If you were objective about it, a call like this from McDonnell was second only in value to a similar call from Rockwell itself. McDonnell had built Mercury and Gemini, the first two generations of manned American spacecraft, and the third stage of the Saturn V. So it would be a good, credible partner. And Lee knew that there were plenty of muttering voices within NASA who had never been happy about Rockwell’s work on Apollo, and had grumbled ever since. That community inside NASA, and Lee was sure there would be some of them on the evaluation board, would welcome a return to the good old days of partnership with McDonnell.

Every which way you looked at this, it made sense.

Lee cut through Cane. “Not interested,” he said.

Art Cane was silent for a long minute.

“Now, look here,” Cane said at last. “You know I’m not going to jam this deal down your throat. That’s not my style, JK.”

“I know that, sir. But this is our bid. Fuck McDonnell. Maybe we’ll hire them as a subcontractor later. Who needs them?”

“JK—”

“I need you to back me, Art.”

There was a bass rumble on the phone line. “Hell, Lee, you know I’ll do that. Just don’t let me down.”

“You know I won’t, Art. Now get off the line, I’ve got work to do.”

Monday, July 6, 1981

FLIGHT CREW TRAINING BUILDING, JACQUELINE B. KENNEDY SPACE CENTER

Natalie York and Ralph Gershon sat side by side in the Mars Excursion Module Biconic Simulator Number Three. York was hot and cramped in her closed pressure suit. Inside, the MEM cabin was realistically mocked up; from the outside, this motion-based simulator was a big, ungainly piece of engineering, with heavy white-painted hydraulics completely enclosing the cabin.

“Okay, Ralph, we’ll give it to you at OMS burn plus one,” the SimSup said.

“Roger,” Gershon said tersely.

Around York, electroluminescent readouts and gauges and dials came to life, the needles flickering and the CRT tubes blinking awake, to register engine temperature and chamber pressure and fuel and oxidizer levels.

Gershon sat to the left, in the pilot’s seat, and York to the right. The cabin’s windows, at eye level around them, were big and square, so that it was like sitting in a small, cramped airliner cockpit. The instruments’ soft green glow suffused the cabin; it was, York thought, like being immersed in water.

There was a smear of crimson beyond York’s window. She saw a simulated Martian landscape, salmon pink and softly curving, come rearing up beyond the glass. The landscape was a slice of painted plaster of paris over which, somewhere, a light television camera was panning under computer control. The sky was black, starless, probably just a backdrop. But there were splashes of orange light: representations of the tenuous upper atmosphere of Mars, reflecting the glow of the biconic’s RCS thrusters.