“Yeah. Makes you think, doesn’t it?”

Muldoon got back to his work on the investigation.

Except, as he tried to sleep that night in a small, stuffy room in JSC, with his head full of the conflicting demands of his new and complex job, Muldoon found himself thinking of a conference he’d sat in on long ago. It was in the von Braun Hilton over at Marshall, as he recalled: a seminar on Mars mission modes. And some little guy had stood up with a strange proposal — Muldoon had spent most of the conference sleeping off a hangover, and couldn’t recall the details — some way to boost the lower delta-vee offered by chemical technology by using gravitational assists. Bouncing off Venus, en route to Mars. And the little guy had been laughed off the stage by Udet and those other assholes from Marshall.

Now, what the hell was that about?

At 3 A.M. he got out of bed and padded down to his old desk in the Astronaut Office, and began digging through his old notes and diaries, chasing down the elusive memory.

By 5 A.M. he’d found what he was looking for. Gregory Dana. Jesus. It was Jim Dana’s father.

By 7 A.M. he was on the phone, trying to find Dana.

So Muldoon started to dip his toes, tentatively, into the shark-pool of NASA politics.

He pulled strings and set up a short-term working group, of NASA people and contractors, which would be able to flesh out in detail the idea that was lodging in his head. While that was coming together he drafted a hasty report to Michaels, summarizing the research he’d been doing.

He had Tim Josephson polish up a final draft for him, thus further extending their unspoken, ambiguous alliance. And when Muldoon sent his report to Michaels, he sent a copy to Josephson, to make sure it was leaked to the White House.

Natalie York was the Astronaut Office representative on Joe Muldoon’s task force. She was sent to NASA HQ for an initiation meeting.

Before arriving, she’d hardly thought much about this assignment. She was just grateful to have a break in Washington — to get away from the grind of training that had become meaningless in the context of a rudderless program, to get away from her empty, unlet apartment, and from all the holes in her life where Ben used to be.

But she found herself in a meeting the likes of which she had only imagined a couple of months earlier — and which she’d thought would never take place again, not after the disaster.

Muldoon had called in staff from all the major NASA centers, including Udet and his team from Marshall, and senior engineers and managers from all of NASA’s major contract partners: Boeing, Rockwell, Grumman, McDonnell, IBM, others. Pulling out so many senior staff put a dent in a lot of other projects, including the post-Apollo-N inquiries and the rectification program, and really Muldoon was going far beyond his organizational authority.

But he evidently hadn’t been shy about using his new position to pull strings.

Standing on a stage at the front of an overcrowded conference hall, Muldoon briefed the opening session.

“The meeting is scheduled for the next fourteen days,” Muldoon said. “The objective is to come up with a new core space program in that time. Nothing less than that. I’m expecting you to work all the hours it takes, including the weekends; I’m going to isolate this group from your other commitments by putting you up here in Washington, and I’ve arranged workrooms and computer facilities and phone lines…”

Despite Muldoon’s vigorous presentation, York became aware of some muttering in the room around her as he spoke. What the hell’s he talking about? A plan to do what? Without the fucking nuke, we ain’t going anywhere except low Earth orbit for a generation.

But York had never seen Muldoon like this.

She’d come to know him as a difficult man: a moonwalker, obsessive about getting back into space again, forceful, foul-mouthed, with maybe too much anger ready to spill out over the incompetence of anyone on the ground he saw getting in his way. She watched as he dominated a room full of the toughest heavyweights in NASA, with passion and anger and a visible will to succeed. He’d grown, remarkably; for the first time she realized how perceptive Fred Michaels had been in selecting this man to run his spacecraft program after Bert Seger.

Muldoon sketched the guidelines for the meeting.

“I want you to focus on a baseline mission profile of a crew of four, with a thirty-day stopover, to be launched for the 1985 opportunity. It will be a very different mission from what we thought we were doing previously: all we have available now is chemical technology, and it is going to need some smart thinking from your trajectory planners.

“We need self-discipline. I can’t emphasize that enough. The objective is to devise a bare-bones program based on what must be done, and what can be done based on the technology we have, not on what you’d like the program to do. The resultant plan, including the schedule, is going to have to be honest: no promises we can’t keep, no wishful thinking…”

And slowly, through her vague numbness, York began to realize what Muldoon was talking about, what the subject of this task force actually was.

Going to Mars. Maybe it’s still possible.

For the first time since Ben’s death, York felt her interest quickening.

After a week, it seemed to Muldoon — amid the blizzard of computer printout, technical journals, Vu-graph foils, flip chart pages, half-eaten sandwiches, and paper coffee cups — that something feasible was beginning to emerge.

His gut instinct was confirmed. We really do have something here.

He began to understand why Michaels had selected him for this job.

The Mars program had dominated the development of NASA since 1972… No, Muldoon reflected, more than that: it had warped the Agency’s post-Apollo growth, and that of all its programs. The Agency had become obsessed with one largely unspoken goal: men on Mars Everything else was subordinated: the Earth-orbit programs were tailored to preparing for the long-haul flights to come, the unmanned programs were either canned or cut around to serve operational purposes.

So he could see why Michaels had put so much trust in him, Muldoon. Because he was a monomaniac, too. His own obsessions were a kind of scale model of the Agency’s.

He was the ideal champion.

After his couple of weeks, Muldoon had enough to put in front of the Administrator.

Muldoon had Josephson call a meeting in front of Michaels, with Udet, Gregory Dana, representatives of the contractors, and even a couple of tame senators: all zealots for the new, embryonic program.

Muldoon summarized the proposed mission mode. “We still need an orbital transfer booster to thrust the ship from Earth to Mars and back. That was the role that had been planned for the S-NB.” He looked at Michaels. “But, even without the S-NB, we have an option, Fred. A chemical technology option. We can use an enhancement of the S-II second stage of the Saturn V. We have design studies by Rockwell dating back to 1972 showing how the S-II could be upgraded for such a role, by providing it with restartable engines, insulation, course-adjustment verniers, docking facilities…”

Michaels grunted. “Yeah. And those studies have been completely trashed by those bastards at Marshall since their inception.”

Udet kept his eyes fixed on Muldoon’s foil and did not react.

Dana said, “I would need confirmation that development of the S-II is possible in the time frame.”

Michaels nodded seriously. “You’ll get it, Doctor.” He made a note to himself on a piece of paper.

Muldoon put up another foil. “Fuel. If we assume that hydrogen/oxygen will be used, we’ve calculated that we will need a total of a thousand tons to depart from the Earth, three hundred tons to brake at Mars, and depart subsequently; and seventy tons to brake at Earth orbit. That’s one thousand, three hundred and seventy tons in Earth orbit at the start of the mission. It would be a lot more if we didn’t have Dr. Dana’s gravity assist maneuver to save fuel. Now, the largest weight we can loft to orbit, with the Saturn VB, is on the order of four hundred thousand pounds — about one hundred and eighty tons…”