reinforced MEM in through the Earth’s atmosphere and land it on the salt flats around Edwards Air Force Base. That had been given to an experienced crew led by John Young. But the D-prime, an eleven-day Earth-orbit shakedown flight, was arguably the more important test. In an untried spacecraft, the crew would rehearse every phase of the Mars landing mission save only the atmospheric entry and final powered descent; and, as well, they would rehearse many contingency procedures which might save future missions.

Already, in the MEM, Gershon and Bleeker had ventured as much as a hundred miles from Apollo. In a craft which nobody had tried to rendezvous with before. Which didn’t have a heat shield strong enough to get them back to the ground. And on top of that, the whole flight was in low Earth orbit, where communications and navigation challenges were even tougher than on, say, a flight to the Moon.

If they got through this flight the MEM would be man-rated, with only the Mars heat shield remaining to be test-flown. It was a connoisseur’s spaceflight, a flight for true test pilots.

And besides, Gershon had been happy to bury himself in the mission, to get away from the attention his assignment to the Mars crew had brought him. The first black man in space: the first brother on Mars. He was learning to deal with it, but it was relentless, distracting. And nothing to do with him.

As far as he was concerned he was Ralph Gershon, complete and entire, and not a symbol of anyone else’s agenda.

However, the mission had been snake-bit: nothing but problems from the beginning.

It started even before the launch, in fact. Gershon had seen JK Lee’s people at Columbia tearing their hair out as they tried to coax Spacecraft 009 through its final prelaunch checkout in the Vehicle Assembly Building at the Cape. There had been times when Gershon had become convinced that it wouldn’t come together at all.

Then, once they had reached orbit and opened up the docking tunnel between Apollo and MEM, Gershon found himself floating in a snowstorm of white fiberglass. It had blown out of an insulation blanket in the tunnel wall. Gershon and Bleeker had spent their first couple of hours in the MEM just vacuuming all that crap out of the air, and they had finished up with white stuff clinging to their hair, their eyelashes, their mouths, until they’d looked like nothing so much as a pair of plucked chickens.

After that Bleeker and Gershon had crawled all over the MEM, putting the subsystems through comprehensive tests. And every damn one of those tests had given them problems which had needed diagnosis and repeated testing.

There had been that odd, sour smell coming from the environment control system in the surface shelter, for instance, which they had finally traced to a piece of scuffed insulation slowly scorching behind a panel. The electrical power system had shown some severe faults, with whole panels of instruments just cutting out. Meanwhile the inertial guidance system was a pig, wallowing inside its big metal sphere, constantly losing its lock. And the MEM’s big antennae complex had gotten stuck, and for a while it couldn’t talk to the Apollo or the ground…

Relationships between the crew and the ground had gotten strained in all of this. As they wrestled with the craft, Bleeker, as commander, had become concerned that Houston was reluctant to make any compromises in the scientific and PR elements of the flight plan — which, as far as Bleeker and Gershon were concerned, came a long way down the list in comparison to the engineering objectives of the mission. So Bleeker, showing an unexpected assertiveness, got into battles with the flight controllers. He canceled TV broadcasts, and he blue-penciled whole sections out of the flight plan.

At one point the capcom told the crew that the controllers were plotting to bring the Command Module down in a typhoon, and Gershon suspected it was only half a joke.

Finally Gershon had gotten so sick of the problems that he’d taken a little plastic juice-dispensing lemon from the food lockers, and hung it up between the MEM’s triangular windows, in full view of the onboard TV, to show what the crew thought of their new ship.

All Gershon could hear was the rattling thump-thump of the ascent engine’s ball valves opening and closing. The noise was oddly comforting, giving him a feeling of security, that the mission was unfolding as it should.

The Earth slid away from Gershon, as the ascent stage climbed smoothly up toward its rendezvous with New Jersey, the waiting Apollo; it was so smooth it was a ride in a glass-walled elevator.

There wasn’t much for Gershon to do. Because the ascent-stage engine had no backup — it had to work — it had been made as simple as possible, with just two moving parts: ball valves, to release propellant and oxidant into the combustion chamber. The engine, fueled with oxygen and methane, had no throttle or choke; all you could do was throw the master arm and turn the engine on, and it would just burn steadily for ten minutes or so, just as it was designed, to lift its crew off Mars and back to a parking orbit.

Gershon leaned forward, resting against his restraints. Through his window he could see the descent stage falling away; it was a truncated cone, with a great gouge dug out of its center. Cables and hoses, cut by the guillotines, dangled. Foil insulation had been blown off the stage by the ascent engine’s blast, and Gershon could see sheets of the stuff floating away, spreading outward in rings.

JK Lee was standing in the Viewing Room in back of the MOCR, chain-smoking. Whenever TV pictures had come down from the orbiting MEM over the last couple of days, you could clearly see the little plastic lemon, floating about under the alignment telescope. He could decode that symbol: it was a little message from the crew, from Ralph probably, meant for him.

But it didn’t faze him, or dilute his elation. No, sir! Sure the crew members were having problems, but they had to expect that; working out the problems was what this proving flight was for, after all. He was a little disappointed Ralph Gershon didn’t understand that, in fact. The important thing for Lee was that he was watching his ship, up there in orbit, glitches or not — his ship, delivered on time and against all the odds.

Lee felt a huge glow of triumph. It was as if, to achieve this day, he’d had to fight everybody — NASA management, the suppliers, the astronauts, half of Columbia, even his own treacherous body. But he’d made it, and the monument to his achievement was up there in orbit, larger than life in the big screens at the front of the MOCR, and on TV sets all around the world. What a victory! Lee had the feeling that nothing in his career from then on would mean as much to him as this triumph, right here, right now. Not even the moment when another of his babies, hatched from the Clean Room at Newport, set down its pads on Mars itself.

He could care less about Ralph’s fucking lemon.

He laughed out loud, uncaring who stared at him, and hauled out another cigarette.

Bleeker said, “Twenty-six seconds. We’re going to pitch over a little. Very smooth, very quiet ride.”

Gershon prepared for the MEM to pitch over. Thinking that it had reached five thousand feet above the surface of Mars, the MEM should tip up, programmed to head for a Mars-orbital rendezvous with the rest of the Ares cluster.

The horizon tilted to his right.

Gershon, already feeling heavy, was thrown against his restraints.

The pitch had been right on cue. But the tipping had felt sharper, more of a rattle, than he’d expected.

And the pitch continued; beyond his window, the cloudscape of Earth was rolling upward, turning from a floor to a wall.

Bleeker said, “What the fuck?”

“Hot mike, Adam,” Ted Curval called up.

They don’t know what’s going on, Gershon realized.

The shining landscape passed over his head, and shadows shifted across the banks of circuit breakers. Vapor, squirting from the reaction control system clusters, sparkled past the window.

But the automatics couldn’t regain control. The spinning sped up.

“Jesus,” Bleeker said wryly. “It’s a real whifferdill. I need to cage my eyeballs.”

An orbital tailspin: Bleeker was right, Gershon realized.

Soon the MEM was twisting through a full turn every second, and Earth flashed past the windows. Sunlight strobed across the cabin, dazzling, disorienting.

Gershon’s vision started to blur as he searched the instrument panel. Time to earn your flight pay, boy.

He started throwing switches, methodically trying to isolate the problem. Maybe an attitude thruster was stuck on; he looked at that first. Whatever it was, he had to get the spin killed quickly. The guidance systems were in danger of locking up altogether; he needed to get manual control before that happened.

He grasped his hand controller and started squirting the RCS clusters, using the Earth as a reference, trying to push against the tumble of the ascent stage and stabilize Iowa.

For a time the whirling got faster; it was as if the RCS motors were having no effect at all, and he started to feel dizzy. Both he and Bleeker continued to snap breakers furiously. If they didn’t get the MEM under control soon, there was a danger they would both black out, and after that, even if the ship didn’t break up, it would be impossible for the Apollo to dock with the spinning Iowa.

At last, they got both primary and abort guidance systems shut off. With the automatics off-line the RCS clusters started to slow the pitching.

Bleeker cut the ascent-stage engine. The spinning continued to slow.

Gershon had to eyeball the horizon to judge when he finally got the stage stabilized; his inner ear was shot to pieces by the spin.

Bleeker sounded strained, as if he was working to keep from throwing up inside his helmet. “Jesus. You were right, Ralph. This ship is an Edsel.”

Gershon kept his eyes fixed on Earth’s horizon; the sense of tumbling slowly receded from his head. “No,” he said. “An Edsel’s a clunker, but it’s harmless. This mother is downright dangerous.”

From the ground, Curval told them that Bob Crippen, in Apollo, was already on his way down from his higher orbit to retrieve them.

August 1984

JK Lee hung around the MOCR through the rest of the mission, right up until the moment that Bleeker’s crew returned to Earth in its Command Module.

Outside Building 30, Art Cane was waiting for him.

“Art!” Grinning, Lee went up to his boss. “I didn’t know you were coming out here.”

In his shirtsleeves, Cane stood there in the sweltering humidity of Houston like an ancient, denuded tree. “I wasn’t intending to. Get in the car, JK.”

The car, parked in a Building 30 space, was a hired stretch limo with a bar in the back. It was pleasantly cool, a relief after the heat of the day. Lee got in and lit up a cigarette.

Cane nodded to the driver, and the car pulled smoothly away.

Lee eyed Cane. “Not like you to be so extravagant, Art.”

Cane shrugged and loosened his tie. “I’m an old man, JK. What can I say? I can’t put up with this Texas heat; I need the air-conditioning.” Cane folded his jacket neatly on his lap, and then put his hands together over the jacket, one on top of the other. “Now, look here, JK. You know the pressure we’ve been under.”

“Sure.”

“That goddamn tiger team thing. And the CARR on 009, and the delays in shipping the bird to the Cape, and those problems with the busted fuel tanks. And now that business in orbit.”

“But that’s all resolved, Art.” Lee launched into a bubbling description of how the whifferdill problem had already been diagnosed to a mis-set switch in the MEM’s cabin. “…When the ascent engine fired, the switch told the abort guidance system it should start looking for the Command Module, to get a lock on for a fast emergency docking. But of course the Apollo was miles away at the time.” He laughed. “So the MEM just started tumbling, looking for that old Command Module for all it was worth…”

Cane held up a hand, the skin on it so loose it reminded Lee of a plucked chicken’s claw. “Yeah,” he said. “But it wasn’t a crew mistake, was it? I mean, they thought they’d set that switch correctly. We had mislabeled the switch. So it was our fault, not theirs.” He shook his head, looking gaunt and old. “Jesus Christ, JK, how in hell did you let something like that out of the factory? It could have killed those guys.”

“Oh, come on, Art. It wasn’t so serious. It’ll be trivial to fix. All of the problems we had were trivial. Finding problems is what proving flights are for. Now, I can take the D-prime records and transcripts and test results back to Newport Beach, and we can begin raking out the remaining flaws in their hardware.” He felt enthusiastic, energetic, renewed by the flight of his machine. “Why, I want to set a new record, coming out of this. I want 010 to show the smallest number of defects in its preflight checkout of any craft of any generation ever shipped to the Cape. Why the hell not? We’re going to make history, Art. With the D-prime behind me, I’ll hit the next one out of the park—”

Cane cut him off. “Listen to me, JK. There are some things you just don’t understand about this business. I’m not talking about specific problems. I’m talking about” — he waved his hands vaguely — “a cumulative effect.”

Lee was uneasy, but baffled. “Cumulative?”

“Things kind of pile up, one on top of another. It’s an image thing. There’s been a lot of comment about the performance of the Apollo hardware — the proven stuff, which brought the astronauts home flawlessly — compared to the problems of the MEM. Maybe the contract should have gone to Rockwell after all, is what they’re muttering. With talk like that around, before you know where you are you can’t do anything right. Even fixing what’s wrong, specifically, isn’t going to help. When you’re in this kind of mess all kinds of questions get asked. Queries about the basic competence of my company.” Lee heard frustration and anger in Cane’s thin voice. “Once they’ve decided you’re dogshit, you’ve had it.”

He turned to Lee, his face crumpled with anger and sadness, his rheumy eyes shining. “And that’s what’s happened to us, JK. NASA, Congress, the press — they’ve decided we’re dogshit. That I’m dogshit.”

The pain in his words tore at Lee. “Oh, Christ, Art, it isn’t as bad as that.”

“You know they’re talking again about moving the contract away.”

“They can’t do it,” Lee said vigorously. “You know that. Not without abandoning the schedule altogether.”

Cane was growing angrier. “They’re talking about reassigning a lot of the MEM work to Aerojet, Boeing, GE, McDonnell, Martin, maybe bringing in Rockwell project managers to Newport—”

Lee laughed. “All the usual suspects.”

“This isn’t a fucking joke, JK,” Cane snapped. “Maybe NASA won’t do it. Maybe they can’t. But they’re talking about it. And that’s the point. Goddamn it, don’t you understand any of this? NASA is trying to show us — and Congress and the press — how seriously it’s taking all of this.

“And heads have been rolling in NASA. Did you know that? Guys who’ve been jerking off instead of keeping a hawkeye on us.” He rattled off a list of names, people at Marshall and Houston.

“Yeah, but look, Art, those guys are mostly administrator types. It won’t make a damn bit of difference if they go or stay. It’s engineers that count. You know that.”

“But it doesn’t matter what I think. Don’t you see it, JK? It’s all a demonstration of intent. It might seem abstract to you, all a game, but believe me, up on the Hill, it’s real. And now, in response, we have to make our own gesture.”

And suddenly, through his euphoria, Lee did see; he saw it in a flash of comprehension, all of it. “Oh, Christ, Art. Oh, no. You can’t do this.”

Cane reached out and spread his long fingers over Lee’s arm. “I’m sorry, JK. I think I have to. I’m looking at schedule and budget overruns. Shoddy manufacturing practices. A test flight that turned into a fiasco, almost a goddamn lethal fiasco at that.”

Lee looked at the back of the driver’s crew-cut head, at NASA Road One sliding by beyond the car windows. He tried to focus on the here and now: the leather smell of the upholstery, the air-conditioning’s crisp coolness. But he felt numb, as if he were insulated within some pressure suit, like Adam Bleeker and his crew.

“I almost gave my life for this goddamn project, Art.” And my marriage. “You know how close we are to the finish line, don’t you?”

“Yes, JK, I—”

“That close.” He held up thumb and forefinger a fraction apart. “And it’s me who got you there. The whole damn concept, the MEM design based on the old Apollo shape, all of that was mine, Art. And it’s me who’s been holding everybody’s feet to the fire ever since. Now we’ve built it, and it’s going to be the finest spacecraft ever flown. And you’re yanking me out of the saddle, all at the behest of some bunch of do-nothing jerk-offs in Washington who couldn’t find their asses with both hands—”

“Cut it, JK.”

“Who’s going to replace me? Bob Rowen? Jack Morgan, maybe? Or -

“No. Nobody internal. JK, I’ve decided we need a heavyweight program manager to follow you. A top guy, to step into your shoes—”

“Who? Who are you giving my job to?”

Cane looked away. “Gene Tyson.”

Lee stared at him, then laughed out loud. Tyson: the slick, fat veep from Hughes who had laughed Lee out of his office during the MEM bid. “Gene Tyson. Are you kidding me?”

“Gene’s a fine engineer, and a good man.”

“Sure, Art. But he’s no -

Cane looked at him. “No what? No JK Lee?”

“That’s right, damn you. Anyhow, it wouldn’t work. My people wouldn’t work with him. They wouldn’t—” Betray me.

Cane coughed and avoided his eyes again. “Tyson has already agreed to take the job. And I’ve spoken to your people.”

“I… you’re kidding me.”

“Morgan and Xu and Lye and Rowen and -

“And they agreed to go along with this?”

Cane shrugged. “I wouldn’t say they were happy about it. But—”

But they accepted it. And the sons of bitches never said a word to me.

“Listen to me, Art. Don’t do this. We’ve got a fine ship there. And a fine manufacturing process. All we have to do is fine-tune a few items, and we can keep right on course, keep on doing what we’re doing, all the way to Mars. Nothing needs fixing, Art. I really believe that.”

“I know you do,” Cane said. His voice was harder, colder. “The trouble is, JK, there aren’t many people left who agree with you.”

Lee flew home, and told Jennine what had happened. He felt a stab of anger, of resentment. “I suppose you’re glad. I suppose you think this is good news.”

Her tired, slack face showed no irritation. “Oh, JK.” She came across to him and held him.

After a while, he felt some of the tension leaking out of him, and he lifted his arms to encircle her.

The next day he went in to the plant. He drove his black T-bird into its usual parking slot, as if nothing had happened.

At her desk, Bella was in tears. He just squeezed her shoulder; he didn’t trust himself to say anything.

Inside the office they were waiting for him, lined up in front of his old gunmetal desk: Morgan, Xu, Lye, Rowen. Their faces were long, and not a damn one of them could meet his eye.

A smell of sweet-sickly cologne, of stale tobacco, wafted around Lee’s office.

There — standing behind Lee’s gunmetal desk — was Gene Tyson.

Lee went straight to Tyson and shook his hand. “Congratulations, Gene. Art is showing a lot of faith in you. You’ve got a hell of a job, but you’ve got the best people in the industry here, and I know you’re going to pull it off.”

Tyson gripped his hand. “I’ve got one big act to follow.” He sounded sincere, his big fleshy face solemn. “I’m going to need your support during the handover, obviously. JK—” He glanced around the office. “You don’t need to move out of here. It’s not necessary. I mean—”

“No.” Lee released Tyson’s hand; his own fingers felt moist from the perspiration of Tyson’s soft flesh. “No, that’s okay, Gene. Just give me a day to get out.”

“Of course.”

Then, graciously enough, Tyson left the office.

When Tyson had gone the room felt empty, purposeless.

“Damn it, JK,” Bob Rowen said suddenly, and his big round moon of a face, under its grizzle gray crew cut, looked alarmingly as if it might crumple up into tears. “I didn’t want it this way. You know that. The MEM is your ship.”

Lee took his shoulders and shook him gently. “Well, now you’ve got the ball coming out of the sky at you, boy,” he said softly. “And there isn’t a pair of hands anywhere in the industry I’d rather see under it.”

“We go back a long way, JK. All the way back to the old B-70.”

“Christ, it’s not as if I’m going to Mars myself. I’ll even be on-site here, most days.” It was true; Cane had offered him a staff job, a way to keep his rank of vice president. “Anytime you need me, you know you’ve only got to pick up the phone.”

At that, Rowen’s face did crumple. “I know, JK. Oh, Jesus.”

Lee felt as if he might fold up, too. Destructive testing, again.

He stepped back and clapped his hands. The sound was loud, startling, and they all looked at him.

“Come on, guys. You’ve all got work to do. Let’s get on with it.”

His people made attempts at good-byes, at more eulogies.

He chased them out of his office.

When they’d gone he stood there for a while, looking at his big metal desk. It looked like a piece of a wrecked battleship, stranded in the middle of a sea of blue-gray corporate-colors carpet.

Suddenly he couldn’t stand it anymore.

He went out, closing the door behind him. He asked Bella, who was sobbing openly, to pack up his effects and send them on.

Outside, Jack Morgan was waiting. “Come on,” Morgan said. “I could use a day off. Let’s get down to the Balboa Bay and drown in Lemon Hart.”

It sounded like a hell of a good idea to Lee. But, there in the middle of the parking lot, something slowed him, snagging at him like a trapped thread.

“No,” he said. “Thanks, Jack, but no.”

“Huh?” There was the concern of a doctor mixed in with Morgan’s surprise.

Lee grinned. “I’m fine. It’s just that—”

Morgan clapped his shoulder. “Don’t worry about it. Next time, huh.”

“Sure.”

Lee walked to his T-bird. He guessed Morgan understood.

It’s just that today, I think I should go on home to Jennine.

Monday, August 13, 1984

Bleeker, in blue coveralls, sat in a small padded chair, opposite Muldoon’s desk. Bleeker’s eyes were large and pale, and had always seemed somehow calm to Muldoon. Like windows to a church. But then little creases bunched up around those eyes, and the color drained out of Bleeker’s face.

When Bleeker spoke his voice had tightened up, but it was under control. “So tell me, Joe. I did something wrong?”

“No. No, of course not. You know that.” Muldoon tapped the fat brown card folder on his desk. “It’s just surgeon shit… Listen. You want a drink?” He opened the bottom drawer of his filing cabinet. “I have a bottle of sour mash down here, and—”

“No, thanks, Joe. Just tell me, will you?”

Muldoon opened the folder on his desk. It was the preliminary surgeon’s report from Bleeker’s D-prime mission postflight checkup. He started leafing through it, through the metabolism graphs and radiation dosimetry charts and countersigned forms and all the rest, wondering where to begin. “Hell, Adam. You know how it is with surgeons. You only walk out of their office two ways: fine, or—”

“Or grounded. And I’m grounded. Is that what you’re going to tell me, Joe?”

Impatient, Muldoon banged the folder closed with the palm of his hand. “Adam, you’ve spent a hell of a lot of man-hours in space, in Skylab, Moonlab, and now D-prime—”

Bleeker ducked his head.

“In fact, that’s one of your main qualifications to be on Ares. Right? We know you can cope with long-duration missions, because you’ve done it already. And now you’ve got experience with the MEM, the new technology… But you know that space exposure gets to you in the end.”

“So what’s the problem? Muscle wastage?” For the first time Bleeker looked vaguely alarmed. “Is it my heart?”

“No,” said Muldoon quickly. “As far as I can tell from this crap, your heart is fine. Adam, you’ve always been outstanding in adhering to your exercise regimes. Your muscle decline has been small, every trip, and you’ve recovered quickly.”

“What then? Calcium loss?”

“Not that. Adam — it’s radiation exposure.”

“I’m within the limits,” Bleeker said quickly.

Muldoon tried to suppress a sigh. “Yes, but they changed the rules on you, pal. To be fair to the surgeons, they keep on learning; they still don’t know much about the effects of long-term low-level radiation exposure, and they keep on coming up with new ways for you to get hurt… Listen: what do you know about free radicals?”

Bleeker frowned.

“Free radicals are bits of molecules. Highly energetic. Like ions — with charges knocked out of their atoms — only with more horsepower. They’re highly oxidizing, which means they have a taste for hydrogen. They’ll strip hydrogen atoms out of nearby molecules, even. And that can cause havoc if it’s happening inside your cells.

“Now, we’ve all got free radicals in our bodies. We need them for the operation of the metabolism. But there’s a balance. Your body produces them, and absorbs them, and keeps everything together. But if you’re exposed to high-energy radiation, or light, or extremes of temperatures—”

“You get more free radicals.”

“Right. The balance is lost.” Muldoon looked over the report once more. “These babies propagate. A free radical will return to normal by stealing its neighbor’s electron. But that makes that neighbor into a free radical in turn. Your body has a scavenger system to fight these things, but it can get overwhelmed or inactivated. And then the damage you suffer depends on what gets hit. You can get radiation-induced cancers if a DNA base is damaged, or your system loses control of its functions if protein is damaged, or you can get internal bleeding if membrane lipids are broken.”

Bleeker frowned. “Membrane lipids, Joe?”

Muldoon tried to put together an answer in plain English: how free radicals contributed to aging, and cancers, and degenerative diseases of the heart, liver, and lungs; how the loss of free-radical balance contributed to a lot of other microgravity problems like disturbing the inner ear’s balance mechanism, and bone degeneration…

“Look, Adam, you ever left a slab of butter out in the sun?”

Bleeker thought about it. “Gets rancid.”

“Well, there you are. That’s free radical damage.”

Bleeker, his eyes locked on Muldoon’s, started pulling at his cuff, in a precise, apparently unconscious gesture.

Bleeker really did seem to have a kind of inner calm, an even temper. It had evidently gotten him through all that A-war shit he’d trained for, Muldoon supposed. Maybe the psychs were right, that Bleeker had a lack of imagination.

But Muldoon could see the tension building in him, under the surface. How was he going to react to this, the worst news of his life?

“Look, Adam. You have to understand. You’re not ill. It’s just that because of this kind of study, they’ve tightened the limits. On everybody. And you, with all your exposure to space, have finished up outside the limits. If the free-radical study had come in a couple of months earlier you probably would have been bumped off D-prime, too. Look — you might have suffered some of this free-radical damage. Or not. Or something else—”

“I’ve proved myself in space, Joe, and on the ground, time and again. Look how I pulled off the D-prime flight. I deserve this goddamn trip.”

“I know that, but—”

“And I know about surgeons’ reports. They talk about risks. Likelihoods and percentiles. Not certainties. And besides, it isn’t logical. The Ares crew is going to run up a lot more time in space than I’ve accumulated anyhow.”

“But starting from a lower base, Adam. Even Phil Stone.”

“Joe, I don’t care about the risks. I want to go anyhow.”

“If it costs your life?”

“Even so.”

Bleeker lifted up his head, and there were those wide, church-window eyes looking right into Muldoon, open, honest, committed.

I have to kill this, here and now. I can’t leave him with any hope. And he didn’t intend to tell Bleeker about the pressure he’d been under: from the flight surgeons, even from Administrator Josephson himself. He wasn’t going to hide behind any of that.

“That’s not the point, Adam,” he said, and he tried to get some steel into his voice. “I can’t risk having you fall ill, halfway to Mars. I can’t risk sending you. Because you would endanger the mission.”

Bleeker smiled, a small motion of the muscles of his cheeks. Then he stood up, stiffly, still tugging at his cuff. “I appreciate the way you’re handling this, Joe.”

“Oh, God. Don’t be kind to me, for Christ’s sake. Adam, we’ll talk later. You know I need your help now. We haven’t got a lot of time to recover from this. And later — hell, there are still good careers here, on the ground.” He laughed, a little hollowly. “Look at me. You’re still in the team, Adam.”

“Sure. I know my duty, Joe. I’ll do everything I can.”

Goddamn this job. This is the most competent man in the Office, and I have to bump him. “Yeah. I know you will.”

Bleeker turned back. “By the way. Who’s replacing me? You decided yet?”

Joe Muldoon hesitated.

His orderly crew rotation system had gone out of the window, first with Curval bombing out, and on top of that came this bad shit from the surgeons about Adam. He felt an unreasonable anger at the doctors, the managers, the psychologists, all the rest of them who wanted a piece of his decision.

He felt like shocking them all, taking back the responsibility in his own two hands.

He’d already spoken to Phil Stone, the Ares mission commander. Stone had defended Bleeker to the hilt. But when he’d come to accept Bleeker was off the mission, Stone had been surprisingly clear about who he wanted to replace Bleeker.

Well, Joe, you have to pick the best Mission Specialist. The most knowledgeable: more so than Adam, for sure. And the most committed: the one who’s been spending time in the sims, and trailing around trying to train the prime crew, and all of that. And -

What?

And someone who can maybe see things, the mission, in a way old jocks like you and me can’t. A different perspective. Someone who can articulate it better, maybe…

Rookie or not, Phil?

Hell, yes, Joe. Rookie or not.

Muldoon found himself grinning. He knew that the candidate he had in mind had spent a lot of time working with Ralph Gershon, in the MLTV and various sims and survival exercises. But only because they were both outsiders, pushed together by circumstance. Still, they’d proved they could work together, although they would never be bosom buddies. The goddamn shrinks will jump up and down, over having two dipsticks on one flight, with only Phil Stone to keep ’em apart…

So, fuck ’em.

“Yes,” he said to Bleeker. “Yes, I’ve decided. But, Adam—”

“Yeah?”

“She doesn’t know yet.”

Monday, August 13, 1984

Vladimir Viktorenko had his shoes off, and he was sipping at a miniature bottle of minibar malt whiskey. He was in Houston to work on more aspects of the Ares training program. He was listening desultorily to the evening news and wondering what to do with the evening.

The newscaster — a stunningly beautiful young woman — said that the crew for Ares had just been announced.

Viktorenko coughed and dropped the little bottle.

He sat up, wiping a fine spray of the liquor from his upper lip. He couldn’t have heard correctly.

But no: there was a picture of Natalie herself, an official portrait in which she sat before a nondescript background, staring past the photographer’s shoulder, nervously clutching a long-obsolete model of a biconic MEM.

He picked up the phone and dialed York.

“Marushka! I just heard! You are going to Mars!”

York’s voice was flat, unemotional. “It isn’t true.”

“What? But I have seen the news…”

“Yeah. Me, too. But I haven’t heard anything from NASA. Until they call me, I don’t know anything about it.”

Viktorenko felt his mouth opening and closing, like a fish’s. You are going to Mars! You should be dancing, singing! The silence on the line stretched out.

“Marushka. You are alone?”

“Uh-huh.”

Of course you are. “Do I have your permission to come wait with you, until the phone call comes? Perhaps this will help you.”

“If you like. You don’t have to. I’m fine, Vladimir.”

“Of course you are.”

Viktorenko hung up, swept up six of the miniatures from the minibar, and ran out of the room.

In her apartment York was sitting on the couch, alone, with the TV running in the background. She wore a sports shirt and slacks. On the living-room walls she had pinned up her old Mariner pictures, and there was work scattered over the small desk, half-finished: a new paper, evidently, on the surface properties of some obscure region of the planet Mars.

Viktorenko bustled in. “I bring you a present.” He dug the six miniatures out of his pocket, and set them up in a row along the top of the TV set.

“What’s that for?”

“For when you get the right call. Or, perhaps, in case you get the wrong one.”

He sat beside her, then, and held her hand, and they watched the TV together, without speaking. At first her hand was stiff in his, but after a couple of minutes she clung to him, and he could feel the cold dampness of her palm.

The phone rang, startling Viktorenko.

York let it ring a couple of times. Then she unwound her hand from Viktorenko’s and walked to the phone. Her steps were slow and deliberate, as if she were wearing some invisible pressure suit.

“York.”

He heard her exhale, softly.

“Oh, hi, Mom. No. It’s not true. Well, maybe. I’ve only seen the TV news, like you. NASA hasn’t called me. Until then I… No, I don’t think I should call them. They know where I am. I’ll just wait here until — yes, maybe you should get off the line, Mom. I’ll call as soon as I know. Bye. Yes, me, too. Bye.”

She hung up. She turned to Viktorenko and shrugged.

On the TV a rerun of some awful dated sitcom was showing; Viktorenko could barely follow the quick-fire accents, and he found the visual business of the show cheap and unfunny.

York sat silently, trembling a little. He doubted that she could even see the TV images.

The phone rang. York got up again.

“York.

“Yes, sir.”

She fell silent, then, for long seconds.

“Yes, sir. Thank you. I’ll do the best I can. Sure. Good-bye.”

She hung up the phone. Viktorenko did not dare to speak.

York walked to the TV, where the canned laughter was still rattling from the inane sitcom. She picked up one of Viktorenko’s miniatures, twisted it open, threw the cap across the room, and downed the draught in one gulp.

Viktorenko couldn’t contain himself. He got off the sofa and crossed the room in one great stride; he got hold of York by the elbows. “Well? Well, Marushka?”

She looked up at him, her eyes small and vulnerable under those peculiar big eyebrows. “It’s true,” she said. “Vlad, it’s true. That was Joe Muldoon.”

Viktorenko wanted to dance, shout, pick her up and whirl her around!… But she just stood there, looking up at him, fiddling with the empty bottle; he told himself to be calm, and wait on her needs.

She picked up the phone, and called her mother. Then she suggested that they should wait a while, in case there were any more calls.

So, bizarrely, Viktorenko found himself back on the sofa, holding York’s trembling hand, and watching the stupid sitcom run its meaningless course.

After a time, York said: “I can’t stand this, Vladimir.”

“What?”

She made a small gesture; he guessed she was holding herself in, tight. “The uncertainty. The roller-coaster ride. The lack of control I have over my own life. My God, Vlad, after the space soak mission was canned I thought I was farther from Mars than ever. And now — out of nowhere — this.”

He squeezed her hand. “You were never in the military, Marushka. This is the military way to do things. In the military, you have no choices, no control. Perhaps your civilian NASA has more of a military streak than many care to admit.”

The phone rang. It was Adam Bleeker, whose seat York had taken. York spoke to him briefly, quietly.

“How is he?”

She shrugged.

They sat a little longer, but there were no more calls. No doubt those idiots in the Astronaut Office were closing ranks, punishing York — and Gershon, probably — for ousting their buddies, their preferred candidates.

Eventually Viktorenko decided enough was enough. “No more of this! We would handle matters so much better in Russia. Come. We will go out. We will eat, we will go to a barbecue pit or a Pizza Hut or a Mexican drive-in, or whatever you like. My treat! The treat of the Soviet Union, Marushka!”

At first she demurred, but he insisted.

As they left the apartment, a fat young man with a tape recorder came running up the hall; a spotlight glared over his shoulder.

“Ms. York! KNWS-TV News. How does it feel to be the first woman on Mars?”