“But we never had a Mars program, in the way that we had a Moon program back in the sixties. The point was that we were going to develop the technology bit by bit — the nuke rocket, and new heat shields, and new navigation techniques, and long-duration experience, and so on. All of which could be put together into a Mars mission one day, if we chose to; but it would all be modular, and able to be configured into a lot of flexible mission requirements—”

Stone laughed. “You’ll have to get out from behind that desk, Joe. You’re beginning to sound like you belong there.”

Muldoon grunted and rubbed his eyes. “Well, anyhow, we sure as hell ain’t going to Mars. Not anymore; not in my lifetime or yours, Phil.”

“You’re so sure? We’ve got most of the elements. We do know how to survive long-duration missions.”

“Sure I’m sure. The fucking nuke rocket blew up in orbit, remember. The Russians are still sending down pictures of the damn thing glowing blue in the dark. From what I hear there’s no way we’re going to be allowed to fly a NERVA again. And without NERVA—”

“There goes your Mars mission. Unless you fly chemical.”

“Yeah,” Muldoon growled. “But how? Here — look at this thing.” He grubbed on his desk until he found a glossy report, full of spectacular color images. “This is from Udet and his guys, at Marshall. They’ve reworked some old papers that go all the way back to the early sixties. Have you heard of the EMPIRE studies?”

“Nope.”

“Marshall and a couple of contractors, back in ’62 and ’63. Back then, Apollo-Saturn had just about crystallized, and the engineers were asking, what the hell else can we do with this stuff? And they came up with EMPIRE — Early Manned Planetary-Interplanetary Round-trip Expeditions. Look at this. Some of the options needed nuke stages, but others were chemical only. There were a lot of studies like that, from that period. Soon after, every aerospace engineer in the country had his head up Apollo’s ass, and the flow dried up.”

Stone leafed through the report. “So what is Udet doing with this now?”

“He wants to revive a chemical-only Mars flyby option. A couple of S-IVB third stages in orbit, ganged together and fired off on a minimum-energy trajectory, looping around Mars. You’d need two, maybe three Saturn launches to do it.”

“A flyby of Mars? What the hell kind of mission is that?”

Muldoon rubbed his face. “Well, you’re talking maybe a seven-hundred-day round-trip, and about one day of useful work at Mars.”

“Whipping by at interplanetary speeds…”

“Oh, and by the way. You’d pass on the dark side.”

Stone laughed. “You’re kidding.”

“Well, that was the kind of mission they were proposing, back in 1963. The point was to go — just like Apollo, really — nobody cared what you did when you got there.”