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.”

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.