“Bullshit,” Lee snapped. “I’m in the middle of a fucking CARR.” He got up and headed for the door.

Morgan simply blocked the door with his body. He nodded to Gershon. “Get on the phone to Mr. Cane,” he ordered. “Tell him he has to speak to Lee.” And he turned and shouted to an assistant to send for the paramedics.

Uncertain of what he was getting himself into, Gershon picked up the phone.

Lee kept reading the report. “Look at this shit. Missed deadlines. Late drawing releases. Cost overruns. Yeah, yeah. But don’t they understand how complex this thing is? Or what chaos their own people create down here every time they push through another change? Look, you can comb through the paper trail all you want, but you have to look at the fucking hardware. Sure, we’re behind schedule. But this is a joke.” He appealed to Morgan. “It’s a fucking witchhunt, Jack. That’s what it is. A witch-hunt.”

Gershon held the phone out to Lee. “Art Cane wants to talk to you.”

Lee took the phone.

Art Cane ordered him to leave the plant.

A couple of paramedics came running up the corridor. They had a wheelchair with them.

IK Lee looked around, bewildered, still wearing his Clean Room overshoes and plastic hat.

The paramedics got him into the chair, ignoring his vague protests, and rushed him out.

Morgan lit up a cigarette, his hands trembling.

Gershon found he was shaking, too. “Christ,” he said to Morgan. “I didn’t know.”

Morgan pulled off his plastic hat. “Really? Hell, JK’s not the only one who’s nearly killed himself on this fucking program. Haven’t you heard about it? They call it the Ares Syndrome.”

It had been a coronary, all right; it hit Lee soon after the medics got him to the hospital.

When Lee came to himself — a few days later, flat on his back in the hospital — the first thing he did was get a secure phone installed in his room, and he started calling the plant.

He found the place in an uproar.

The final draft of Phil Stone’s tiger team report was, if anything, even more damning than that leaked early summary. And there was a lot of wild talk in the press of NASA going to another contractor for the MEM.

After a point the speculation seemed to feed on itself — Lee had even seen articles about the number of articles that had appeared on the MEM problems. It seemed to Lee that his people were spending more time on rooting through all the press garbage and the gossip from NASA and in-house than they were on building a spacecraft.

Well, as far as Lee was concerned, it was all a lot of bull; there was no way NASA could pull out of Columbia if it wanted to preserve anything like its 1986 Mars landing target. It was just bullying, industrial blackmail.