“It’s an equatorial site,” she said. “So you get a mix of young and old geological types. And that’s important to us. Most mixed terrain is complex, broken up. But here the landscape is pretty forgiving for a landing. And if you’re going to find water anywhere, it’s here. Maybe under the surface. And where there’s water—”

“Maybe there’s life.” Stone got out of his chair and walked across to the map; he leaned close so he could read the label by the little flag. “Mangala Vallis. What does it mean?”

“All the major valleys have been named after words for Mars. Here, to the east of Marineris, we even have an Ares valley…”

“And Mangala?”

“Sanskrit. The oldest language of the Indo-European group.”

“So maybe Mangala is the oldest word for Mars in the western world.” Stone smiled. “I kind of like that.” Standing at the map, he turned to eye York. “So you’ve been pushing the site selection board toward Mangala Vallis. For good operational reasons, of course. A place on which you just happen to be the world’s leading expert. Right, York?”

He was grinning, and so was Bleeker.

“Still wangling to get my seat, Natalie?” Bleeker called, good-natured.

She felt chilled. These guys see right through me.

But maybe that’s not a bad thing. If Bleeker knows I’m right on his tail, maybe he will take his geology a little more seriously.

And all he has to do is slip once…

She started to roll up her maps. “What do you think? I’ll give you a preprint of my next Journal of Geophysical Research paper on Mangala; read it and weep, flyboys.”

“Now what?” Stone asked. “Are we done?”

“Like hell. We’re only just beginning; that was the fun stuff. Now we come to Martian climatology. Compare and contrast with Earth’s, and…”

After some grumbling, the guys settled down again.

The day wore on, and the little room grew progressively hotter. October 1981

In the end, five lead companies submitted proposals to build the Mars Excursion Module: Rockwell, McDonnell, Martin, Boeing, and JK Lee’s company, Columbia.

The post-presentation work of the MEM Evaluation Board was long and complicated. It was all a question of weighted scores; Ralph Gershon had never seen anything like it. There were subcommittees to evaluate the bidder’s “administrative capacity” and “business approach” and “technical qualification” …Gershon was himself involved in three of the subcommittees. And each subcommittee assigned weighted scores to each bid, under hundreds of categories.

It didn’t make sense to Gershon. Would all these numbers really determine the final outcome? If you could reduce decision making to a mechanical process, the day would come when a computer could run an outfit like NASA.