“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.

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.