“Look at this. And this.” Morgan took Lee through a whole series of options, where he had tried to juggle elements of his ECLSS weight budget against each other. “There’s no way I can support four men for thirty days on the surface. That’s one hundred and twenty man-days. It just doesn’t fit. We’re an order of magnitude out, here.”

Lee felt a bubble of panic swell up in his throat. It really looked as if they weren’t going to be able to close the design.

Suddenly he was aware of the lack of sleep, all the meals he’d skipped, the adrenaline he’d been burning off; he felt ill, light-headed.

Come on, JK. Get a grip on yourself. If it’s a problem for you, so it is for Rockwell, and McDonnell, and all those other assholes. Look for a way to turn this to our advantage.

Morgan was looking at him with concern. “Are you okay, JK? You look kind of—”

“Don’t turn into a doctor on me now, Jack.”

“Buddy, the way you eat yourself up, you’re going to need a doctor someday. I mean it, JK.”

Lee railroaded on. “Listen, Jack. You can’t deliver a hundred and twenty man-days on Mars. Fine. What can you give me?”

Morgan thought about it. “Maybe 75 percent of that. Say ninety days.”

Shit. Worse than I thought. “So we have our four guys down there for, what, twenty-three days?”

“You’ve just lost a quarter of your surface stay time, JK. I can’t believe that’s going to be acceptable.”

Lee shook his head. “No, it isn’t. But there has to be another way.” He thought about it. “Ninety man-days, huh. Well, what if we only take three guys? Then we can still stay the full thirty.”

Morgan shook his head immediately. “That’s impossible. The RFP sets it out. Having spent all that money to get their guys onto Mars, NASA wants to get twenty-four-hour EVA cycles going. They want two guys out on the Martian surface for as much of each day as possible. They want a ‘red’ and ‘blue’ team shift system—”

“Well, the ‘red’ team can take a flying fuck at the ‘blue’ team,” Lee snapped back. “This won’t be the only place where that shitty RFP is wrong.”

His mind was starting to race.

Three guys instead of four. If it could be done, he started to figure, there would be add-on savings throughout the rest of the program, beyond the MEM definition itself. For example, one quarter less life support would have to be hauled all the way out to Mars and back. And all at no, or minimal, cost to the value of the surface activities.

That’s what he would have to demonstrate, anyhow.

If he could achieve this, he realized with growing excitement, it would be a hell of a strong plank in the bid.