So after that, he started taking material home — draft scripts, documents, notes — and set himself to memorize every piece of the system he was proposing. He even took the stuff to bed, and sat there propped up against his pillows, with his reading light and his glasses.
Jennine would wake up, and mumble something, and he’d be shocked to find it was four in the morning, or some such godforsaken time. An hour until he had to get out and start all over again.
But he was full of energy. He couldn’t believe it. Day after day. He felt like he could fly.
Eventually he had a cot brought into his office. It seemed to him he saved a lot of time that way.
Lee received a call from Art Cane.
“I’m getting kind of worried about what you guys are costing me. If we don’t win the bid, I’m looking at one hell of a write-off. How’s my two million budget looking, by the way?”
“Fine, Art.”
Actually, that was a barefaced lie. Lee was well aware that he had long since gone beyond that two million limit, and in fact he was headed for three or four times that limit.
One of Art’s more endearing characteristics, from Lee’s point of view, was his distrust of computerized accounting systems. He insisted on inspecting the figures every month, analyzed, summarized, and interpreted more or less by hand. Just as when he’d started the company.
So Cane was always at least a month behind the action. And by a little manipulation, Lee could juggle his billings and payments to pick up another thirty days. So he had two months’ grace in all.
That was all Lee needed. In two months, the bid would be in. He figured that if he won the bid, nobody would care how much it cost. And if he lost, Art would have his hide anyway. Either way the important thing was to have the resources he needed at hand, at that moment.
Cane said, “I just got a call from McDonnell Douglas.”
“Oh, yeah? And?”
“It wants to throw in with us on a joint effort to bid on the MEM. How about that, JK? Now, I want you to think about this…”
Cane went on about the details.
Lee thought hard.
If you were objective about it, a call like this from McDonnell was second only in value to a similar call from Rockwell itself. McDonnell had built Mercury and Gemini, the first two generations of manned American spacecraft, and the third stage of the Saturn V. So it would be a good, credible partner. And Lee knew that there were plenty of muttering voices within NASA who had never been happy about Rockwell’s work on Apollo, and had grumbled ever since. That community inside NASA, and Lee was sure there would be some of them on the evaluation board, would welcome a return to the good old days of partnership with McDonnell.
Every which way you looked at this, it made sense.
Lee cut through Cane. “Not interested,” he said.
Art Cane was silent for a long minute.
“Now, look here,” Cane said at last. “You know I’m not going to jam this deal down your throat. That’s not my style, JK.”
“I know that, sir. But this is our bid. Fuck McDonnell. Maybe we’ll hire them as a subcontractor later. Who needs them?”
“JK—”
“I need you to back me, Art.”
There was a bass rumble on the phone line. “Hell, Lee, you know I’ll do that. Just don’t let me down.”
“You know I won’t, Art. Now get off the line, I’ve got work to do.”
Monday, July 6, 1981
Natalie York and Ralph Gershon sat side by side in the Mars Excursion Module Biconic Simulator Number Three. York was hot and cramped in her closed pressure suit. Inside, the MEM cabin was realistically mocked up; from the outside, this motion-based simulator was a big, ungainly piece of engineering, with heavy white-painted hydraulics completely enclosing the cabin.
“Okay, Ralph, we’ll give it to you at OMS burn plus one,” the SimSup said.
“Roger,” Gershon said tersely.
Around York, electroluminescent readouts and gauges and dials came to life, the needles flickering and the CRT tubes blinking awake, to register engine temperature and chamber pressure and fuel and oxidizer levels.
Gershon sat to the left, in the pilot’s seat, and York to the right. The cabin’s windows, at eye level around them, were big and square, so that it was like sitting in a small, cramped airliner cockpit. The instruments’ soft green glow suffused the cabin; it was, York thought, like being immersed in water.
There was a smear of crimson beyond York’s window. She saw a simulated Martian landscape, salmon pink and softly curving, come rearing up beyond the glass. The landscape was a slice of painted plaster of paris over which, somewhere, a light television camera was panning under computer control. The sky was black, starless, probably just a backdrop. But there were splashes of orange light: representations of the tenuous upper atmosphere of Mars, reflecting the glow of the biconic’s RCS thrusters.
“Take it that the burn was good.” the SimSup said. “Your residuals are three-tenths, and your pitch maneuver was successful.”
“Okay,” Gershon said.
Gauges flickered and acronyms scrolled across the CRTs before York.
“We’ve dumped our forward RCS propellants,” she told Gershon. “OMS and RCS post-ignition reconfiguration complete. Auxiliary power unit start. We have two out of three APUs running, and that’s nominal.”
Gershon flicked at a gauge. “SimSup, I’ve got a poor correlation with the attitude reading on the inertial ball. I’m going to center the readings manually. You got a problem with that?”
“No problem, Ralph. We agree with that.”
“Entry interface,” York said. “We’re in the atmosphere, Ralph. A hundred and fifty-eight thousand feet. Nose up at forty degrees.”
Gershon said, “Let’s see what they’ve got to throw at us this time.”
“You’re getting paranoid, Ralph.”
“Tell me about it.”
Then the plaster of paris was scrolling past the window more rapidly.
“Frictional heating,” York said. She watched sensors telling her how the temperature was climbing over the lower surface of the craft.
The biconic, based on Rockwell’s current draft design, was the most advanced MEM configuration being studied by the various contractors. The four-man craft would fall into the atmosphere belly-first, and then fly down like an airplane, so the whole of the underside was tiled with heat-resistant panels, forming a heat sink which absorbed the energy of the sparse Martian air molecules.
“Get ready for your comms blackout,” the SimSup said drily. “See you on the other side, guys.”
“I hope so,” Gershon said.
Beyond York’s window a pinkish plasma glow built up.
Gershon grunted. “What a fake.”
“I kind of like it,” York murmured.
York and Gershon began to monitor the systems displays before them, checking them against checklist cards taped to the consoles. Then the work of the sim became routine, almost dull…
Except that, York knew, if this was for real, she would be feeling the first tug of deceleration in earnest, as the craft dug deeper into the Martian atmosphere. She could feel her pulse rising, beating at her throat. This simulation, designed more for engineers than astronauts, was crude: not even motion-based, it was a shadow play, mimicking life. But there was just enough in the sim, inside this static cabin, for it to catch at her imagination, to give her a taste of how it would be, really, to fly down from orbit to the surface of Mars.
She wished — suddenly, childishly — that this was for real. That she could somehow fast-forward through the years of training and uncertainty that lay ahead.