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.

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.”