“So what would you do?”

“Me? If I was Grumman? I’d tell my designers to cut out the ice cream and focus on the meat and potatoes. Pick one approach and stick to it. If you’re building a lifting body, fine. Don’t give me damn Moon-bug legs as well.”

The delegation led by Boeing wasn’t too specific about the details of its landing craft itself; instead it concentrated on how it would get down through the atmosphere. Its MEM would descend from orbit and go through reentry, and then, about six miles up and still traveling faster than sound, it would sprout a ballute — a cross between a balloon and a parachute, a huge, inflatable sail that would grab at the thin air. Then, a complex sequence of parachutes would bring the craft close enough to the surface for hover rockets to take over for the landing.

The problem was that nobody had yet made a ballute, or even tested one in a wind tunnel. And it would be all but impossible to test in the thicker atmosphere of Earth.

A lot of the Boeing presentation had to do with the technicalities of packing parachutes. It was deadly dull. Gershon made himself take notes on his jotting pad; but sometimes, when he glanced down at the pad, he didn’t recognize what he’d written.

The third presentation was from Rockwell itself, backed by a combination of Langley and JPL. And this was the most advanced option of all. It was another lifting-body shape, but more advanced than Grumman’s crude half cone: it was a biconic, a segment of a fat cone topped by a thin nose. This MEM would be able to enter the Martian atmosphere direct from Earth, without the need to stop over in a parking orbit around Mars first. The biconic would be controlled one hundred percent by the pilot, with a joystick and rudder pedals. The ship would follow a complicated entry path, dipping and swooping and swirling, losing heat gradually and bleeding off speed. And then, approaching the surface, the biconic would tip up and land on its tail, ready for an ascent back to orbit.

But there were drawbacks. The electronics would be so complex there was no way an astronaut could land the thing in the case of computer failure. And all those curved surfaces would take a lot of buffeting from the air; the biconic would need heavy heat shielding over most of its surface.

The biconic looked to Gershon like a hybrid of Langley’s traditional love of aircraft and JPL’s expertise in robotics and computer control, all mixed up together with Rockwell’s immense appetite for fat and ambitious development budgets.

Looking at the presentation, Gershon felt an odd itch in the palm of his hands and his feet.

Lee was grinning at him. “I can see that look in your eye. You’d like to fly that thing down through the Martian air, maybe do a couple of banks over Olympus Mons.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

Lee waved his hand. “I’m not mocking you. But you need to understand that you’re looking at a twenty-year development effort there, minimum, in my judgment. Christ, nobody’s flown a biconic ever. Not even a fucking wooden mock-up. Unless the Russians are up to something, which I doubt.

“And then you’re talking about building a biconic to land on Mars. What do we know about the atmosphere of Mars? Buddy, if you want to see your grandson flying down onto all that red dust, then you put your money on a biconic. But you and I sure ain’t going to see it…”

The three presentations took them right through the day and on into the evening. Then, in a long final session, the meeting argued out the merits of the comparative designs: possible crew sizes, surface stay capabilities, gross weight in Earth orbit, required delta-vee, aerodynamic characteristics like lift-over-drag ratio. It all got bogged down in picky detail, and it became clear to Gershon after a while that all sides were more intent on filibustering than reaching any kind of decision.

Gershon stared at Dutch Kindelberger’s mural of the Mustang and wondered what it had been like to fly.

As the meeting broke up, around 9 P.M., the delegates began to make plans to rendezvous in various bars.

JK Lee approached Gershon. “You’re looking kind of strained.”

Gershon grinned at him. “I like the idea of a couple of pitchers of cold beer. But not in some shitty bar with these corporate suits, frankly.”

“Yeah. Listen. You want to get out of here? It’s a clear night. We could take a drive, maybe up toward Edwards.”

Edwards Air Force Base. Up on the high desert. “Let’s go.”

They got out of the Brickyard. Lee pulled his little black T-bird out of the parking lot, and they stopped to pick up a couple of six-packs. Then Lee headed north, out of the city.

The night was crisp and cool and cloudless, but the horizon was ringed with the conurbation’s sulfur orange glow. Gershon had to tilt his head back and stare straight up to see any stars, in a little clear circle of sky directly above him. He thought he recognized the big square of Pegasus up there, the winged horse.

He had a sense of confinement, as if the city and all its smog was a great big box he was stuck inside.

Lee drove one-handed, hanging on to the T-bird’s wheel with one finger. “I remember coming up here. I mean, 1955 or earlier. The days of the B-70. The road out of the city was just a two-lane blacktop, winding up out of the Newhall Pass and through Mint Canyon, until it gave onto the high desert. And Palmdale was just a gas station, with a whole bunch of Joshua trees… All changed now, huh.”

“I guess.”

“So. You had a good day?”

Gershon grunted. “Not one of my best.”

“You’re not a lover of engineering debate.”

“That wasn’t a debate about engineering. And most of those guys sure weren’t engineers.”

Lee hooted. “You’re right there. But you have to understand the politics, my friend. Look at it this way. When Nixon canned the Space Shuttle, back in 1972 — well, that wasn’t the most popular decision with the big aerospace boys. They would have loved the Shuttle because the whole damn thing would have been new. They would have been able to throw away all their old Saturn tooling facilities and start afresh, at great public expense. But with the incremental program we’ve got now, everything is a derivative of something else. And it’s all pretty much owned by the companies who designed those pieces.

“So you’ve got Boeing working on the new MS-IC, for example, the enhanced Saturn first stage, which was what it had originally built. And McDonnell Douglas, over at Huntington Beach, has built the Skylabs and Moonlabs — space stations lashed up from disused Saturn third stages — which McDonnell built in the first place. And so on.

“But the plum contract — the most advanced technology, the real glamour work for the next decade — is going to be the MEM. A whole new spacecraft, to take a few guys to the surface of Mars. Making a lot of other guys very rich in the process…”

“But NASA hasn’t even issued a Request For Proposals yet.”

“Of course not. What do you expect? NASA’s taking too much heat from its contractors. And then on top of that you have all the usual bullshit infighting between the NASA centers.”

“Maybe so,” Gershon said gloomily. “But we’ve already pissed away six years, since ’72.”

“You want to fly something before you retire.”

“You got it.”

“Hell, I understand that. Listen, you want to break open that six-pack?”

“You want one?”

“Sure.”

Gershon’s can was still dewed from the store’s refrigerator. The beer was crisp in his mouth; he felt some of the tension of the day unwind.

The San Gabriel Mountains were behind them, and Lee pushed the T-bird hard through the blackness. The road was vacant, laser-straight, fore and back, in the lights of the T-bird.

Now, there were stars all the way down to the horizon. JK Lee propped the wheel between his bony knees and, holding his beer in one hand, extracted a cigarette and lit it up with the other. The light of the tip combined with the dashboard’s glow to cast soft, diffuse light over his face.