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.