Drive characters

Appears from the start

A Martian engineer with a talent for propulsion and a private yacht he has been modifying in his own time. Comfortable, married, and not especially ambitious in a public sense, he has been refining a fusion drive design because the problem interests him rather than because anyone commissioned it, and he intends to take the result out for a quiet test flight himself.

Appears from the start

Solomon's wife, from a well-established Martian family. She is clear-eyed about her husband's preoccupation with his engineering and about what their life together is, and she is the person he thinks about when he has time to think about anything.