Joe Muldoon wasn’t a happy man.

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.

The scale — the audacity of it all — stunned him, when he let himself think about it. And Muldoon, he reminded himself, had walked on the Moon.

Maybe, as many people argued, they were going too far, too fast…

He shrugged that off. Be that as it may, they were going.

As far as Muldoon was concerned it was better to get somebody down to that surface to do at least some science, no matter how dumb. And, the way he saw it, the way to maximize the chances of achieving that was to send up his three best aviators: people who had cut their teeth in the most extraordinary physical situations the home planet had to offer. And hope that was enough for Mars…

Also, while he was impressed by York, there was something about her which unsettled him a little. All that intensity. She’d come into NASA with a great big grudge against the world, and it was still there, and getting bigger all the time, as far as he could see. Those goddamn twitching eyebrows of hers. She would drive her crewmates crazy in a month.

York wasn’t ready. It was a shame.

He crossed out the draft list.

Anyhow, it wasn’t the MSP but the MMP seat that was giving him the most grief at the moment.

He was hearing a lot of bad things from the mission controllers, and others, about Ted Curval’s performance.

Curval was one of the best test pilots Muldoon had worked with. And Phil Stone, his commander, was intensely loyal to him. But Curval’s attitude looked to be a little bit off beam.

Curval was fucking arrogant. He was taking his seat for granted. He seemed to feel it was sufficient to just turn up, and laugh his way through the training, and expect just to be able to crawl into the MEM when the time came, and everything would be fine. His performance in the sims, for instance, was well below the target the SimSups expected.

Muldoon had been on Stone’s back about this; as Stone was commander of the crew, in Muldoon’s mind it was up to Stone to get Curval in gear. And he knew, for instance, that Stone had been instructing the SimSups to give Curval all the help he needed.

Everybody understood how tough it was, to learn to handle a system orders of magnitude more complex than any spacecraft which had yet flown. But it was up to Curval to apply himself. And Curval didn’t show any sign of improving. Or even of understanding the importance of improving.

In his own mind, Muldoon kept comparing Curval with another good pilot: Ralph Gershon.

Muldoon had been keeping a weather eye on Gershon for a while. He’d shown himself to be willing to work at anything he was asked to. Muldoon had followed Gershon’s performance in the sims, and he’d heard — ironically, from Ted Curval himself — how determined Gershon had been to get on the Mars Landing Training Vehicle, and then, once he was there, to make that baby his own. And he’d spent a hell of a lot of his time out at Newport Beach, working on the long, slow grind of MEM development.

Gershon was gradually putting himself into the position of being the automatic choice as MEM pilot.

He was surely aware he was doing that — he was probably even planning for it — but in Muldoon’s eyes that was no bad thing. It showed Gershon was figuring out the system, and knew how to apply himself.

The contrast with the complacent Curval was marked. In Muldoon’s opinion, Gershon’s potential as a pilot wasn’t quite that of Curval, but then Curval showed no signs of realizing the potential he had.

Flying Gershon would shut up another corner of the minority rights lobby, anyhow. America’s first black face in space… But Muldoon wasn’t about to let that influence his decision one way or the other. If Gershon was seen to be getting preference he didn’t deserve — if he was appointed to a mission ahead of guys who were better qualified — then a hundred resignations would be hitting Muldoon’s desk within a day. And Muldoon would be banding them together and sending them on to Josephson, with his own stapled to the front. He was absolutely clear in his own mind about that issue.

What was of a lot more concern to him was the fact that Gershon was a rookie. And, of course — and a big reason why Gershon was still grounded after so long in the corps — there was the question of Gershon’s stability.

Gershon had been through Vietnam.

That was a different type of war from what some of the older guys remembered. Gershon was a loner, a bachelor, too wild and eccentric for many of the guys — particularly the older ones who, in their own way, were deeply conservative.

Gershon was a risk, then. But the bottom line was that Gershon could probably land the MEM in situations where a lot of other guys would abort, or even crash.

And if Muldoon bumped him onto the upcoming D-prime mission, let him fly the test MEM in Earth orbit, he could maybe prove that quickly, and he wouldn’t be a rookie anymore.