“You from one of the MEM bidders?”

“Nope,” Lee said. “I’m from CA. Columbia Aviation. Tell me you’ve heard of us.”

Gershon grinned.

Lee shrugged. “We do a lot of subcontracting work for Rockwell, and others, and we’re doing some experimental stuff for NASA. Lifting body shapes and such. We’re small, but we’re growing, and we’re smarter than the rest. When it comes to Request For Proposals time, we’ll throw in our lot with one of the big guys and hustle for a piece of the pie.” He stared up at the HQ building, the big brick cube. “You know, I worked here, for a while. Under Dutch Kindelberger.”

Gershon looked at Lee with new interest. He knew that name, of course. Any kid like Gershon, who had grown up steeped in planes and the men who built them, would know about Dutch Kindelberger. Dutch had built up Rockwell — then called North American Aviation — in the war years by delivering perhaps the finest American flying machine of that conflict, the P-51 Mustang.

“Dutch designed this building himself,” Lee said. “We used to call it the Brickyard.”

“I didn’t know Kindelberger was an architect.”

“He wasn’t.” Lee grinned. “You don’t think it shows?” He looked around, at the airport, the boulevard, the sprawl of Rockwell buildings. “There used to be a sign, on top of the main building over there” — he pointed — “You could see it from miles away. ‘Home of the X-15.’ ”

Something clicked in Gershon’s mind. “I thought I knew your face.” He had a vague memory of an old photograph, from the scrapbooks and cutting files he’d kept as a kid: an experimental airplane, up at Edwards, with a line of grinning young engineers, all spectacles and buck teeth and uncontrolled hair. “You worked on the X-15?”

Lee said, “No. But I bet I know what you’re thinking of.”

“The B-70. You worked on the B-70, didn’t you? With Harrison Storms.”

“Yeah. With Stormy.”

Harrison Storms was the man who had built the Apollo spacecraft for Rockwell. And before that, there had been the B-70, a supersonic bomber. Gershon remembered old photographs: that stainless steel surface painted white to reflect Mach 3 heat, the huge delta wing two stories off the ground…

“Congress canceled the project on us,” Lee said. “We only made two of the damn things. And I know one of them crashed with an F-104. I guess the other was scrapped.”

“No. It survived. It’s in a museum.”

Lee eyed Gershon and smiled. “How about that? I never knew.”

Gershon glanced at his watch. “Come on. It’s after nine. We have to go in.”

“Sure. We don’t want to miss the read-through of the minutes, do we?”

Side by side, they walked into the Brickyard.

Two portly, shirt-sleeved aerospace executives were struggling with a balky Vu-graph machine. One said, “You sure you know how to fly this thing, Al?”

Al laughed.

Gershon tried to settle himself in the small, hard-framed chair, with his briefcase tucked under the table. It was already hot, airless, and his collar chafed at his throat.

That word, “fly,” tugged at him. Flying a projector. Flying a desk. Jesus. Words misused by people who knew no more about flying than how to order a drink from a stewardess.

The chairman called them to order. He was NASA Assistant Administrator Tim Josephson, a tall, thin, bookish man. He sat on a swivel chair behind a desk at the head of the table, and rattled through the minutes and agenda.

Lee leaned over to Gershon. “How do you like that? This is Dutch’s old office. That’s Dutch’s chair, for God’s sake. Rockwell must really, really, want this contract.”

Behind Josephson the whole wall was covered with a mural. It showed a P-51 Mustang coming right out at you.

Gershon wanted to be out of here, doing something.

But life in the Astronaut Office wasn’t like that. You had to pay your dues.

“Listen to me,” Chuck Jones had said, in his role as chief astronaut. “We gotta have someone from the Office assigned to the Mars Excursion Module.”

Gershon had thought he was being dumped on. “But there is no MEM.”

“Even better.” And Jones had spun Gershon a story about how Pete Conrad had helped to design the controls and instrument displays for the Lunar Module. “Conrad spent fucking months in plywood mock-ups of that lander, surrounded by painted switches and dials, trying to imagine himself coming down onto the Moon.” Jones held his thumb and forefinger up, a hairbreadth apart. “And he came that close to being the first man to land there. Now. You want to tell me you know more about how things work around here than old Pete Conrad?”

So maybe it wasn’t such a bad assignment after all, Gershon had concluded.

The trouble was, though, it still didn’t look as if the MEM was ever going to fly, except in the glossy promotional brochures of the aerospace companies.

Landing a spacecraft on Mars wasn’t an easy thing to do. And that was just about the only thing everybody was agreed on. Even after you’d hauled ass all the way out there, you found yourself facing a planet that was an awkward combination of Earth and Moon: the worst features of each, Gershon supposed. That smear of air was thick enough that you couldn’t fly a tinfoil buggy on rockets right down to the surface, like the Lunar Module landing on the Moon; you were going to have to take a heat shield along. On the other hand, the air was too thin to allow you simply to fly your way down to the surface in a glider with wings, the way the Space Shuttle would have flown to Earth. You had to have some compromise, a bastard cross between a flying machine and a rocket ship.

So disagreement was inevitable. After all, nobody had done it before, tried to build a machine to land people on Mars.

But there was a lot of money and politics involved, so, of course, the arguments went far beyond the technical.

The liaison group was a relatively new initiative, and it came from Fred Michaels himself, as an attempt to cut through the mess of arguments holding up the MEM design. The group got all the warring factions together — the aerospace people from Rockwell and McDonnell and Grumman and Boeing, and the NASA groups from Marshall and Ames and Langley and Houston — to thrash out the issues.

The formal presentations started.

First up was a delegation from Grumman, to present its current thinking.

The Grumman MEM would come in from Martian orbit as a half cone, like an Apollo Command Module split down the center. With the aid of a lot of electronics, the crew could actually steer the thing. Then, inside the atmosphere, the MEM would tip downward, so that it was falling to the ground nose first. The heat-shield shell would fall away, revealing something that looked like a fat Lunar Module with landing legs that would spring out. The whole thing would come down on rockets mounted in the nose. On the ground, the MEM would unfold, with crew quarters swiveling out from the sides toward the ground.

Grumman had built the Apollo Lunar Module. Gershon happened to know that Grumman had the tacit backing of Marshall, with Hans Udet and all the other old Germans. And so what you got was a kind of beefed-up Lunar Module, coupled with some typical brute-force heavy engineering from the Germans.

The Grumman people had a model, a little Revell-kit version of the thing, which was all unfolding legs and rotating compartments and bits of plastic heat shield. Parts of it kept falling off in the hands of the nervous presenter. The thing looked ludicrously overcomplicated. When that upside-down cone came apart, revealing all the plumbing inside, Gershon was reminded of an ice-cream cone.

JK Lee leaned over and laughed quietly. “Christ, that thing is ugly. And you’d waste a lot of development effort.”

“How so?”

“The thing’s a bastard. Too many smart-ass ideas. You’d have to develop a new heat-shield material to cover that huge flat surface. And you’d have to figure out how to build a lifting body to fly in the Martian atmosphere. And you’ve got a whole new Lunar Module to build as well. And for what?”