A knock at the door interrupted his paperwork.

“Come,” Guo Ming said, happy for the interruption.

“Good evening, sir,” said Under Director Zhu Tao.

“Tao, welcome back.”

“Thank you, sir. It’s good to be back in Beijing.”

“How were things at Jiuquan?” asked Guo Ming. “Not too cold, I hope? I’ll never understand why our launch complex is in the middle of the Gobi Desert.”

“It was cold, yet manageable,” Zhu Tao said.

“And how are launch preparations coming along?”

“I am happy to report they are all on schedule.”

“Excellent.” Guo Ming smiled.

Zhu Tao sat quietly, staring at his boss.

Guo Ming looked expectantly back at him, but Zhu Tao neither stood to leave nor said anything further.

“Something else, Tao?” Guo Ming asked.

“Mmm,” Zhu Tao said. “Of course, you’ve heard about the Iris probe?”

“Yes, I did,” Guo frowned. “Terrible situation. That poor man’s going to starve.”

“Possibly,” Zhu Tao said. “Possibly not.”

Guo Ming leaned back in his chair. “What are you saying?”

“It’s the Taiyang Shen’s booster, sir. Our engineers have run the numbers, and it has enough fuel for a Mars injection orbit. It could get there in four hundred and nineteen days.”

“Are you kidding?”

“Have you ever known me to ‘kid,’ sir?”

Guo Ming stood and pinched his chin. Pacing, he said, “We can really send the Taiyang Shen to Mars?”

“No, sir,” said Zhu Tao. “It’s far too heavy. The massive heat shielding makes it the heaviest unmanned probe we’ve ever built. That’s why the booster had to be so powerful. But a lighter payload could be sent all the way to Mars.”

“How much mass could we send?” Guo Ming asked.

“Nine hundred and forty-one kilograms, sir.”

“Hmm,” Guo Ming said, “I bet NASA could work with that limitation. Why haven’t they approached us?”

“Because they don’t know,” Zhu Tao said. “All our booster technology is classified information. The Ministry of State Security even spreads disinformation about our capabilities. This is for obvious reasons.”

“So they don’t know we can help them,” Guo Ming said. “If we decide not to help, no one will know we could have.”

“Correct, sir.”

“For the sake of argument, let’s say we decided to help. What then?”

“Time would be the enemy, sir,” Zhu Tao answered. “Based on travel duration and the supplies their astronaut has remaining, any such probe would have to be launched within a month. Even then he would starve a little.”

“That’s right around when we planned to launch Taiyang Shen.”

“Yes, sir. But it took them two months to build Iris, and it was so rushed it failed.”

“That’s their problem,” Guo Ming said. “Our end would be providing the booster. We’d launch from Jiuquan; we can’t ship an eight-hundred-ton rocket to Florida.”

“Any agreement would hinge on the Americans reimbursing us for the booster,” Zhu Tao said, “and the State Council would likely want political favors from the US government.”

“Reimbursement would be pointless,” Guo Ming said. “This was an expensive project, and the State Council grumbled about it all along. If they had a bulk payout for its value, they’d just keep it. We’d never get to build another one.”