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.

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…