But Lee still seemed to be having trouble with that left arm of his. He rubbed it frequently, up around the armpit, and he was having difficulty standing for long periods.

Lunch was a finger buffet. Gershon gulped down a quick plateful. Lee sought him out and invited him to take a walk around the plant. Gershon appreciated that and accepted. Just now it might have been more politically astute for Lee to be oiling up to the NASA bigwigs. And Gershon hadn’t exactly been uncritical of Columbia over the years. But Lee had evidently never forgotten the favor that Gershon had done him, by pushing the MEM RFP his way in the first place.

They reached the Clean Room. The four flight test articles were being assembled here, in antiseptic conditions. Lee and Gershon had to sign in, and they had to put on white coats and soft plastic overshoes and tuck their hair inside little plastic caps with elasticized brims. They were given strict instructions by the foreman to keep to the marked paths, and away from the spacecraft if you please.

The room stretched off in all directions, white-walled and illuminated by brilliant fluorescents. Clusters of workmen, all kitted out in soft hats and overshoes, toiled at huge pieces of equipment. There was a soft murmur of conversation, a clank of metal on metal, a whir of machinery. Huge winches and cranes dangled from the reinforced roof, empty and potent.

The Clean Room reminded Gershon more of a sculptor’s foundry than a factory; there was no sense of the routine here. Only a handful of MEMs would ever be built, and so everything here was new, special, a one-of-a-kind.

And in the middle of all this, four conical shapes were starting to emerge, as if crystallizing from some superconcentrated solution. They looked like religious artifacts, Gershon thought, like four pyramids in a row, with their silvery, shining skins punctured by mysterious nozzles and inscribed windows.

This was the mark of Lee’s achievement, Gershon reflected. Amid all the management chaos — and blizzards of changes, and balky subcontractors, and awkward customers, and engineering unknowns, and cost overruns — JK Lee was creating something magical: four Mars ships, coalescing on a factory floor in Newport Beach.

Beside each of the cones there was a sign: This is a Manned Spacecraft. Your PRIDE — Personal Responsibility In Daily Effort — will ensure their safe return.

Lee grinned. “Something I stole from McDonnell,” he said. He kept on rubbing his arm, and he looked drawn and tired, with none of the intense energy Gershon had come to associate with him. Maybe the CARR was taking it out of him.

They stopped alongside one of the four glittering spacecraft. “Spacecraft 009,” Lee said. “The subject of the CARR today; the first MEM intended to carry a crew. How about that.”