The MEM loomed over Gershon, all of thirty feet tall, like some fat metal teepee. The shining heat-resistant skin was incomplete in many places, and he was able to see the subsystems in the interior, exposed as if this was some big cutaway model.

He could make out the overall layout of the ship. There was the slim shaft of the ascent stage at the axis of the teepee — a spacecraft buried within a spacecraft — with the angular, truncated crew cabin at its tip. And there, at the base of the MEM, was the fat half torus that was the surface shelter, with the curving access tunnel snaking upward to the ascent-stage cabin at the top of the stack. And opposite the shelter, balancing its weight, were propellant and oxidant tanks: big spheres for the descent stage, squat cylinders for the ascent stage, grouped in an asymmetrical cluster like big shining berries.

A service platform, on wheels, had been set up beside the MEM. Corrugated walkways snaked over from the platform into the interior of the MEM, and Gershon could see workmen in white coveralls on their bellies in there, laboring over wiring, control panels, ducts, and pipes, like little worms crawling around inside the gleaming machine.

Gershon ducked down to get a view of the interior of the surface shelter. He could see the big storage lockers, which would hold the Mars surface suits and EVA equipment. The pale green walls of the shelter were encrusted with control panels, twenty-four of them, and five hundred switches. There were warning lights everywhere. Here and there loose wiring spilled out of an open panel, but some of the panels and lights were already operational, and they glowed softly, sending complex highlights off the experiment tables and science equipment.

Gershon could have drawn this layout blindfolded. After so many years with Columbia, so many hours in simulators here and at the Cape and Houston, he knew the position of every damn switch. He could even lay claim to have designed half the panels he saw.

There was a scent of wiring, of lubricant, of ozone, of fresh-milled metal. The MEM was unfinished, but it had a live feel to it, much more so than any simulator. It was like the cockpit of a new, gleaming aircraft.

And it was homely. It was the kind of den Gershon would have loved to have owned as a kid, a mixture of workshop, radio station, and clubhouse.

He would have no trouble living in here for a month, on Mars, he realized; no trouble at all.

If he got himself the chance.

There was some kind of commotion going on, and Gershon straightened up to see.

Jack Morgan stalked down toward Lee and Gershon with a document in his hand. “JK! Have you seen this?”