As he walked into the low fieldstone building that served as office space for Columbia’s executives, Gershon could all but smell the tension in the air.

The CARR was to be held in a big bleak conference room here. The CARR, the Contractor’s Acceptance Readiness Review, was a major event in the life of a spacecraft, the moment when it was judged to have met the specifications of the contract and became the property of the United States government. And since Spacecraft 009 was the first MEM designated for a manned mission — the man-rating D-prime flight — the pressure on Columbia Aviation to get this CARR right was intense.

There were a dozen senior NASA managers and a lot of the top people from Columbia involved in the project: Chaushui Xu, Bob Rowen, Julie Lye, and others. People Gershon had gotten to know well.

But the CARR was starting late.

JK Lee, the chairman for the day, hadn’t turned up for work yet. In fact, the word was, he hadn’t shown up at all since Friday afternoon. It was Monday morning, and everyone knew that Lee normally worked right through the weekend. Gershon felt vaguely disturbed. This sure as hell wasn’t like Lee.

Gershon got himself a coffee and a bag of peanuts from one of the ubiquitous vending machines.

Without a single article having yet left the ground for a flight test, the MEM program was suffering very visible delays and failures and cost overruns. Columbia was coming in for a huge amount of criticism: from NASA, from Congress, from other subcontractors. Even NASA’s redesign around JK’s three-man strategy was being picked over. In the Astronaut Office, the fury at the reduction of Muldoon’s four-man crews to three still hadn’t subsided…

In fact Gershon knew that Joe Muldoon had gotten so impatient with what he saw as lax management of the project that he’d ordered a “tiger team” review of the whole thing. It was a technique NASA had borrowed from the Air Force. The tiger team, led by Phil Stone, had a free hand to descend on Columbia’s plant and rake through any and all aspects of the operation. Gershon knew that the tiger team was likely to be here today, even in the middle of the CARR review; and their draft summary report was all but completed. This, and the CARR, were in addition to the usual review process, which might involve as many as four hundred NASA staff out here at Newport, looking over the shoulders of the Columbia staff. It all added to the pressures, already barely tolerable, on JK Lee and his people.

Then JK Lee came bustling in at last, his tie on crooked, a fat stack of papers under his right arm. He was holding his left arm a little stiffly, Gershon thought. He dumped his papers on a lectern at the front of the room and spent a few minutes glad-handing some of the NASA people.

Then he went up to the lectern and called for order.

“Okay,” he opened. “This is the CARR for Spacecraft 009. It’s a meeting specifically concerned with 009 and its suitability to leave the plant, here, and begin the checkout procedures and booster-mating procedures down at the Cape. We should try not to get ourselves tangled up with design changes; we’re concerned with the specific checkout of this spacecraft as it is presently configured.”

He faced his audience. “Now, it’s not a meeting where I want to see us bring up old bitches. We know the ship has been moving slowly. I acknowledge that. In fact it’s still not completely through all of its tests, so the CARR is in that sense somewhat provisional. But I intend to go ahead with it anyway…”

There was some grumbling at that, but nobody protested out loud.

Gershon picked up his thick briefing papers.

Under Lee’s bustling chairmanship, the meeting began to work its way through the list of problems. Most of them were minor, and had been hashed over in previous sessions. Lee tried to keep the discussion short on each point, cutting off arguments and summarizing the mood of the group in a series of Action Responses for each itemized problem.

Even so, the list of items to be reviewed was so long that it was soon obvious to Gershon that the CARR was going to go on for many hours; maybe it wouldn’t even finish that day.

Still, Lee was in good form today, Gershon thought. He was hyped up, but he took them briskly through the items. He arbitrated disagreements, joking and laughing. It made for a good atmosphere, relaxed and constructive, with plenty of humor.

But Lee still seemed to be having trouble with that left arm of his. He rubbed it frequently, up around the armpit, and he was having difficulty standing for long periods.

Lunch was a finger buffet. Gershon gulped down a quick plateful. Lee sought him out and invited him to take a walk around the plant. Gershon appreciated that and accepted. Just now it might have been more politically astute for Lee to be oiling up to the NASA bigwigs. And Gershon hadn’t exactly been uncritical of Columbia over the years. But Lee had evidently never forgotten the favor that Gershon had done him, by pushing the MEM RFP his way in the first place.

They reached the Clean Room. The four flight test articles were being assembled here, in antiseptic conditions. Lee and Gershon had to sign in, and they had to put on white coats and soft plastic overshoes and tuck their hair inside little plastic caps with elasticized brims. They were given strict instructions by the foreman to keep to the marked paths, and away from the spacecraft if you please.

The room stretched off in all directions, white-walled and illuminated by brilliant fluorescents. Clusters of workmen, all kitted out in soft hats and overshoes, toiled at huge pieces of equipment. There was a soft murmur of conversation, a clank of metal on metal, a whir of machinery. Huge winches and cranes dangled from the reinforced roof, empty and potent.

The Clean Room reminded Gershon more of a sculptor’s foundry than a factory; there was no sense of the routine here. Only a handful of MEMs would ever be built, and so everything here was new, special, a one-of-a-kind.

And in the middle of all this, four conical shapes were starting to emerge, as if crystallizing from some superconcentrated solution. They looked like religious artifacts, Gershon thought, like four pyramids in a row, with their silvery, shining skins punctured by mysterious nozzles and inscribed windows.

This was the mark of Lee’s achievement, Gershon reflected. Amid all the management chaos — and blizzards of changes, and balky subcontractors, and awkward customers, and engineering unknowns, and cost overruns — JK Lee was creating something magical: four Mars ships, coalescing on a factory floor in Newport Beach.

Beside each of the cones there was a sign: This is a Manned Spacecraft. Your PRIDE — Personal Responsibility In Daily Effort — will ensure their safe return.

Lee grinned. “Something I stole from McDonnell,” he said. He kept on rubbing his arm, and he looked drawn and tired, with none of the intense energy Gershon had come to associate with him. Maybe the CARR was taking it out of him.

They stopped alongside one of the four glittering spacecraft. “Spacecraft 009,” Lee said. “The subject of the CARR today; the first MEM intended to carry a crew. How about that.”

The MEM loomed over Gershon, all of thirty feet tall, like some fat metal teepee. The shining heat-resistant skin was incomplete in many places, and he was able to see the subsystems in the interior, exposed as if this was some big cutaway model.

He could make out the overall layout of the ship. There was the slim shaft of the ascent stage at the axis of the teepee — a spacecraft buried within a spacecraft — with the angular, truncated crew cabin at its tip. And there, at the base of the MEM, was the fat half torus that was the surface shelter, with the curving access tunnel snaking upward to the ascent-stage cabin at the top of the stack. And opposite the shelter, balancing its weight, were propellant and oxidant tanks: big spheres for the descent stage, squat cylinders for the ascent stage, grouped in an asymmetrical cluster like big shining berries.