He had a decision to make, and today was the day he had to make it.

He had the three names of his prime Ares crew — the Commander, the Mission Specialist, and the Mars Excursion Module Pilot — written out on a piece of paper on his desk.

CDR: Stone. MSP: Bleeker. MMP: Curval.

Less than eighteen months before Ares was supposed to leave the ground, the heat was on NASA over its crew selection — which still hadn’t been announced to the public — and NASA, in turn, was turning up the heat on Joe Muldoon, who was responsible for that selection.

The scientific community was going ape-shit about the fact that all three astronauts on the prime Mars crew were from the military. Adam Bleeker — while he was doing fine in the freshman-standard geology classes York was mounting, and while everyone acknowledged he was an intelligent, competent, experienced astronaut — was, according to the eggheads, a completely crazy choice for the Mission Specialist slot. The National Academy of Sciences and the U.S. Geological Survey were throwing around a lot of crap about the fact that NASA even had a fully qualified Mars surface scientist, in Natalie York, but wasn’t planning to give her a seat on the mission. And all the other scientists in the corps, the geochemists and geophysicists and life scientists, had been overlooked as well.

It was Apollo all over again, they said.

Well, York had shown she could do a good job under pressure, on her assignment as Apollo-N capcom for instance, and she’d been putting in an impressive amount of time in the sims. She could probably handle the flight.

Muldoon knew that putting York on the mission as the MSP would shut up the science lobby for sure. And, he reflected, assigning York would have the side benefit of closing down another couple of lobbies — the minority interest ones — which complained long and hard about the way NASA still supposedly discriminated in favor of sending up white males.

He wrote out that list of names, now, to see how it would look:

CDR: Stone. MSP: York. MMP: Curval.

But York was a rookie.

He remembered what York herself had said, back at the time of her selection interviews. We need to get a scientist on Mars. But a dead scientist on Mars wouldn’t do anybody any good. The fact was, you weren’t talking about a trolley-car ride but an extended deep-space mission using complex, edge-of-the-envelope technology.

Sometimes, when he reflected on what they were doing, it grabbed at his imagination. They were planning to send three people in a fragile collection of tin cans across forty million miles — and then hope that the engineering being cooked up in Lee’s ramshackle operation in Newport Beach, and whatever discipline could be adapted from a lifetime of aviation in Earth’s atmosphere, were capable of bringing them safely down to the surface of an alien world. Plumbing, TV cameras, and all.