Xu started to get nervous, and he fumbled a little. But Lee wasn’t perturbed; he knew that Cane valued brains above everything else, and these were some of the brightest kids in the company. Cane was listening.

Xu got to the end of his presentation. He sat down, fumbling again.

Bob Rowen took the floor. A good bit older than the others, Rowen had worked with Lee on the old B-70 project, and with Lee and Storms on the later X-15 development. Rowen outlined how Columbia could handle the challenges of the spacecraft’s avionics. Soon, it was pretty clear that a Columbia MEM would be the smartest spacecraft that ever flew.

Halfway through Rowen’s pitch, Cane very visibly turned off his hearing aid and started going through his paperwork.

Jack Morgan leaned over to Lee. “Christ,” he whispered. “What the hell do we do now?”

Lee grinned. “We keep briefing. He’s hooked, believe me. If he didn’t like us, we’d be out of here by now.”

The last pitch was Jack Morgan’s, and he described how a Columbia MEM would keep four humans alive on Mars for a month. Clearly irritated by Cane’s manner, Morgan rattled through his spiel as quickly as he could, and sat down with a clatter of show-cards.

Lee got to his feet again. He summed up everything that had been said, and made a little speech about the future, and then just waited.

He was aware of his team getting restless behind him, but Lee had been here many times before. He stood before Cane’s desk, unperturbed.

After a full two minutes, Cane put down his stone pen and leaned back in his chair. He turned his hearing aid back on. “JK, you’re a crazy man. I don’t know why I keep you on the payroll.”

Lee leaned forward and rested his clenched knuckles on the table surface. “Goddamn it, Art, we’re in the aerospace business. And this is the finest opportunity to achieve something new in our field since Apollo.”

Cane rubbed his eyes. “We’re an experimental shop. One of life’s subcontractors. Not a big player.”

“But it doesn’t have to stay that way,” Lee insisted. “And maybe it shouldn’t.”

“And we wouldn’t win anyway.” Cane picked up a piece of paper from the seemingly random pile on the desk top before him. “Look at this, now. Look who we’re up against. McDonnell, Martin, Convair, General Electric, Boeing. Not to mention Rockwell, who will win anyhow. Some of these guys have been involved in the MEM base-technology studies since ’72. They’ve got a jump on us of years, damn it. Years. Look at this. Martin has spent three million bucks of its own money, and it already has a detailed analysis that runs to four thousand pages. And we’re starting from scratch.”

Lee waved his hand. “Look, we can’t get into a blueprint duel with these guys. But remember how Bell fumbled on its bid for the X-15. Bell built the X-1 — the ship that Chuck Yaeger took through the sound barrier—”