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.