And, if the Mission Module’s life support were to fail in-flight, it would even be possible for the crew to retreat to the Command Module and use it as a shelter. A lifeboat. Just then, with Gershon alone in it, the Command Module seemed pretty roomy; it wasn’t like that with three of them aboard, and things would be pretty tough if they had to spend weeks, or even months, cooped up in there.

But it was better than dying.

Every aspect of the mission had been designed with failures in mind, to give options at every point, to leave no “dead zones” where there was no abort capability. The designers had almost succeeded.

Gershon hummed along with Mozart as he worked.

This fifty-day checkup was a chore, of course, but everything on the fucking flight was a chore for Gershon. And it was the same on every long-duration spaceflight.

Gershon’s moment was going to come when he took that MEM down through the thin air of Mars itself. But he’d basically be working at peak effectiveness for, what? — forty, fifty minutes? — out of a flight that was going to last a year and a half. Not much of a payload ratio, Ralph. But that was okay. It was a bargain that Gershon was prepared to accept. Because there he was, on an odyssey to Mars.

The first time he’d come across the name “Ares” had been in a battered old book he’d picked up from a dime store in Mason. It was a collection of science-fiction stories, by someone called Stanley Weinbaum. The title story was “A Martian Odyssey,” and it featured a ship called Ares and four men exploring the surface of an exotic, mysterious Mars. Weinbaum’s magical words were alive in his memory, still, after all those years; it was as if he could feel the stiff, yellowing pages of that battered old paperback in his hands.

When he’d heard they were going to use Weinbaum’s name for the mission, Gershon had whooped.

He’d worked his way through the science-fiction canon as he grew older, and he’d ridden many other ships to Mars. Bradbury had been elusive, with his hinting descriptions of silver locusts — pulsing with fire, swarming with men — falling to the surface of a beautiful, inhabited planet. Clarke’s Ares, on the other hand, had been described in great detail. It was a dumbbell shape of two huge spheres, separated by a hundred yards of tubeway. The rear contained atomic motors — serviced by AEC robots — and the leading sphere was living quarters, with cabins and a huge dining room and an observation gallery…

Sitting in the canvas frame couch, Gershon sucked some more juice out of his tube and ran his hand over the surface of the grimy instrument panel before him. He grinned. Dining rooms, huh.