“But I’ll bet the landscape isn’t too easy to negotiate.”

“No. Some of the smaller canyons there are a couple of miles deep. If you had several months to survey the place, and some kind of flying machine—”

“But we don’t,” Stone said. “Okay, Natalie. That leaves two places. Both on the border between the old stuff in the southern hemisphere and the volcanic plains in the north.”

“Yes. This one in the eastern hemisphere” — on the opposite side of the world from Tharsis — “is called Nilosyrtis Mensa. It is what we call ‘fretted’ terrain.” She dug out a photograph, this one a mosaic in black and white. It showed a surface uniformly crumpled.

“Christ,” Stone said. “It looks like beaten copper.”

“We think the older, southern terrain has been eroded, here on the border, leaving this irregular, grooved landscape.”

“Looks bloody difficult to land on,” Bleeker said.

“Yes, and you’d need long traverses to achieve systematic surveys.”

“All right. So that leaves one site.”

The final flag was at the western fringe of the Tharsis Bulge, close to the border of the north and south terrains. It was in the middle of a green stripe that cut north to south across the Valles. The green, together with the blue ribbon of the Valles, made a rough upright cross, straddling the equator.

“This is a region shaped by running water. Apparently. There are channels that seem to flow out of the Valles Marineris, and across the northern plains.”

Stone smiled. “So these are the famous water-carved features you tell us about in the Singing Wheel.”

“It’s an equatorial site,” she said. “So you get a mix of young and old geological types. And that’s important to us. Most mixed terrain is complex, broken up. But here the landscape is pretty forgiving for a landing. And if you’re going to find water anywhere, it’s here. Maybe under the surface. And where there’s water—”

“Maybe there’s life.” Stone got out of his chair and walked across to the map; he leaned close so he could read the label by the little flag. “Mangala Vallis. What does it mean?”

“All the major valleys have been named after words for Mars. Here, to the east of Marineris, we even have an Ares valley…”

“And Mangala?”

“Sanskrit. The oldest language of the Indo-European group.”

“So maybe Mangala is the oldest word for Mars in the western world.” Stone smiled. “I kind of like that.” Standing at the map, he turned to eye York. “So you’ve been pushing the site selection board toward Mangala Vallis. For good operational reasons, of course. A place on which you just happen to be the world’s leading expert. Right, York?”

He was grinning, and so was Bleeker.

“Still wangling to get my seat, Natalie?” Bleeker called, good-natured.

She felt chilled. These guys see right through me.

But maybe that’s not a bad thing. If Bleeker knows I’m right on his tail, maybe he will take his geology a little more seriously.

And all he has to do is slip once…

She started to roll up her maps. “What do you think? I’ll give you a preprint of my next Journal of Geophysical Research paper on Mangala; read it and weep, flyboys.”

“Now what?” Stone asked. “Are we done?”

“Like hell. We’re only just beginning; that was the fun stuff. Now we come to Martian climatology. Compare and contrast with Earth’s, and…”

After some grumbling, the guys settled down again.

The day wore on, and the little room grew progressively hotter. October 1981

In the end, five lead companies submitted proposals to build the Mars Excursion Module: Rockwell, McDonnell, Martin, Boeing, and JK Lee’s company, Columbia.

The post-presentation work of the MEM Evaluation Board was long and complicated. It was all a question of weighted scores; Ralph Gershon had never seen anything like it. There were subcommittees to evaluate the bidder’s “administrative capacity” and “business approach” and “technical qualification” …Gershon was himself involved in three of the subcommittees. And each subcommittee assigned weighted scores to each bid, under hundreds of categories.

It didn’t make sense to Gershon. Would all these numbers really determine the final outcome? If you could reduce decision making to a mechanical process, the day would come when a computer could run an outfit like NASA.

In this bidding war, for instance, it was pretty obvious to Gershon that Columbia had the most plausible strategy. NASA, with the bigger players, had pissed away the best part of a decade on studies and proposals and evaluations of ever more exotic Mars landers, without ever really getting to the point. Lee’s people had come in fresh and had cut through all that crap, and presented something that looked as if it could be up and flying in a couple of years.

The trouble was, the scoring didn’t back up that intuition. Even though its technical pitch was well received — and the human factors stuff seemed particularly well thought through — Columbia was penalized by its status as a small experimental outfit. It just didn’t look as if Columbia was capable of delivering a complete spacecraft.

When the first-cut summary sheets came in, the overall totals gave Rockwell first place, with Boeing and McDonnell tied for second, and Columbia a distant last.

Gershon argued against the scoring in the final plenary sessions. “Damn it, you’ve got the results of the sims. I bust my balls trying to get a biconic to fly. We have to pick the bidder with the best chance of building something that will work…”

He got some sympathy from Joe Muldoon. The scores went through a rethink which helped Columbia a little.

But in the end Muldoon’s final report to Tim Josephson followed the scoring conclusions: “Rockwell International is considered the outstanding source as the Mars Excursion Module prime contractor…”

His assignment completed, Gershon went off to work at the Cape on the first of the Ares A-class missions, an unmanned proving flight of the upgraded Saturn VB.

In a couple of days he was called back to JSC to put his pawprint to the final MEM report. Gershon turned up, pretty pissed with the whole thing.

Muldoon caught him up.

“Where are you going?”

“It’s over, isn’t it? Oh, come on, Joe. You know as well as I do that Columbia was the only outfit with a real chance of building something in the time frame.. And now we’re dumping them.”

“Of course I know that. But it’s not over yet.”

“Are you kidding me? We’ve just signed off the final report, for Christ’s sake. Columbia never had a chance.”

“You’re learning fast, Ralph, but you’ve got a long way to go. In this game, a signed-off, final report is just the start of the negotiations.”

“What do you mean?”

“I want you to do something for me.”

A couple of days after that, a long telegram landed on JK Lee’s gunmetal desk.

He called in Jack Morgan and flipped the telegram across the desk at him.

Morgan read through the thing carefully, but he kept one eye on Lee as he did so.

The telegram had come from Ralph Gershon, one of the astronauts on the evaluation board. It was basically a list of questions about the Columbia bid. A lot of them were brutal, and the first was a doozie: translated from corporate speak it was, How can a pissant bunch of amateurs like Columbia handle the development of a major spacecraft like the MEM?

“Well, I guess this is it,” Morgan said, studying Lee. “We’re dead.”

Morgan had never seen Lee so low as in the last couple of months, since the MEM presentation. The release of tension, the sleep deficit, and all the rest of it had dumped Lee into a deep, deep trough of depression. And Lee’s overspend on the proposal had finally come out into the open, and there was a lot of muttering against him within Columbia. During the MEM exercise Morgan had become genuinely worried about what Lee was doing to himself. Not to mention his family. With the MEM thing being over, Morgan knew he was going to have to broach the health thing with Lee, somehow. Maybe he’d try to work through Jennine.