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.

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.