Gershon laughed. He wasn’t surprised to hear it.

The astronauts still exerted a lot of power, official and unofficial. It was their asses on the line, after all. Lee was trying to get them all to submit to his change request process, just like everybody else, to keep everything orderly. But he was also aware of the need to keep this key group sweet. So he’d set up a private lounge for the astronauts, just down from his office, with a shower and a couple of fold-out beds, a place where they could sack out and hide from the press. And he’d take them home with him and have Jennine throw swank dinner parties for them, and make a hell of a fuss over them, and laud them to the skies. And the astronauts would come away thinking IK Lee was the greatest thing to have happened to the space program since the invention of Velcro.

At least, Gershon reflected, until he bounced their next request for a change.

Then Lee spotted something else, in another part of the shop floor. He stalked over to an operator of a six-ton turret lathe, who was shaving thin slices off an intricate aluminum sculpture. The thing looked beautiful, like a work of art in itself; Gershon, who was supposed to be an expert on MEM systems, couldn’t place it or identify its function. Lee picked up the engineering drawing the guy was working from. Then he called Gershon over; Lee was agitated, and the operator avoided Gershon’s eyes, obviously embarrassed. Gershon felt sorry for him.

“Look at this,” Lee said, waving the drawing in front of Gershon.

“What about it?”

“We’ve got a policy that any drawing with more than a dozen changes has to be redrawn. This one must have over a hundred, for Christ’s sake. And that’s not the worst of it.” He picked up the component the operator had been modifying. “This fucking thing is obsolete! I know it is! Even before it’s been manufactured!” He threw the thing to the floor, where it landed with a clatter.

The operator, baffled, wiped his hands on a rag and looked around for his supervisor.

Lee stalked away, a tight little knot of tension; Gershon walked with him, his flight helmet under his arm.

Lee looked quite gaunt, his skin stretched tight as if by wires under the flesh, and his posture was stooped over. Lee was a man just eaten up by nervous energy and adrenaline.

Gershon had come to spend a lot of time at Newport as the MEM had moved through its development. He’d served as a guinea pig for the life sciences boys, and he’d crawled in and out of hatches and down ladders to sandpits stained red like Mars dust.

He’d spent hours in plywood-and-paint mock-ups of the spacecraft interior, trying to imagine that this was real, that he was all but alone on the far side of the Solar System, trying to bring a spacecraft down to Mars. Just like Pete Conrad.

He wanted nobody to know the MEM better than he did. And he was achieving his goal.

He’d become aware that the whole place, the whole of Columbia Aviation, was kind of high-octane, driven forward by the relentless, destructive energy of JK Lee. And under the high pressure and the enormous complexity of the project, the place always seemed on the point of being overwhelmed.

But Gershon still believed, as he had at the time of the RFP, that the Columbia vision of the MEM — inspired and led by JK Lee — was the best shot they had of building something that might actually work sufficiently well to fly people down to Mars a few years from, now.

Gershon had been tough on Columbia himself. But basically he wanted the project to succeed. He wanted to fly to Mars, damn it, not hang JK Lee’s scalp on his wall.

But, even as he framed that thought, he tripped over a wire, stretched across the floor. And when he looked down he saw more wires and loose components and discarded equipment: bits of spacecraft, scattered over the floor like detritus, washed up by the overwhelming tide of specification changes

Gershon, flight helmet under his arm, walked around the training vehicle. Natalie York walked with him, her hair lifted by the breeze, her sunglasses hiding her eyes.

Ralph Gershon couldn’t help himself. “That’s the MLTV? Holy shit,” he said.

Ted Curval, from Phil Stone’s prime crew, was the senior astronaut assigned to oversee them for the day. He just grinned. “Your regulation Mars Landing Training Vehicle, Number Three. Brutal, ain’t she?”

The Mars Landing Training Vehicle was an open framework, set on six landing legs. Gershon could see a down-pointing jet at the center, surrounded by a cluster of fuel tanks. Reaction control nozzles were clustered at the four corners of the frame, like bunches of metallic berries, and there were two big auxiliary rockets, also downward-pointing. The pilot’s cockpit was an ejector seat partially enclosed by aluminum walls, with a big, bold NASA logo painted on the side, under a black-stenciled “three.” The whole thing stood maybe ten feet high, with the legs around twelve feet apart. There was no skin, so you could see into the guts of the thing, jet and rockets and fuel tanks and plumbing and cabling and all; it was somehow obscene, as if splayed.

In the low morning sunlight the bird’s complicated shadow stretched off across the tarmac of the wide runway.

“Shit,” Gershon said again, coming back to Curval. “It’s like something out of a fucking circus.”

“Tell me about it,” said Curval. “But it’s the nearest thing we have to a MEM trainer. You want to fly a MEM, you have to learn to handle one of these things, guy.” Curval was grinning, laughing at him.

Ted Curval was one of the Old Heads. A classic astronaut profile: a Navy test pilot, he’d even been an instructor at Pax River, and he’d logged a lot of time in space already. In the endless battle to climb up the Ares selection ladder, Curval had the great advantage of being from an earlier recruitment class than Gershon, and had already accrued plenty of live, free-flying MLTV experience. While the best Gershon had managed, for all his angling and hours spent at Columbia, had been some time on the tethered facility at Langley, where a MEM-type mock-up dangled from cables.

So Curval was in Phil Stone’s crew and was on his way to Mars. And Ralph Gershon was still on the outside looking in.

But what the hell. As of today, Ralph Gershon would be able to add MLTV experience to his list of accomplishments. So screw Ted Curval, and all the other complacent assholes.

As far as Gershon was concerned the contest wasn’t over until the bird left the pad, on April 21, 1985.

Gershon jammed his helmet on his head. He jumped up into the MLTV’s open frame. With a single twist he was able to lower himself into the single seat. “How about that. Just my size.”

Curval stepped forward. “Hey, Gershon—”

Gershon was strapping himself in. “The seat’s a Weber zero-zero, right?”

“Come on down from there, man, you’re not prepared. You’re not supposed to—”

“And the jet back there is a General Electric CF-700-2V turbofan. Come on, Ted, I know the equipment. I’ve come out here to fly the thing, not listen to you yack about it.” He glanced down at the control panel: a few instruments, a CRT, a couple of handsets. Just like the sims.

He found himself blinking; the sun was strong, almost directly in his face, and his eyes hurt. On the Plexiglas windshield in front of him he could see reticles — fine lines — etched in there, labeled with numbers -

But suddenly the pain in his eyes amplified. “Yow.” He threw his arm across his face. His eyes itched unbearably, and started to flood.

“For a start,” Curval called up drily, “you can close up your visor. You’re being hit by hydrogen peroxide leaking from the attitude controls. You sure you know what you’re doing, guy?”