Arthur Cane was over seventy, and a huge Bakelite hearing aid clung to one fleshy ear, and he didn’t have a hair on his head. But, after all these years, Lee could still see the look that came into the old man’s eye when he walked around the company lot, past the big, gleaming walls of the wind tunnel. Look at this. My very own wind tunnel.

Cane was an old-timer who’d worked in the Hughes Corporation before the war, and had then spent a number of years with the boffins at Langley. Cane loved working on advanced aircraft concepts — the push of knowledge into new areas, the thrill of making materials and systems perform beyond the limits of what seemed possible — but he’d gotten frustrated at Langley, with its budget compromises and in-house politics.

So, when Langley was subsumed into NASA, Cane had gotten out and formed his own company — Columbia Aviation — so that he could fund his own research and follow his nose, and sell the results back to NASA and the big players.

Which he’d done with success. But Cane had fiercely resisted growing Columbia too fast or too big, and he’d also defended his company astutely from the takeover bids that came along regularly from the big boys.

Well, today Lee was going to ask Cane for a couple of million bucks of company money, to bid for a contract so big it was bound to transform Columbia out of all recognition. So I damn well need to understand how Art ticks.

Lee opened the pitch. He kept his introduction flat, neutral, and brief. Time enough for tub-thumping later.

First up after Lee was Julie Lye, a smart young MIT graduate. Lee had pulled her out of her regular research to give the proposal some academic weight. Lye gave a brief, concise talk on what was known, from the various space probes, of Mars: the structure of the atmosphere, the properties of the surface. It was an introduction to the problems anyone would face in landing humans safely on Mars, keeping them alive, and bringing them home. Lye was trim, precise, reassuring.

Cane watched her with his face blank and his fingers steepled before him.

Next came Chaushui Xu, another smart kid, a Chinese-American who was taking a doctorate in aerodynamics based on his work at Columbia. Xu’s presentation was about the options for getting through the Martian atmosphere, and how Columbia’s expertise could be leveraged to solve the problems.

Cane’s eyes narrowed to slits, as if he was falling asleep.

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.