Gershon asked, “So what would you do?”

“Huh?”

“If you were going to build a MEM.”

“Me? Oh, we aren’t going to bid. We’d ruffle too many feathers. And the big boys would crowd us out anyhow. Rockwell is going to get the contract. Everybody knows that. It’ll pull strings, just like it did to get Apollo. I understand the MEM was part of the deal, kind of, when Nixon canceled the Shuttle. That and its Saturn second-stage injection-booster project. You’ve got to balance your constituencies.” His Bronx accent came out comically on that last word.

Gershon grunted and pulled at his beer. “But if you were bidding,” he pressed.

“If we were?” Lee thought for a moment, balancing his beer on his lap. “Well, you have to adjust your philosophy to accommodate the situation. You might get just one shot at this, a trip to Mars. So you want something that you know you can build quickly, and cheaply, that’s gonna work first time. And we don’t know if lifting bodies and biconics are going to work, and we could spend a lot of time and money finding out they don’t.”

“So what?”

“So you use what’s worked before. Start with a low L-over-D shape, say of zero point five.”

L-over-D: lift over drag, the key aerodynamic measure of shape. “Point five. That’s an Apollo Command Module shape.”

“Exactly. Build a big, fat Command Module. All you’d need to figure is how to build a wider heat shield. We know it’s a design that works. Apollos flew eight manned Moon program flights, and since then three missions a year to Skylab, and one a year to the Moonlab since ’75… what’s that, twenty-five flights? And the Apollo 13 CM even survived its Service Module exploding under it.”

“You’d have no maneuverability in the Martian atmosphere.”

“Not as much as a biconic, but you’d have some. Just like with Apollo. If you offset the center of gravity, you get a certain amount of control, with lift coming from the shape. And here’s the thing. The aerodynamics would be simple enough for you to fly the fucking thing down by hand if you had to, even if the electronics failed. You couldn’t do that with a biconic.”

“What about after the atmosphere entry? Parachutes?”

Lee thought about it. “Nope. Air’s too thin. You’d have to have some system of busting out of the heat shield and landing on a descent engine, like the Lunar Module. Like the Grumman bid, I guess. And then you’d have an ascent stage, the top half of the cone, to get you back to orbit. You’d leave behind the heavy heat shield, and all the surface gear.”

It all made sense to Gershon. It would be low cost, low development risk, low operational risk. It’s all I need, to land on Mars. And you could have the thing flying in a few years.

“JK, you ought to put in a bid. I’m serious.”

Lee just laughed.

He waved ahead, gesturing with his can. “Look out there.”

Gershon saw that the desert there was a flat, pale white crust in the starlight. Salt flats. And, on the horizon, a row of lights appeared out of nowhere, like a city in the desert.

“Edwards,” Lee said. “Where I came with Stormy Storms to watch the X-15 fly. Christ, they were the good days.” He took another pull of his beer, then threw the can out of the car.

Gershon handed him another can, and the T-bird sped on, as the giant hangars of the Air Force base loomed out of the darkness around them.

She was held up for an hour at Building 110, the security office of the JSC campus.

How are you supposed to present yourself, if you’re a rookie astronaut reporting for your first morning’s work? You have no identification badge on your shirt pocket, because on that first day, you have to enter the space center grounds to have the badge issued…

Strictly speaking, of course, York thought, it was an infinite regress, a paradox. It was logically impossible ever to enter JSC. She tried to explain it to the receptionist.

The receptionist, her broad, fleshy face a puddle of sweat, just looked at her and turned to deal with the press people queuing behind her. After a while York shut up and sat in the poky little building, trying to stop her hands folding over themselves.

Finally a secretary, tottering on heels, came out to collect her.

The secretary led her across the spiky grass of the campus. The woman was around thirty. She trailed a cloud of cosmetic fumes — perfumes and face powder and hair spray — that made York’s eyes sting. She looked oddly at York, and York could see the woman considering giving her girl-to-girl tips about where to get something done about that hair.

York clutched her empty briefcase and wondered what the hell she was doing there.

The secretary took her to Building 4, and told her she was expected to attend the regular pilots’ meeting straightaway. Every second Monday morning, at eight: she was already late.

She slipped into the meeting room, at the back.

There were maybe fifty people sitting around in the room: all men, clean-cut, close-shaven, crew-cut, wearing sport shirts and slacks. There was a lot of wisecracking, and deep, throaty laughter that rumbled around the room.

Chuck Jones, chief astronaut, stood at the front of the room, hands on hips. Jones was talking about some technical detail of the T-38 training aircraft.

York spotted an empty seat, not far from the door, and with muttered apologies she squeezed past a few sets of knees toward it. The astronauts made way for her politely enough, but she was aware of their gaze on her, curious, speculative, checking out her figure, studying her un-made-up face. What the hell’s this? Is it female? Are you here to take notes, baby? Make mine decaffeinated…

She spotted Ben Priest, sitting up front with his arms folded, looking the part.

“Now,” Jones said from the front of the room, “I’ve had reports from Ellington that some of you guys aren’t checking out your equipment before flying the T-38.”

There were groans. “Christ, Chuck, do we have to go through all this again?”

“We want to keep the privilege of flying the T-38s. But it’s a privilege that can be rescinded any time. You may be astronauts, but you aren’t free from the routine responsibilities of checking out what you fly. All I’m asking for is a little more effort, to keep those guys at Ellington sweet…”

Jones started going through assignments for the next two weeks. “Okay, we have Bleeker, Dana, and Stone to the Cape Tuesday to Friday. Gershon to Downey, all week. Curval and Priest to Los Angeles.”

Someone spoke up from the floor. “Hey, Chuck. I thought you were coming with us to L.A.”

“No, I changed my mind. I’m going to the Cape. I want to go through the new CM sim they’re building out there.”

“Don’t you like us anymore, Chuck?”

“You guys go west and I’ll go east anytime…”

That kind of bullshit went on for half an hour. By the end of it, York was feeling restless, baffled by the barrage of jargon, bemused by the slowness and apparent waste of time. It was like, she imagined, being inside an unusually clean men’s locker room.

She felt intimidated and out of place. How can I make a mark in an environment like this?

She met the rest of the cadre she’d been recruited into: eight others, all men, mostly with flying experience. They looked bright, eager, young, alert. Christ, three of them are already wearing astronaut-issue sport shirts! How had they known?

Chuck Jones took the new rookies on a tour of the Center.

She peered through doorways into the empty offices of senior astronauts. All the rooms looked the same, neat and spruce and barely lived-in, with pictures of spacecraft and airplanes on the walls. On the desks were boys’ toys: aircraft and lunar modules, and models of the new Saturn VB, with solid rocket boosters you could snap on and off.