As they prepared for the ignition, Bleeker had “Born in the USA” playing on the cabin’s little tape deck. It drowned out the clicks and whirs of the MEM’s equipment.

Bleeker said, “Ascent propulsion system propellant tanks pressurized.”

“Rager,” Gershon replied.

“Ascent feeds are open, shutoffs are closed.”

On the ground, Ted Curval was capcom today. “Iowa, this is Houston. Less than ten minutes here. Everything looks good. Just a reminder. We want the rendezvous radar mode switch in LGC just as it is on surface fifty-nine… We assume the steerable is in track mode auto.”

Gershon said, “Stop, push-button reset, abort to abort stage reset.”

Bleeker pushed his buttons. “Reset.”

Curval said, “Our guidance recommendation is PGNS, and you’re cleared for ignition.”

“Rog. We’re number one on the runway…”

A hundred miles above the Earth, as Gershon and Bleeker worked through the litany of the preburn checklist, MEM and Apollo drifted in formation. The Apollo, containing Command Module Pilot Bob Crippen, was an exquisitely jeweled silver toy, drifting against the luminous carpet of Earth. And the MEM was a great shining cone, at thirty feet tall dwarfing Apollo, surrounded by discarded Mars heat-shield panels and rippling with foil.

Its six squat landing legs were folded out and extended. But MEM 009 was destined to land nowhere.

Gershon stood harnessed in place beside Bleeker in the cramped little cabin of the MEM’s ascent stage. He felt bulky, awkward in his orange pressure suit. In front of Gershon was a square instrument panel, packed with dials and switches and instruments. There were two sets of hand controllers, one for each man. More circuit breakers coated the walls, and there were uncovered bundles of wiring and plumbing along the floor.

The cabin had two small triangular windows, one to either side of the main panel, calibrated with the spidery markings that would help guide a landing on Mars. Blue Earthlight shone through the windows, dappling the cabin’s panels.

Behind Gershon there were three acceleration couches, two of them folded up. On a landing flight there would be a third crewman in here, the mission specialist, a passenger during the MEM’s single brief flight.

The cabin’s surfaces were utilitarian, functional, mostly unpainted. The metal panels were just bolted together, the bundles of wires lashed in place by hand. You could see that the MEM was an experimental ship: the product of handcrafting, of thousands of man-hours of patient labor, and based on conservative designs, stuff that had worked before.

The apparent coarseness of the construction, with everything riveted together as if in a home workshop, was the feature of space hardware that most surprised people used to sleek mass-produced technology. It was nothing like Star Trek.

But to Gershon the MEM was real, almost earthy.