At about 3:30 A.M. Jack Morgan came to the door, thoroughly oiled. He took a flash photo of Lee, with his slides spread out all over the hotel room’s polished desk. “For Christ’s sake, JK, put that crap down and go to bed. If you don’t know the pitch now, you never will.”

Lee gave in. He cleared up the slides and got into bed. He even turned the light out and lay there in the dark.

But he could see the slides more clearly than when they were physically in front of him.

After maybe thirty minutes of this he got out of bed, had a shower and a shave, and started working again.

His wake-up call came, and when he looked out of the window he found the planet had rotated again, and it had become light.

Thirty minutes before the Columbia pitch was due to start he went down to reception to meet the others. Bob Rowen was carrying a fat PC. The computer contained the whole Columbia case, split into little chunks and indexed so that in response to questions Lee could get at any point of it quickly.

Lee glad-handed the others, trying to radiate confidence and surety.

But suddenly his stomach clenched up, and he knew he was going to be ill.

Jack Morgan had been watching him, and he dragged Lee off to a bathroom, away from the others, where he threw up violently: a thin, brown, stinging liquid, nothing but coffee.

Morgan didn’t say anything, but Lee knew what he was thinking. He’d been running on adrenaline and coffee and no sleep and little food for ten weeks.

Morgan made him pull down his pants, and gave him a shot in the cheeks from a needle full of something, vitamin B-12 and other crap. But it worked; it got Lee back together again.

And in a couple of minutes he was able to walk out of there, smart and spruce and neat and feeling just fine.

They arrived at the ballroom where the presentations were to be made.

The MEM Evaluation Board members were sitting in rows before the stage: seventy-five of NASA’s most senior people.

Lee knew many of the members by sight. There was Hans Udet from Marshall and Gregory Dana from Langley — famous enemies, sitting stiffly side by side — and he spotted Ralph Gershon, skulking at the back of the room. Gershon nodded to Lee and grinned.

Joe Muldoon was sitting front and center, chairing the session; Muldoon might have become a power in the hierarchy, Lee thought, but he still didn’t look like he fitted the blue pinstripe he had tucked himself into.

Tension hung in the room like ozone.

As the Columbia team set up, the team that preceded them was coming out. It was McDonnell, whose invitation for a joint pitch Lee had famously rejected. And among their subcontractor partners was Hughes, who had rejected Columbia’s approach.