Voyage

Friday, November 28, 1980

Rolf Donnelly swung his car into his space outside Building 30, the Mission Control Center. He got out, whistling.

There was a new sign up, in a parking space close to the building: MCC M O EMPLOYEE OF THE MONTH. Donnelly laughed. Welcome to government work! You’re in Mission Control, and your prize for a good job well-done is the loan of a parking space!

He took a breath of the muggy autumn air. It would be his last fresh air for a while; one of the few things he didn’t like about working in Building 30 was that it was completely enclosed. He walked slowly by the big air-conditioning grilles on the outside of the building; in the spring, birds nested in there, but he couldn’t see any activity.

Donnelly was still whistling as he turned into the building. He was a flight director, and he was going to be lead flight for the Apollo-N mission. And he loved his job.

The big display screens at the front of the room bore spectacular images from Kennedy, of climbing metal, billowing smoke, flames as bright as the sun.

The Saturn VN lifted smoothly off the pad.

A few seconds into the Apollo-N flight, the Mission Operations Control Room was an amphitheater of calm, of control, of patient work. From his position in the command and control row of the MOCR, third from the front, Donnelly could see everything: the rows of blocky benches, the workstations with their clumsy old CRTs and keyboards bolted into place, manned by the controllers that made up his flight team. Indigo Team. The workstations were littered with ring binders of mission rules, polystyrene coffee cups, yellow notepads.

On the brown-painted walls there were mission patches, dating all the way back to Gemini 4; and there were plaques, framed in the team colors of retired flight directors. There was a big Stars and Stripes at the front of the room. The light was low, the colors gloomy; but the CRTs glowed brightly.

The booster passed the launch tower. And, smoothly, Indigo Team took control of the mission from the Kennedy Firing Room.

Donnelly could feel adrenaline surge in his system.

“Roll and pitch program,” Chuck Jones called down on the air-to-ground loop. His voice was shaking, barely audible to Donnelly. “Everything’s looking good. The sky is getting lighter.”

The Saturn VN pitched itself over, arcing east over the Atlantic. The booster was flying itself, gimbaling its engines so that it neatly followed its preprogrammed trajectory; the members of the crew, Jones, Priest, and Dana, were passengers, their nuclear rocket just payload.

Natalie York, capcom for the shift, called up to the spacecraft. “Apollo, Houston… You’re right smack-dab on the trajectory.”

“Roger, Houston. This baby is really going.”

“Roger, that.”

Numbers scrolled across CRT screens, and Donnelly’s team talked quietly to each other on their comms loops.

It was York’s first assignment as capcom. She sounded calm, controlled; Donnelly was pleased.

The flight was going well. Rolf Donnelly could feel it. He didn’t have to do a thing.

There were a lot of unique features about this mission. It was the first time the U.S. had tried to maintain two ambitious flights at once, with no less than six astronauts above the atmosphere: Jones, Dana, and Priest climbing to orbit for their NERVA test flight on top of the Saturn VN, and Muldoon, Bleeker, and Stone already out in lunar orbit in Moonlab, waiting for their rendezvous with the Russians. It was also the first time NASA had operated both its MOCRs at once.

And this was, of course, the first manned flight of the S-NB, the new Saturn booster third stage with its NERVA 2 nuclear engine.

Management Row, behind Donnelly in the MOCR, was full today. For instance, there was Bert Seger, just over Donnelly’s shoulder, his trademark carnation a glare of white. And in the Viewing Room behind the glass wall at the back of the MOCR, Donnelly had spotted Fred Michaels himself, puffing on one of his cigars, watching the numbers unroll with baffled anxiety. This was a very important, and very public, flight.

But Donnelly wasn’t concerned; not now. He had a lot of faith in his people. The controllers in this room were actually leaders of the teams, three or five strong, who worked in the back rooms clustered around the MOCR; to get as far as this room, the controllers had had to work in the back rooms on a good number of missions. That was the way Donnelly had come up himself. The controllers would often get poached away by the higher salaries offered by the aerospace companies: a spell in Mission Control looked good on your resume. But that was all right; it kept down the average age in here.

Anyway, Donnelly had no such ambitions. The MOCR was much closer to the center of gravity of decision making, on any flight they’d launched to date, even than being in the cabin of the actual spacecraft. This was where things were run; in this room, Donnelly was in control. As far as he was concerned, it was better than flying.

One minute into the flight.

The vibrations of the launch smoothed out. We are outpacing sound itself, Jim Dana thought.

“You know,” Jones shouted, “there’s something…”

Ben Priest yelled back. “What?”

“This goddamn bird doesn’t ring right…”

Dana, staring at the panel before him, couldn’t see Jones’s face inside his helmet.

There wasn’t time to think about it. Gs were piling on Dana, as the five heavy engines of the S-IC stage continued to blast. Two, three, four Gs… he could feel his chest flattening.

But that was about as bad as it would get. In fact, the Gs were oddly reassuring. They were coming right on schedule. Maybe Jones was wrong. So far this was just like the sims. Almost.

Suddenly he was thrown forward against his seat restraints. What the…? The smooth buildup was gone. Could an engine have failed? But then he was hurled back, deeper into his couch; and then forward again, so hard he could feel his straps bruise his stomach and chest through the suit’s layers. Then back again -

“Pogoing!” Jones shouted. “Hang on to your hats, guys.”

The vibrations, forward and back, were coming at the rate of five or six a second, and their violence was astonishing. How many Gs? And oscillating all the time -

Dana could no longer see; the craft was a blur around him, and he felt as if he was being pummeled about the chest, head, and legs. We’ll have to abort. We can’t survive this. It’ll shake us to pieces. He tried to turn his head, to see if Jones was reaching for his abort handle.

The pogoing didn’t show up in the MOCR.

To the controllers there, the first-stage burn looked nominal. It was only apparent in the Marshall engineers’ equivalent of Mission Control, called the Huntsville Operations Support Center.

On a closed loop from Marshall, a warning was whispered to Mike Conlig. “The S-IC is pogoing. The accelerometers are showing plus or minus eight Gs.”

Conlig was sitting at the left-hand end of the Trench — the front row of the MOCR at Houston — working as the Booster controller for this launch, with special responsibility for the new NERVA stage. The pogo had to be occurring because the natural vibration of the thrust chambers of the F-1 engines was close, somehow, to the structural vibration of the stack as a whole. Christ, he thought. But we put in absorbers to de-tune the vehicle, this shouldn’t be happening. Evidently those assholes at Marshall hadn’t done enough resonance testing on the new Saturn VN stack, with its nuclear third stage. We could lose the mission because of this.

He prepared to report to Flight.

But the whisper from Huntsville came through again. “Amplitude diminishing.”

Conlig held his breath and waited.

The pogoing faded, as suddenly as it had begun.

By comparison, the steady pressure of three or four Gs on Dana’s chest was a welcome relief.

He saw the mission clock, hovering before him. Ten seconds. That’s all it was. Ten seconds.

He turned his head to see the others; there was a zone of blackness around his vision. He focused on Chuck Jones’s face. “Chuck? Ben? Are you okay?”

Jones’s hand was closed tight around the abort handle; Dana wondered what effort of will it had taken to keep from turning it. Jones said, “Houston, we’ve been a-pogoing. But we is still here, like three dried peas in a tin can.”

“Roger.” Natalie York sounded puzzled. It was possible the Houston people didn’t know, yet, what the crew had gone through. They didn’t see the accelerometer readouts. Dana just hoped they were watching the rest of the telemetry.

But then the events of the launch sequence came rushing on them. “Three minutes,” Jones called. “Get set for staging, boys.”

Dana shook his head, and the darkness at the edge of his vision began to disperse. He thought uneasily of the additional stress the staging would place on the pogo-rattled S-NB.

Rolf Donnelly had not enjoyed the pogoing. He had also not enjoyed not knowing about it until the crew’s verbal report came through.

At this stage of the flight, the Marshall people were more or less in control; they had the best understanding of the status of their bird. But I don’t know why we didn’t abort during that damn pogo. They must be really keen to get their nuclear stage into orbit.

Ascent to orbit was always the most difficult and dangerous phase of a mission: the phase when a hell of a lot of energy was being expended to get those tons of metal up to an orbital speed of five miles per second. Reentry was infinitely easier since you could dissipate all that energy at your leisure. Ascent was the phase when you were buying the most risk, the phase when Donnelly always braced himself for problems.

He felt he needed more control than he’d had on this flight so far.

The trouble was, the Marshall Germans had developed their skills in an era of automated, unmanned vehicles. You couldn’t send a command to a V-2 once it was off the pad. And the thought of trying to control a bird in flight was still alien to them. So the Germans had done their best to turn their controllers, the people involved, into robots — extensions of the machine. Don’t improvise. Be disciplined. Follow the book, you’re paid to react, not to think.

Donnelly made a silent vow that he would campaign to have procedures changed. He didn’t want to be put in the position of having to trust the judgment of the Marshall people again.

Still — although the Saturn was riding a little above its planned path, on the big trajectory plot at the front of the room — the crew seemed to have ridden out the pogo, and the booster’s telemetry looked nominal. The stack had survived its first staging, the discarding of the spent S-IC, and the second-stage burn looked smooth.

Maybe we’ll get away with this…

Donnelly could feel a pressure on his back. There were men in that Viewing Room, among the VIPs and celebrities and headquarters people and politicians and crew families, who would know things were going wrong. There was Fred Michaels himself, with his nose practically pressed up against the glass. And beside Michaels was Gregory Dana, Jim’s father. Donnelly didn’t know Dana senior personally, but he understood he was some kind of mission specialist from Langley. The pressure exerted by the man was worse even than anything induced by the presence of Michaels. Goddamn it, that’s my son up there.

Donnelly was a man on the climb. He looked forward to a bright future — a few more years there in the arena, then maybe a move up into program management. And when he’d pulled off this complex and difficult mission, it would be one hell of a feather in his cap.

He loved his job. He wanted to go a lot farther; he wanted to run the flight to Mars. He did not want this mission to fail.

It was time to light the nuke.

Apollo-N shuddered as explosive bolts severed the spent S-II second stage. Dana drifted, weightless, waiting for the next kick.

“Here we go again,” Jones said. His Tennessee twang was calm and relaxed — as if he does this every day.

Well, Chuck Jones could playact his calmness all he liked; but even he had to be wound up tight as a watch spring, Dana thought, because the most important moment in the flight was approaching. The third stage of the stack was not the old reliable S-IVB which had carried the Moon missions to Earth orbit and beyond; it was an S-NB, with the first operational NERVA engine. And the damn thing was going to have to work to get them to orbit, Dana knew, or they were going to be flying across the Atlantic to a hard landing in the goddamn Sahara.

York called up: “Apollo, Houston, you are go for orbit. You are go for orbit.”

For long seconds the spacecraft soared, without acceleration; and then, at last, Dana was kicked in the back.

“She’s lit,” Chuck Jones breathed. “How about that. We’re flying a goddamn nuke.”

The NERVA burn was nothing like so jarring as the second-stage ignition six minutes earlier; the ride was crisp and rattly, with just two hundred thousand pounds of thrust pressing a full G into his back.

And then Earthlight strobed past Dana’s window. The Apollo had dipped toward the ground.

He was thrown forward against his restraints, the breath knocked out of him. My God. What now?

The nose of the craft pitched up again. Metal groaned, and Earth’s brilliant face swooped past his window. His helmet thumped against the sparse metal frame of his couch. Blue light flashed over his visor.

Chuck Jones’s voice was dry. “We’re riding a bronco here, Houston. Please advise.”

“Booster, Flight. Tell me what you’ve got.”

To Donnelly, it looked as if the little Saturn icon on the plot board was drunk, as it wandered crazily around its programmed trajectory. A dozen voices jabbered in Donnelly’s ear at once; he listened to them all, somehow simultaneously, trying to piece together what was happening.

But the most important voice wasn’t there. Mike Conlig wasn’t speaking to him.

“Booster, Flight,” he repeated. “You got anything you want to say?”

Even without Conlig he could follow the bones of what was happening. The S-NB seemed to be working nominally, in fact. The pitching must be due to leftover problems from the pogoing. The vehicle had been tipped up too high when staging came. So when the S-NB cut in, it found itself pointing too far into space. It had gimbaled its nuclear engine, and tried to point its way toward the center of the Earth. For long seconds the guidance system battled with the limits of gimbal on the engine. And then the S-NB seemed to figure that its path had gotten too low, so it pitched itself up again…

And on, and on, in a wild feedback process, as the S-NB’s instrument unit strove to bring the ship back to an unreachable flight path.

Where the hell was Conlig?

“Booster, Flight. Booster.”

Christ, Fred Michaels thought, watching from the Viewing Room at the back of the MOCR. I do not want this bird aborted.

It would be a very bad time to foul up.

The new Reagan administration was shaping itself up after its landslide, and Michaels was already gloomy about the future. He figured it was Ted Kennedy’s defection from Carter during the primaries that had done for the peanut farmer, although Michaels suspected Carter’s time might have been up anyhow. And here came Reagan, rattling his saber at the Russians over Poland and Afghanistan, and promising to get the hostages out of Iran… Maybe Reagan would be gung ho about space; nobody knew.

Meanwhile Michaels had lost a close political buddy in the White House, and his Kennedy card was looking a little worn.

Anyhow, the Apollo-N flight had so far gotten NASA some extensive coverage — some of it even favorable, as it showed the elaborate precautions the Agency was taking over its nuclear materials. It had even crowded out the “Who Shot JR?” hoopla that was fascinating everybody. Michaels did not want to turn those front pages into damning coverage of another Apollo disaster; not now, not ever…

Bert Seger, a few rows back from Michaels in the Viewing Room, knew this was NASA’s most controversial flight since the military crews of Skylab A. There had been a march and protest rally by campaigners at Kennedy today, people with kids, and banners saying REMEMBER THREE MILE ISLAND. The Cape security people had kept them well away from the launch site, and from the main public viewing areas. But Seger, hotfooting it back from Tyuratam for this launch, had had to work his way past it all.

Seger had been cocooned in the project for years. He’d found the anger he’d witnessed in those massed faces, on the news programs and on NASA’s closed-circuit loops, startling, deeply troubling.

Of even more concern to him was the grumbling he’d heard from inside the Agency. Some of the astronauts, that loudmouth Joe Muldoon, for instance, had been getting a little too vocal about the flight-readiness, or lack of it, of NERVA. Fortunately, however, Muldoon was safely out of the way, on the other side of the Moon.

But Muldoon and the others had planted seeds of doubt in Seger. Had he been pushing too hard? If anything went badly wrong today, then after bulling through the protests, NASA might, after all, smear nuclear fuel all over the eastern seaboard.

Yesterday, in the Operations Building at Kennedy, the Apollo-N crew had given Seger a small, informal photo, in a brass frame. It showed the three of them in their space suits, smiling, and was signed by them all. The inscription was: To Bert — In Your Hands.

“Booster, Flight. Booster, damn it.”

Donnelly’s voice was persistent in Conlig’s headset, like a buzzing insect. It made it hard to think.

The mission rules were clear enough. In the event of a failure like this at such a point in the launch, Conlig, as Booster, should push his abort switch. The little icon representing the Saturn continued to deviate from its path. But…

But the deviation wasn’t as bad as it had looked at first. And there clearly wasn’t any tumbling.

The S-NB was a smart bird. It could exert a lot of control over its trajectory by gimbaling its engine bells. It looked as if the booster was doing all it could to keep to its target path. The trajectory was still under control.

Conlig forced himself to reply to Donnelly. “Uh, Flight, Booster.”

“Jesus Christ, Booster. Go.”

Conlig took a deep breath. “Flight, Booster. We seem to have good control at this time.”

Then calls began to come in from the other controllers: Guidance, flight dynamics, the systems guys in the row behind Conlig. Apart from the oscillation around the trajectory, everything was performing nominally.

Donnelly said: “You sure, Booster?”

Are you really sure you have this bird under control? Are you sure you shouldn’t ask for an abort?

Are you sure you know what you’re doing, Conlig?

Conlig felt as if the room, the world, was closing in around him; the headset seemed to burn on his ears, and the little Saturn icon on the plot board was like an image of his own wavering determination.

I should abort. But the thing is flying.

“You sure, Booster?” Donnelly pressed.

“Data indicates it, Flight.”

“Roger.” I’ll trust you, Conlig.

Conlig stared at the icon, willing it to keep on climbing, up toward orbit.

He knew it was in nobody’s interests to abort if they didn’t have to.

The burn lasted two and a half minutes. Apollo-N was boosted five miles higher and another 250 miles downrange.

Then the S-NB stage shut down its NERVA engine.

Jones read off the DSKY display before him. “Natalie, you can tell the boys at Marshall that their rascally bird performed beautifully. Except that we’ve ended up in orbit ass-backwards.”

“Roger,” York replied laconically. “I’ll relay that, Chuck; thanks.”

Mike Conlig was aware of Natalie sitting, as capcom, just a few yards away from him.

I should have aborted. But I didn’t. I got away with it.

He didn’t turn; he didn’t want to meet Natalie’s eyes.

Donnelly felt some of the tension drain out of him.

He went around the horn, polling his controllers; they all reported a ship that was, in spite of everything, reasonably close to nominal. We got through it. How, I’ll never know.

Bert Seger knew they had been lucky. He determined to poke a hot stick up the asses of those guys from Marshall over this. The S-IC had pogoed. The Saturn first stage should not be letting them down, not after more than a decade of experience, not after so many flights.

Seger walked into the MOCR and leaned over Donnelly’s station. “I want you to make damn sure you’re confident about that NERVA engine of Marshall’s. Otherwise, bring those guys straight back down.”

Friday, November 28, 1980

APOLLO-N; LYNDON B. JOHNSON SPACE CENTER, HOUSTON

They shoved their pressure suits into net bags and crammed them under their couches; Jim Dana was wearing only a pair of Beta-cloth coveralls over his long johns.

He was a hundred miles up, a thousand miles downrange from the Cape, and covering five miles every second. There in his center couch, his feet pointed up at the stars, he was peering at his home planet through the Command Module’s window.

He couldn’t get over how beautiful the sunlit Earth was. It was a wall of color and light, gently curving, which divided the universe in two; cloud lay across land and ocean in brilliant white plumes, like feathers.

Ben Priest, to Dana’s right, was grinning at him. “How do you feel?”

“Like I was born to be up here.”

Chuck Jones unbuckled his seat belt and pushed himself out of the left-hand couch. He floated up toward the instrument panel. “Hot dawg,” he said. “We is in orbit, gentlemen. Welcome to the astronaut corps. Now all we’ve got to do is figure out if we can stay here.”

Priest and Jones set to work on checking out the craft’s flight path and velocity estimates with the ground stations and instrumentation aircraft. Dana could hear Jones humming as he worked. Meanwhile, Dana’s job was to make sure the guidance platform was aligned.

He floated up into the air and folded back his couch, the center of the three. In microgravity, the cramped cabin seemed roomy. Dana pushed a fingertip against an instrument panel; it was enough to launch him slowly down past the others into the equipment bay under the couches.

He drifted among coolant pipes and storage compartments. There was room to stretch out, for the first time since the launch, with his feet by the hatch and his head pointing at the floor. As he stretched he felt twinges at his stomach, chest, and knees: the aftermath of the pogoing. It was actually less painful than he’d expected; his pressure suit had evidently protected him.

Dana floated down to the Inertial Measuring Unit. The guidance device was a metal sphere the size of a beach ball. Inside the casing a platform was maintained in position by three nested spheres. The whole thing was like a table on a boat, gimbaled to remain level regardless of the boat’s heeling. The system was the spacecraft’s way of being able to sense where it was relative to a reference trajectory.

Checking the alignment was a routine chore; it was a checklist item on every flight. But there was a big fear that the pogoing and wild gyrations Apollo-N had suffered during the launch might have thrown the platform out of line.

To align the platform Dana had to take sightings on various stars through a small optical telescope and sextant. The idea was to pick a couple of stars from a standard list, then tell the spacecraft to find them. If the star wasn’t exactly centered in the crosshairs of the telescope, Dana would make an adjustment to correct it, and the computer would enter the adjustment into the platform, which would then reset itself.

He selected the constellation of Orion, with its distinctive three-star belt across the middle. He shielded his eyes more carefully from the glare of the Earth and the cabin lights, and he pointed the ’scope where he knew Orion ought to be. At last he made out the three faint dots, and bright Sirius nearby, right where they were supposed to be…

He grinned. The alignment was fine. Maybe the worst was over, and the rest of the flight was going to work out.

After all, the first objective of the flight test had already been achieved: to prove that the S-NB could loft itself, and a crewed spacecraft, into orbit. From here on out the mission was to show that NERVA could safely be restarted several times. During the week-long flight Apollo-N would be sent on thin, elliptical orbits, looping a hundred thousand miles into space — halfway to the Moon.

There would be plenty of science to do, with an extreme ultraviolet telescope, helium observations, high-altitude atmospheric studies, and Earth observation and photography; there was equipment inside the Command Module, and various external experiments and sensors stored in an instrument bay in the Service Module. But the science was nominal, Dana knew. The real purpose of this mission was simple: make sure the damn NERVA works, and can be controlled from the spacecraft, without smearing nuclear waste all over everything.

When he’d taken his star readings, he used the sextant to measure the angle between two fixed stars. It was a check of the platform’s memory; Dana had to get his calculations to agree to within a ten-thousandth of a percentage point: the goal, in fact, was to get five balls, a perfect reading of .00000 on the star angle comparison.

Dana scored .00003: four balls and change.

Meanwhile he was getting used to microgravity. When he put his hands out he found he could make himself spin in the air, like a sycamore seed.

The feeling was wonderful. He felt like laughing.

Rolf Donnelly was at the center of a web of information, argument, and extrapolation, a web that swept across the country: from the Marshall people in Alabama, to Rockwell at Downey, with its intimate understanding of Apollo-N, to Boeing, which was doing some hard analysis of the telemetry data from its balky S-IC first stage, to a dozen or more groups in the MOCR, and the back rooms, and in Building 45. He imagined phone lines singing as the ground controllers and the crew worked through comprehensive checklists covering the propulsion systems, gimbal systems, gyros, computers, life support, spreading their findings out across the country.

Slowly the answers were coming in, filtered and assembled by Indigo Team.

The S-IC pogo was, it seemed, due to an unexpected resonance mode of the Saturn VN, the new Saturn/NERVA stack. It should have been anticipated by somebody, long before the stack was assembled for launch.

What the hell happened to quality control on this program? Donnelly understood how everyone involved was under great time pressure. But still: It won’t fail because of me. It sounded like some assholes at Boeing or Marshall had kind of forgotten that motto; and there couldn’t have been a worse mission to forget it on.

Anyhow, what to do?

The logical thing to do was just to abort, to bring the crew home. After all, the spacecraft hadn’t been designed for the treatment it had received during launch.

But Donnelly had started out as a physicist, and he remained, at heart, a scientist. Never mind the mission rules, or the politics: what does the data tell you?

The failure had been Saturn’s, not NERVA’s. And Saturn had been discarded, and the Booster people were assuring him that everything was fine, that the pogoing hadn’t hurt the S-NB nearly as badly as it might have. Besides, the S-NB had already worked — and well, given the situation it had found itself in when it had tried to find its flight path. Meanwhile, the other subsystem teams were continuing to click off the items in their checklists as sweet as honey.

Behind him, in Management Row and the Viewing Room, there were more little clusters of senior management, worrying themselves to death. There was Bert Seger, with the directors of Flight Operations and Crew Operations; and behind Seger, beyond the Viewing Room glass, Donnelly recognized Tim Josephson.

The strategic importance of the flight was obvious to everyone: NERVA’s nuclear technology had to succeed — it had to be demonstrably safe — because if public hostility wasn’t assuaged, and if the nuclear program was cut back or even terminated altogether, well, hell, you could kiss good-bye to Mars.

Donnelly had to make the right call. By tradition only Flight, or Surgeon, the mission doctor, could call an abort. NASA senior management had never before overridden a flight director’s decision during a mission.

It was a first Donnelly didn’t want to happen on his watch.

Natalie York, as capcom, was sitting in the workstation row in front of Rolf Donnelly. She watched the faces of the controllers around her. She’d gotten to know them all during the intensive training for this mission, the long, complex integrated sims, the frenetic drinking sessions later. They were all men, all very young. They shared a brand of intense, fragile intelligence which made them socially awkward, maybe temperamental, ultimately unstable.

They’d all had a tough time during the flight to orbit, and they still faced equally tough decisions.

Mike sat in the Trench, the row in front of her, a little to her left. He was hunched over his console, his posture redolent of tension, his hair loose and greasy at his neck. He was bent in some huddled discussion with a colleague from Marshall.

She remembered all her old doubts about Mike’s temperament — whether he was suited to high-pressure situations like this, involving erratic boosters and manned spacecraft and rapidly unraveling missions…

She had an impulse to reach out and touch him, to try to reassure or calm him. But she knew that her intrusion wouldn’t be welcomed. Mike was off on some trajectory of his own, as out of her control as had been the Saturn/NERVA stack, guiding itself into space.

Anyhow, she ought to be concentrating on herself. This assignment was a big moment for her. York was an ascan no more. She was officially on the flight roster, and this capcom posting was her first operational duty: quite a vote of confidence.

It was much more difficult than she’d expected. The capcom was the only person allowed to speak to the crew. She was the funnel for inputs from all around the MOCR, and beyond; she had to be alert, to think constantly, to filter and integrate all the information she received. Nobody was writing her a script; she had to figure it for herself, in real time.

So far, she reckoned, she was doing fine. But nobody was noticing her, one way or the other. They wouldn’t until she screwed up.

I just hope you make the right choices today, Mike. For Christ’s sake, it’s Ben up there…

Jones and Priest drifted down to sleeping compartments in the equipment bay. Each of them was actually just a six-foot-long shelf with a foot of clearance, big enough to take a body-sized mesh hammock.

Dana strapped himself into the left couch, in front of the control panel. He knew that being in the couch he’d drawn the most comfortable sleeping berth. But as Command Module Pilot, Dana had to keep his headset on during the night, in case the crew had to be woken by Houston. And even if Houston restricted their chatter, there was always a dull roar of static, which wasn’t going to help him sleep.

None of that mattered.

My first night in space. All around him the cabin of the Command Module hummed and glowed, gray and green and warm, a small boy’s dream of the perfect den. A loose page from a checklist came drifting over his head, on some random air current; when he blew toward it, the page crumpled a little and drifted away.

He turned to the window. Apollo-N was flying over a mountain range. He could see the wrinkles in the land, as if the world were some huge, sculptured toy beneath him; thick clouds lapped against one side of the range, like a turbulent fluid.

He felt detached from the frustrations and complexities of his life below: the routine, the time-eating training, the press stuff he hated so much, the endless waiting he’d had to endure for this, his first flight. All of the problems seemed flattened, two-dimensional, like the surface of the Earth, and he felt a warm love reach out from him to envelop Mary and the kids, his parents, the whole of the glowing planet of his birth.

Christ, it’s true. I was born to be up here. None of the rest of it — the engineering, the science, even the prospect of going to Mars — none of it counts, compared to this moment.

I never want to go back down.

They’d checked out everything they could, and all the telemetry looked good, and the inertial table was lined up, and the subsystems checked out, and all the backroom guys and the engineers and the contractors with their test rigs were saying, yes, we know what went wrong; and no, we’re confident this mission is going to throw you no more curve balls.

I’ll tell you how we can achieve zero risk, Donnelly thought. We won’t fly.

Donnelly stood up and turned to face Bert Seger, who stood behind him in Management Row.

“Bert, I’m going to recommend we proceed with the mission. All the parameters have fallen into line.”

Seger, hollow-eyed with jet lag, just nodded.

It was 4 A.M. The decision was obvious.

Donnelly sat down. He’d been resting his hands on sheets of his flight plans; when he lifted his hands he found he’d left behind two perfect, wet images of his palms.

Monday, December 1, 1980

Adam Bleeker was the first of the Moonlab crew to eyeball the approaching Soyuz. “Hey, Phil, Joe. Come see.”

Stone drifted down to the wardroom’s big picture window.

Soyuz T-3 was silhouetted sideways-on against the pale brown Moon, which slid liquidly past.

Soyuz was shaped, Stone supposed, something like a green pepper shaker, a cylinder topped by a squat dome. The cylindrical body was the Instrument-Assembly Module, containing electrical, environmental, propulsion systems. Two matte black solar panels jutted from the flanks of the instrument module, like unfolded wings. A parabolic antenna was held away from the ship, on a light gantry. Stone was able to make out the flat base of the craft; there was a toroidal propellant tank fixed there, surrounding small engine bells. The dome at the top of the pepper shaker was the Descent Module: living quarters for the cosmonauts, and the cabin that would carry them through reentry into Earth’s atmosphere. For Earth-orbit missions the Descent Module would have been capped, Stone knew, by a large, egg-shaped Orbital Module, a work and living area.

The body of the ship was a light blue-green, an oddly Earthlike color set against the bleak uniformity of the Moon.

Soyuz looked, frankly, like a piece of shit to Stone. The solar cells were big black squares, crudely tiled onto the panels, and thick wires ran along the edges of the panels; Stone could see fist-sized big blobs of solder where some greasy technician had finished his job crudely.

The engineering was agricultural. The approaching Soyuz was like something out of a parallel universe, he thought.

The crew pulled away from the window; there was still work to do before the Soviets arrived.

Stone went up through the hole in the open mesh floor and climbed the fireman’s pole to the Multiple Docking Adapter at the far end of the hydrogen tank, the main experiment chamber. The adapter had three clusters hanging from its ports. There was the Apollo, which had brought the crew up from Earth, known as Grissom to thousands of schoolkids. Grissom had actually been adapted to carry five men home if need be, with two additional couches stowed in the Command Module’s lower equipment bay. Then there was the Telescope Mount, a small lab module with four wide solar arrays and a battery of science experiments and sensors. The mount had been adapted by Grumman engineers from a leftover LM ascent stage; in a different reality, that LM would have carried the astronauts of Apollo 16 up from the lunar surface.

The third component fixed to the adapter was a short, squat cylinder called the Soyuz Docking Module, an interface between the incompatible atmospheres and docking kits of Soyuz and Apollo. Viktorenko and Solovyov were going to have to dock with this module, and use it as a kind of airlock to get into Moonlab.

Stone began putting the docking module through a final checkout. As such assignments went, it wasn’t too frustrating. At least the module was a new piece of kit. People had lived and worked in the rest of Moonlab for the past five years, and it showed.

When he’d finished, Stone drifted back down to the wardroom. His next job was to run a visual sextant check of the Soviets’ position.

As he made his observations, Soyuz maneuvered away from the backdrop of the Moon and floated against the stars.

“Moonlab, this is Komarov. Moonlab—”

Muldoon replied for Moonlab. “We hear you, Komarov. The VHF link is working fine.” Viktorenko, on Soyuz, had used English; Muldoon replied in halting Russian.

Muldoon went through a four-way conversation between Moonlab, Soyuz, and the two ground control stations at Houston and Kaliningrad, testing out links and confirming system status.

Soyuz wheeled around so that it faced Moonlab. “Moonlab, Komarov. We are ready for the final docking maneuver. I will turn on my beacon.”

A light began to flash on the spine of Soyuz, easily visible through the picture window.

“I see you, Komarov.”

“And I you, Joe. Your elegant Moonlab is difficult to miss. We have our space suits on, all ready for docking. And our bow ties on top, for we are ready for a fine dinner with you.”

Houston and Kaliningrad both called up “go” for the docking. Soyuz spun slowly on its long axis, rolling through sixty degrees to align correctly with the docking module. The solar arrays made Soyuz look almost birdlike, swooping around the Moon like some unlikely metal swallow.

Soyuz came in slowly and hesitantly, with many small attitude and angle corrections. At one point the ship even backed off from Moonlab. The Moonlab crew and Houston kept quiet; Stone listened to the soft, tense, dialogue in Russian between Komarov and Kaliningrad.

Komarov was evidently a pig to fly. Soyuz was a flexible ferry craft, but it was essentially a contemporary of the American Gemini, lacking much of the sophistication and power of Apollo. There was a real lack of precise attitude control and translation instruments, with most of the operations conducted by preprogrammed mission event sequencers.

In fact, the poor maneuverability of Soyuz had caused some friction during the planning stages of this joint flight. Some on the U.S. side had suggested, half-seriously, that Soyuz should be the “passive” partner — that Apollo should haul the bulk of Moonlab into the docking with the tiny Soyuz…

Anyhow it looked as if Soyuz was coming in on its final approach. As it neared, bristling with detail, Komarov arced up and out of Stone’s view, and he heard Muldoon calling out in Russian.

“Five yards… three yards… one…”

There was a soft clang, a rattle of docking latches.

“Well-done, Vlad,” Muldoon called. “Good show, tovarich. You came in at just a foot per second.”

“Indeed. Now Apollo and Soyuz are shaking hands, here in the shadow of the Moon. Yes?”

The cosmonauts moved into the small docking module and sealed it up. They had to sit out there three hours as the pressure was reduced to match Moonlab’s.

Stone pulled himself into the tunnel at the core of the Multiple Docking Adapter, close to the entrance to the Soyuz Docking Module. Muldoon and Bleeker were already there, and the little tunnel, packed with instrument boxes and oxygen bottles, was crowded. Stone’s job was to work the small handheld TV camera and relay handshake pictures back to Earth.

There was a soft tapping. Muldoon opened the hatch.

Vladimir Viktorenko, beaming broadly, reached out and shook Muldoon’s hand. “My friend. I am very happy to see you.” He came tumbling out of the hatch, squat and exuberant, and gave Muldoon a bear hug. He gave Muldoon a little packet of bread and salt, a traditional Russian greeting. Solovyov followed his commander out. And there were the five of them crowded into the docking adapter’s tunnel, grinning and hugging, always with one eye on the camera.

Muldoon led them through the clutter of Moonlab toward the wardroom. Viktorenko and Solovyov made the obligatory polite remarks about the bird, but, Stone thought, they were being kind.

The first task of each new crew up there was to use its Apollo Service Module to tweak Moonlab’s orbit. The Moon’s gravity field was so lumpy that anything left in low lunar orbit would soon fall to the surface. And when he’d first approached ’Lab in Grissom, Stone might have been tempted to let the thing just fall.

After five years Moonlab’s outside hull was pretty much dinged up, with big fist-sized meteorite holes knocked in the shield. The solar cells, also dented by meteorites, had degraded, and so the power was down to half its peak. Inside, the lights were dim, and jerry-built air ducts ran everywhere to make up for the broken fans. Stone was already sick of half-heated meals, lukewarm coffee, and tepid bathing water.

And the interior was like someone’s utility room — more like a survival shelter than a laboratory, Stone thought — with every surface scuffed and scarred, every piece of equipment patched up, every wall encrusted with junk. Moonlab was an improvised lash-up anyhow, and the place really hadn’t been designed for growth; and every time a crew had gone up with some new experiment or a replacement article it had just bolted the kit to whatever free hydrogen-tank wall space there was, and left it there forever. After five years, the walls were growing inward, as if coated with a metallic coral. Sometimes you couldn’t even find the pieces of kit you needed, and you had to radio down to previous crews to find out where they’d left stuff.

The place was kept hygienic — it had to be — but you wouldn’t call it clean. Hell, you had highly trained pilots and scientists up there. They didn’t want to spend their lives on maintenance, for God’s sake; they had work to do. And the result was unpleasant, sometimes.

Like the black algae that had finally put paid to the shower.

Even the toilets never seemed to vent properly. And the old bird was a chorus of bangs, wheezes, and rattles when they tried to sleep at night. Some long-duration Moonlab crews had gone home with permanent hearing loss, he’d been told.

It was much worse than his first flight out there. It was all a kind of hideous, long-drawn-out consequence of Bert Seger’s original decision to redirect this ’Lab from Earth orbit, back in 1973.

Maybe I shouldn’t be so sniffy about that big tractor out there, the Soyuz. At least the Soviets must feel at home, here, ’Lab’s no worse than a Moscow hotel.

Still, you could see Moonlab as a kind of huge experiment in space endurance. Moonlab was a Type II spacecraft. Type I you’d never repair; you’d use it once and bring it home to discard, or fix on the ground, like Apollo Type II, like the ’Labs, were supposed to be repairable, but with logistic support from nearby Earth. Type III, the ultimate goal, would be able to survive for years without logistic support. Any Mars mission would have to be aboard a Type III spacecraft, a level of maturity beyond Moonlab.

Without the long-duration experience of Moonlab and Skylab, the Mars mission would not be conceivable.

They reached the wardroom, where the plastic table was fixed to the mesh floor, and the crew had rigged up five T-cross seats. They sat at the table, hooking their legs under the bars of the seats, and Stone fixed the TV camera to a strut. Then the performance really began.

There were flags to swap, including a U.N. flag, which had been carried up by Soyuz and would be returned home by Apollo. Each crew had brought along halves of commemorative aluminum and steel medallions, which Muldoon and Viktorenko joined together. They traded boxes of seeds from their countries: the Americans handed over a hybrid white spruce, and the Soviets Scotch pine, Siberian larch, and Nordmann’s fir.

It was time for the ritual meal. The Americans were hosts today, so, from the customary plastic bags, the cosmonauts were treated to potato soup, bread, strawberries, and grilled steak. There was much forced bonhomie and laughter in all this. Tomorrow it would be the Russians’ turn, and — as Stone knew, because they’d practiced even this — the menu would be tins containing fish, meat, and potatoes, tubes of soft cheese, dried soup, vegetable puree, and oats; there would be nuts, black bread, dried fruit.

As he ate, Stone looked dubiously at the TV camera staring at him from above. As space PR stunts went, this one was turning out to be a stinker. Jesus, he thought. I hope nobody I know is tuned in to this.

Viktorenko said, “Of course, as the philosophers say, the best part of a good dinner is not what you eat, but with whom you eat.” He dug out five metal tubes from a pocket of his coverall. The tubes were labeled: “vodka.” The astronauts made dutiful noises of pleasure, and when they opened the tubes up, they found borscht, which they displayed to the camera. A Soviet joke Ha-ha.

With the meal cleared away, the telecast should have been finished, so the crews could relax. But Bob Crippen, capcom for the day, called up from Houston. “Moonlab, we have a surprise for you. Go ahead, Mr. President; you’re linked up to Moonlab.”

Familiar Georgian tones crackled over the air. “Good evening, gentlemen. Or is it morning where you are? I’m speaking to you from the Oval Office at the White House, and this must be the most remarkable telephone call since John Kennedy spoke to you, Joe, and Neil Armstrong on the surface of the Moon, eleven years ago…”

The crews sat around the table, staring into the camera, smiles bolted in place.

Carter made a speech of stunning banality, a ramble that seemed to last forever. Solovyov and Viktorenko looked poleaxed. Carter was duller than Brezhnev.

Jesus, thought Stone. It wouldn’t be so bad if we didn’t know that Carter was on his way out And that he has always been dead set against the space program.

Carter went around the table, speaking to each astronaut and cosmonaut in turn. “So, Joe, I believe this is your first flight in eleven years.”

“Yes, sir, that’s so, my first since the Moon landing. And it’s wonderful to be back.”

“Do you have any advice for young people who hope to fly on future space missions?”

Muldoon’s face might have been carved from wood. Stone knew exactly what he was thinking. Yeah. Don’t fuck yourself over by mouthing off against the Agency. “Well, sir, I’d say that the best advice is to decide what you want to do and then never give up until you’ve done it…”

Well, as long as Carter doesn’t ask if he’s missing his wife, Stone thought, Muldoon will be home clear; everybody in Houston knew that Jill had walked out a couple of months before the launch, but somehow it had been kept out of the press.

Across the table from Stone, Viktorenko dug out five more “vodka” tubes; wordlessly he passed them around. Stone opened his and sniffed at it. Viktorenko nodded to him, holding his gaze. Yes, this really is vodka. But they will think it is borscht. A double joke!

Stone drained his tube in one pull and crushed the metal in his fist.

As the banal speeches and ceremonies went on, the mountains of the Moon, ignored, cast complex shadows over the tabletop.

Wednesday, December 3, 1980

Rolf Donnelly went around the horn, one last time.

“Got us locked up there, INCO?”

“That’s affirm, Flight.”

“How about you, Control?”

“We look good.”

“Guidance, you happy?”

“Go with systems.”

“FIDO, how about you?”

“We’re go. The trajectory’s a little low, Flight, but no problem.”

“Booster?”

“Everything’s nominal for the burn, Flight,” Mike Conlig said.

“Rog. Capcom, how’s the crew?”

Natalie York was on capcom duty again. “Apollo-N, Houston, are you go?”

“That’s affirmative, Houston,” Chuck Jones replied briskly on the air-to-ground loop.

“Rog,” Donnelly said. “Okay, all controllers, we are go. Thirty seconds to ignition.”

York said, “Apollo-N, you are go for the burn.”

Apollo-N was drifting over the darkened Pacific; Ben Priest could see a bowl of white light in the waters below — the reflection of the Moon — and, all but lost in that milky vastness, the lights of a ship.

The crew lay side by side in their couches, cocooned in their pressure suits once more. Priest felt his heart pumping harder. We’ve done everything we can to check this damn bird out; now we have to go full bore on it, and that’s all there is to it.

At ten seconds the DSKY threw up a flashing “99.” Chuck Jones reached out and pushed PROCEED.

Through the changing numbers on his console, Mike Conlig watched as NERVA’s nuclear core was brought back up to its working temperature. Liquid hydrogen was already gushing out of the big S-NB tank and pumping into the cladding of pressure shell and engine bell, and, Conlig knew, would be reaching the radioactive core about now, where it would be flashed to vapor as hot as the surface of a star.

The core temperature began to climb, following the curve laid out in the manuals -

No, it didn’t. The rise was too fast.

Conlig watched with dismay as his numbers drifted away from nominal.

As NERVA lit, the spacecraft shuddered.

Priest was pushed back into his seat with a long, gentle pressure. Perfect. Just like the sims.

Natalie York called up, “You’re looking good here. We’re hawkeyeing your trajectory. You’re right down the center line.”

Priest’s job was to watch the pressure and temperature readouts from the S-NB stage, the NERVA engine, and its big hydrogen tank. Jones was monitoring the attitude indicator with its artificial horizon, ready to take over the steering if the automated systems failed. Dana was calling out their increasing velocity from the DSKY readout. “Thirty thousand feet per second… thirty-three…”

Mike Conlig was aware of a deadly dryness in his mouth. On the loop from the back room, someone was screaming in his ear.

The numbers, white on a green screen, filled his world.

The computers worked constantly to update the numbers, and making sense of them wasn’t easy. He had to check the data-source slots at the top right-hand corner of the screen, to make sure that the sources of his numbers were all still updating him properly, and he had to be sure that he wasn’t diagnosing some problem incorrectly because of a mismatch in numbers of different vintages, fifteen or thirty seconds old.

But he discounted all that. He understood exactly what the silent parade of numbers was telling him. And it wasn’t good. The NERVA core was still overheating.

He tried to increase the flow of hydrogen through the core. That would take away some of the excess heat.

He got no response. In fact, one readout told him that the volume throughput of the hydrogen was actually falling.

Maybe there was a problem with a hydrogen feed line. Or maybe a pump had failed. Or maybe it was his old enemy, cavitation, somewhere in the propellant flow cylinders.

The core’s temperature continued to rise. More screaming in his ear.

Damn, damn. He’d have to abort the burn. And that was probably the end of the mission; he doubted they’d be allowed to go ahead with another engine restart after that.

He sent a command to the engine’s moderator control. He would slow the reaction in the NERVA core, reduce the temperature that way.

He got no response.

If the temperature had gotten high enough, the fuel elements could have distorted, even melted, and it would be impossible to insert the control elements into the core. Was that happening already?

If it was true, there wasn’t anything he could do to retrieve the situation. As he watched his numbers evolve, Conlig felt the first touches of panic.

Priest could clearly see the cones of the volcanoes of Hawaii, upthrusting, broken blisters. Earth receded visibly, as if he were rising in an elevator. The ride was exhilarating.

He felt a surge of elation. The damn nuke works.

It unraveled with astonishing speed.

Conlig watched power surge through the overheating core. After that, the resistance to hydrogen flow through the core sharply increased. Bubbles built up everywhere. The nuclear fuel assemblies were starting to break up. Pressure rose abruptly in the propellant channels, which were also beginning to disintegrate.

The whole structure of the core was collapsing.

The pressure in the reactor began to rise, at more than fifteen atmospheres a second. And, because of the massive temperatures, chemical and exothermic reactions were starting in the core.

And the increased pressure inside the reactor backed up to the pumps, and the pumps’ feedback valves burst. With the pumps disabled, the flow of hydrogen through the core stopped altogether.

The reactor’s main relief valves triggered, venting hydrogen to space. That offered some respite. But the discharge was brief; unable to cope with the enormous pressures and flow rate, the valves themselves were soon destroyed.

And then the massive pressure started working on the structure of the pressure shell itself.

I’ve lost it. I’ve lost the reactor. It had taken seconds for his life to fall apart. He tried to react, to think of something to do, to make a report to Flight. But his mouth was dry, the muscles of his jaw locked.

There was a loud, dull bang, and the Command Module shook: bang, whump, shudder.

Dana, strapped into his center seat, could feel the spacecraft quake under him. Hollow rattles and creaks sounded from around the cabin, a groan of metal as the can around him was stressed; it was a noise oddly like a deep-throated whale song.

The master alarm shrilled in Dana’s headset, a shrill of staccato beeps. Yellow warning lights lit up all over the control panels.

He turned to look at his companions. Jones was staring at the instrument panel, and Priest’s eyes were round. That sure as hell wasn’t routine, whatever it was.

Jones cleared the master alarm.

The feeling of thrust died abruptly. It was like a slow collision in a car; Dana was thrown forward, gently, against his straps.

Jones said, “Jim. The Main A light is on. Check it out.”

Dana looked at his console. A red undervolt light was glowing. Damn. I should have been the first to see it. The Command Module’s systems were Dana’s responsibility.

“Confirm that,” he said. “We’ve got a Main A undervolt.” He was surprised his voice was level. He began to check voltage and current levels; they were showing erratic, inconsistent readings.

He heard pinging and popping noises. It was the sound of metal flexing. The spacecraft was still shuddering. Some damn thing has blown up on us.

Earth was wheeling past the windows. The Service Module thrusters ought to be firing as the spacecraft tried to maintain its orientation. But he couldn’t hear any solenoids thumping.

Jones was talking to Houston. “Natalie, we be a sorry bird up here. We’ve got a problem.” He unbuckled his restraints and floated up to the left-hand window. Dana knew he was following an old pilot’s instinct: at a moment like this, regardless of the telemetry, you needed to take a walk around the bird, to look for leaks and kick the tires, see for himself what was wrong.

Dana glanced out of the window to his right, past Ben Priest.

He saw sparks, chunks of some material, flying up past the Command Module. The material was glowing, red-hot.

Then he could smell something, inside his helmet. It reminded him, oddly, of Hampton: his childhood, the ocean.

Ozone.

Donnelly didn’t even need to hear the specific words. He could feel the event, see it in the changed postures of controllers all over the room, hear it in the sudden urgency of their voices.

Something had fouled up. But at first the cause wasn’t clear; all Donnelly got was a rash of symptoms, monitored by his controllers.

“We’ve got more than a problem.” That was EECOM, in charge of electrical and environmental systems: life support in Apollo-N. He was shouting. “I have CSM EPS high density. Listen up, you guys. Fuel cell 1 and 2 pressure has gone away.” Controller jargon, for fallen to zero. “And I’m losing oxygen tank 1 pressure and temperature.”

Natalie York was talking to the crew. “This is Houston. Repeat that, please.”

“…We’ve got a problem,” Jones said over the air-to-ground. “The NERVA is out, and we’re seeing a Main Bus A undervolt.”

“Roger. Main Bus A. Stand by, Apollo-N; we’re looking at it.”

Guidance said, “We’ve had a hardware restart. We don’t know what it was.”

A hardware restart meant some unusual event had caused the computer to shut itself down and reboot. Donnelly called for confirmation from another controller.

The crew kept reporting the Bus A undervolt.

The electrical power for Apollo-N came from three fuel cells in the Service Module. The current from the cells flowed through the A and B Buses, conduits which fed the rest of the spacecraft’s components. An undervolt alarm meant the spacecraft was losing its electrical power.

Donnelly tried to get confirmation of the problem from EECOM. “You see a Bus undervolt, EECOM?”

“…Negative, Flight.”

But EECOM had hesitated.

He knows more than he’s telling me. He’s still trying to figure it through. What the hell was happening? The mission seemed to be falling apart before his eyes.

Donnelly pressed EECOM again; he needed more data. “The crew is still reporting the undervolt, EECOM.”

“Okay, Flight. I have some instrumentation problems. Let me add them up.”

Instrumentation problems. EECOM sees the undervolt, all right. But he doesn’t believe what the instruments are telling him. He’s looking at a lot of ratty data, he thinks some kind of major telemetry failure is under way. He wants to be sure before he reports it to me.

Donnelly said, “I assume you’ve called in your backup EECOM to see if we can get more intelligence applied here.”

“We have him here.”

“Roger.”

Then INCO, the instrumentation and communications controller, called in. “Flight, INCO. The high-gain antenna has switched to high beam.”

What in hell did that mean? “INCO, can you confirm the time when that change occurred?” If he could, it might be a clue in pinning down what was happening…

Before INCO could reply there was another call. “Flight, Guidance. We have attitude changes.”

“What do you mean, attitude changes?”

“The RCS valves appear to be closed. They should be open.”

Reaction control problems. Antenna problems. Problems with the oxygen tanks, and the fuel cells.

He’d never seen a systems signature like this before, not in any of the sims he’d gone through. But then, even after twelve years of flights, Apollo-Saturn was still an experimental system. You’d test-fly an airplane far more times than any spacecraft had ever flown, before declaring it operational.

So what was hitting him? It could be instrumentation problems, flaky readouts, as EECOM seemed to suspect. Or it could be that the Service Module had blown out, knocking the whole stack sideways. Or something else might have blown, and damaged the Service Module.

INCO’s timing came in. His antenna problems dated from a few seconds after they’d lit the NERVA.

For the first time in several seconds Donnelly glanced at the trajectory plot board. The spacecraft was diverging, markedly, from the path it should have followed, had the NERVA been burning smoothly.

The S-NB looked to have shut down.

“Guidance, you want to confirm that deviation?”

“Rog, Flight.” Guidance was the ground navigator. Guidance must be looking at multiple problems, too, as the spacecraft drifted from its trajectory and tumbled away from its intended attitude.

“Booster, you have anything to report?”

Mike Conlig did not reply. Donnelly could see how he was hunched over his console. “Booster?”

York said, “The crew is reporting a smell of ozone, inside their helmets.”

“Flight, this is Surgeon. I have a contrary indication.” The flight doctor on this flight was a crop-headed Oklahoman sitting in the row in front of Donnelly, with the systems guys, at the left-hand end next to Natalie York. He was wearing a button badge which read FUCK IRAN. His voice was taut, urgent.

Donnelly switched him onto a closed loop. “Go, Surgeon.”

“Flight, I’m monitoring a surge of radiation flux through the spacecraft cabin. And some changes in the crew’s vital readings.”

Donnelly was thinking through York’s brief report. They can smell ozone. Oxygen, ionized by radiation. Radiation from the NERVA. Jesus Christ almighty.

It was real, then. Not just flaky instrumentation. And the Russians orbited a goddamn Vietnamese in Salyut this year. The press will crucify us.

Because of the two simultaneous missions in progress Bert Seger had been away from the office for three days, and he was taking a chance to work through his mail. He’d only been at it for a few minutes when he got a call on the squawk box, the line that linked up the senior staff in Building 2.

There had been some kind of problem with the Apollo-N flight, and Seger had better get on over to the MOCR.

Angrily, Seger folded up his mail. With the NERVA, it was one damn thing after another.

The voltage needle on Bus A sank past the bottom of its scale. More warning lights came on.

Dana checked the Service Module’s fuel cell 1, which was supposed to feed Bus A. It was dead. His gloved fingers clumsy with the switches, Dana began to reconnect the Command Module’s systems from Bus A onto Bus B.

Another red light came on. Bus B was losing voltage as well. He checked fuel cell 3, the feed for Bus B; it was dead, too.

Jesus. We’ve lost the Service Module. It’s Apollo 13 over again.

He made his report, trying to keep his voice level. Mary would be listening, probably the kids. “Okay, Houston, I tried to reset, and fuel cells 1 and 3 are both showing gray flags. I’ve gotten zip on the flows.”

“Acknowledged, Apollo-N. EECOM has copied.”

Earth, beautiful, unperturbed, drifted past the windows.

The spacecraft and booster had been set rotating by that mysterious bang. Dana knew the ship’s attitude control systems should have been trying to steady their slow tumble, but there was no sign of any correction.

“Chuck, I think the Service Module’s RCS must be out.”

“Rog,” Jones said. “Houston, we don’t have reaction control, either from the Service Module or from S-NB.”

If the Service Module had blown, it was the end of the mission. But still, the crew ought to be able to get home, from this low Earth orbit.

As the spacecraft rolled, a cloud of ice crystals, sparkling, dispersing, drifted past the window to his right. It seemed to be venting from somewhere in the stack. It was quite beautiful, coalescing above the shining face of Earth.

More alarms lit up, as the problems multiplied and spread.

Donnelly had Surgeon feeding radiation dosimeter readings into his ear on the closed loop.

EECOM said, “Flight, I want to throw a battery on Bus A and Bus B until we psyche out the anomalies. We’re confirming undervolts.”

Donnelly tried to shut out Surgeon’s voice so he could figure out EECOM’s suggestion.

EECOM wanted to run the Command Module off battery power. It was a reasonable short-term suggestion. But, looking ahead, the Command Module’s batteries would have to be conserved to allow the crew to reenter the Earth’s atmosphere. “What about limiting that to a single Bus, rather than both?”

“Hold on that, Flight.” EECOM would be conferring with his team of experts in the back rooms.

It was obvious from multiple indications, not least the crew’s report, that the NERVA had indeed shut itself down after only a few seconds of the planned burn. “Booster, you have anything you want to say to me?”

Conlig didn’t reply. The guy seemed to have frozen out.

“The crew’s health is going to be severely impacted,” Surgeon said on the closed loop. “Though they probably don’t know it yet. In fact, Flight, you can’t expect them to function normally for much beyond a few more minutes.”

Guidance came on line. “The bird’s attitude is still changing. They’ve got to stop it. We’re heading for gimbal lock.”

“I hear you, Guidance.”

Gimbal lock meant the spacecraft was tumbling beyond the tolerance of the inertial guidance system. The platform could be reset by eye again. But if Donnelly was forced to go for an emergency reentry, he needed alignment control immediately.

Somehow, though, he felt that alignment loss, even a gimbal lock, was the least of the spacecraft’s problems just then.

“Houston, Apollo-N.” It was Jim Dana; to Natalie York, Jim’s voice sounded thin, frail, but controlled. “We’re seeing some kind of gas, venting from the stack.”

York’s skin prickled with a sudden chill.

“Rog, Apollo-N,” she said. “Can you tell if it’s coming from the S-NB tank, or the Service Module?”

“We can’t tell. Both, possibly.”

She’d been following the controllers’ terse dialogue. The controllers were still working to the assumption that there was some kind of instrumentation or telemetry problem to explain the multiple anomalies.

But if the ship was venting gas, that couldn’t be it. The problem couldn’t be just instrumentation or an electrical screwup. And besides, she could see that Surgeon, next to her, had switched onto a closed loop.

Something, some violent and destructive event, had happened to Apollo-N, up there in low Earth orbit, to a spacecraft with a nuclear pile attached to its tail.

She glanced across at Mike. He was still hunched over his console and whispering into his headset. Why doesn’t he say something to Flight?

She became aware that her right hand was clutching the thin metal maintenance handle of her console; her hand was closed into a fist, painfully.

Her throat was dry, and she had to force herself to swallow before she could speak again.

Ben’s up there. What in hell is going on?

Gregory Dana, in the Viewing Room, could see the spacecraft icon drifting from its programmed trajectory on the big plot board, and he could follow enough of the controllers’ terse exchanges to figure out that something catastrophic had happened to Jim’s ship.

The Viewing Room was steadily filling up — as was the MOCR amphitheater itself — as off-duty personnel came hurrying in, responding to the deepening atmosphere of crisis.

Dana was joined at the window by one of the astronaut corps, Ralph Gershon, whom Dana had met a couple of times through Jim.

Gershon stared out at the frantic huddles in the MOCR and snorted contempt. “Jesus. Look at them huddling up. They always go through the same thing. What happened? Where are we? What are we going to do about it? They’re so damned slow, and restricted in the way they think. And meanwhile the bird drifts around the sky, broken-winged.”

Broken-winged.

The problems must be with the nuclear engine. Everything, every anomaly, had flowed from that moment.

They have to get the crew away from that damn booster. Dana couldn’t understand why that hadn’t been done already.

He glanced around. He couldn’t tell if any of this was being broadcast on the public networks. What if Mary, and Jake and Maria, were seeing this on TV? What about Sylvia?

Silently, his lips moving, Gregory Dana began to pray.

The NERVA has blown. That’s got to be it.

Jim Dana, lying in his couch, thought he could feel the tingle of radioactive particles within his body. It was a thin wind, working its way into his bones. His face and chest felt as if they were on fire. He felt a burning sensation and a tightness about his temples, and his eyelids were smarting, as if they had been doused with acid.

With every breath, he must be filling his lungs with radionuclides.

His throat hurt, and he began to cough.

Wednesday, December 3, 1980

The Executives Group were about to take dinner at the International Club on Nineteenth Street. Vice President-elect Bush attended, along with members of the Senate and House who held key positions on the Space and Appropriations Committees; they were standing around with drinks in their hands.

Under the surface of talk and networking, Fred Michaels was running over the events of the day.

Michaels had inherited the idea of the Executives Group from his predecessors at NASA. The Group consisted of the space program’s top people: Michaels and his NASA senior managers, and the prime contractors’ senior executives, from Rockwell, Grumman, Boeing, McDonnell Douglas, IBM. It was an elite club that Michaels liked to bring together four or five times a year.

Today had been a good day, he decided. The Executives Group session had gone well, and Bush’s closing address had been encouraging. Michaels had worried about losing outgoing veep Ted Kennedy, who, with his brother, continued to support the space program. Today, though, Bush seemed to be positioning himself as — if not an advocate — then at least as an ally.

Yes, a good day. But Michaels was tensed up, his big stomach growling. He always found it impossible to relax in the middle of a mission. Any one of a hundred thousand malfunctions could, he knew, spell the end of the flight, and maybe cost the crew members their lives, and conceivably put a bullet to the head of the whole Mars initiative — and, incidentally, Michaels’s own career. How the hell could anyone relax through that? And tonight there were not one but two American crews beyond the atmosphere, one floating around the Earth with a nuke on its tail, and the other bouncing off the Moon with those Russians. What a situation.

Still, the S-NB seemed to be functioning well, so much so that Hans Udet — the most senior of Marshall’s Germans on the project — had felt able to take time out to be there with the Executives tonight. Michaels could see him, glad-handing a brace of congressmen with all the Prussian charisma and charm at his disposal. Udet looks confident enough. Why the hell shouldn’t I be?

That was when the phone calls started coming in.

Afterward, Michaels would never be sure who had gotten the first call.

He saw the president of Rockwell in excited conversation with another man. Then all the Rockwell executives left the club’s main room and returned a few minutes later, visibly distressed. They began to go through the room, seeking out others; Michaels could see the news — whatever it was — spreading through the Executives Group like a contagion of dismay.

Then Michaels himself was paged to take a call from Tim Josephson, who was still at NASA Headquarters a few blocks away.

“Fred, the crew has lost the NERVA. The technical parameters got out of their nominal boundaries. Ah — in fact, the thing might have exploded.”

“Jesus Christ. And the crew?” Michaels snapped. “What about the damn crew, Josephson?”

Josephson’s voice was even, analytical. “It’s hard to say from here, Fred. The updates are patchy. I’d say we’re looking at a potential crew loss situation.”

A waiter paged Michaels with another urgent call. This time it was Bert Seger from Houston. Seger, his voice high and clipped, gave him more details: some kind of runaway in the NERVA reactor, extensive damage to the Service Module, damage unknown to the Command Module -

Michaels cut him short. No American astronauts had been killed in space before. No previous Administrator had lost a crew. “Bring them home, Bert.”

Michaels felt someone grabbing at his arm. It was Udet; the tall German was smiling, a little flushed with the drink. Udet wanted to introduce Michaels to a portly senator.

Michaels drew Udet to one side, and told him the news.

Udet’s smile evaporated. He seemed to withdraw into himself; he held himself straight and erect, his face a mask. With precision, he put his glass down on a waiter’s tray.

“What must we do?”

“Hans, I want you to call the White House and tell them what’s happened. Tell them I’ll be in contact as soon as I can. And then I want you to get the hell out of here and back to Marshall.”

The German nodded his head and walked stiffly from the room. Michaels watched him go.

He thought back. Seger’s telephoned voice had been distant, light, oddly false; Michaels felt a stab of worry. But the guy is under incredible pressure. Of course he’s going to sound strange. As long as he stays in one piece long enough to get the bird down. Seger’s mental state was something Michaels could deal with later. Christ, I’m going to have a few crazies on my hands before we’re done with this damn business.

Michaels walked back to his guests in the reception room. Obviously word was continuing to spread among them. Hell, they only need to look at my face to see that. He even saw one man crying.

In the dining room the waiters were laying out dinner; nobody was paying any attention to them.

Michaels found Bush and spoke briefly with him. Then he called for quiet and broke the news officially to the rest of the guests.

After that the group broke up quickly. The contractors who had hardware involved in the accident left to find planes to take them to Houston.

Michaels made his apologies to Bush, left the club, and ordered his driver to take him to NASA Headquarters.

Wednesday, December 3, 1980

The Astronaut Office was quiet that night. With two shots aloft — and with one of them in trouble — most of the pilots were wrapped up in work in support of the flights in the simulators, or working at contractors’ plants around the country.

Ralph Gershon was there, though, in the office. As a MEM specialist he didn’t have any specific assignments to do with the current shots. But he’d heard something about the problems on the NERVA flight today. He’d gone over to the MOCR, but there wasn’t a damn thing he could do there. He was just in the way, radiating anxiety all over everybody else. So he made sure his location was known, in case he was needed, and he sat in the office he shared, quietly going through his in-tray.

The phone rang. He picked it up on the first ring.

“Ralph? I’m glad I caught you.”

“Natalie? Are you still on shift?”

“Yeah. Rolf Donnelly asked me to call you. I—”

“Yes?”

“We think we might lose the crew.”

Gershon could hear voices in the MOCR behind her, taut, shouting.

York wanted Gershon to arrange for astronauts and wives to go to the homes of the crew.

Gershon agreed straightaway, and York hung up.

It was a tradition, dating back to Mercury, that if you had to receive bad news like this, you’d get it from an astronaut, or his wife — someone close enough to the risks and pressures to understand how you’d be feeling.

Gershon dug out his phone book. He’d start with people he knew lived close to the families.

The assignment was going to be as hard a mission as he’d performed in his life.

He began to dial.

Venting gas.

Donnelly understood the implications of that observation as well as anyone.

On the loop he said, “Okay, now, Indigo Team, let’s everyone keep cool. We’re going to stick to the mission rules, and remember the priorities.

“Let’s go back to basics. EECOM tells me that right now we still have a sealed can.” An airtight ship, a place to keep the astronauts alive. “We’ve faced situations like this many times in the sims” — but never for real, damn it — “and you know that having a sealed can is always the number one requirement; as long as we have that, at least, we have time to figure things out. We’re going to solve this problem, but we’ll take our time over it, because we have the time; we don’t need to make things worse by guessing. Now, let’s get to it.”

It seemed to do some good; the atmosphere in the MOCR, the angle of hunch of the white-shirted shoulders, seemed to ease a little. Donnelly nodded to himself, pleased; maybe he’d lanced the boil of panic that had been building up.

Donnelly knew he had to work systematically. He was going to “down-mode,” in the jargon, move from one set of options to another, more restricted set. He had to preserve as much of the mission objectives as he could without further endangering the lives of the astronauts. If you can’t land on the Moon, can you at least orbit it? And he didn’t want to close out any options he didn’t have to, because he didn’t know what else was likely to be thrown at him, and he needed to keep contingencies open. For example, it was conceivable they might have to use the S-NB engine to direct a reentry, if the problems turned out to be with the Service Module after all.

Tread lightly, lest ye step in shit. That was the motto. The trouble was, Donnelly was quickly running out of options altogether.

In the background, he heard Natalie York talking to the crew. “Apollo-N, we’ve got everyone working on this. We’ll get you some dope as soon as we have it, and you’ll be the first to know.”

Good girl.

Chuck Jones replied. “Thank you, Houston.” On the air-to-ground, Jones’s voice sounded dry, weak.

In response to the sound of Jones’s voice there was a brief, distressed silence in the MOCR, despite the array of amber lights before Donnelly.

He scanned the MOCR. Each of his controllers was staring into his own screen, digging deeper and deeper into the problems he saw in his own area. As if his own problems were somehow separate from the rest.

Donnelly had a pang of doubt, suddenly. Am I handling this the wrong way? The controllers were getting isolated from each other and from the real spacecraft up there; some of them were probably still convincing themselves that there was nothing worse going on than a booster shutdown and some funny instrumentation glitches.

But we already know that isn’t true. The crew heard a bang. And they can see gas venting.

He needed to start talking to his controllers again, to try to keep them thinking as a team.

“Okay,” he said, “I want to get everybody on the loop. Retro, Guidance, Control, Booster, GNC, EECOM, INCO, FAO. Give me an amber, please.”

An amber light on the Flight’s console indicated talk-and-listen; it meant that controller wanted attention. One by one, the lights turned from listen-only green to amber.

Except Booster.

“Goddamn it,” Donnelly snapped. “Booster, Flight. Give me an amber, please.”

“Acknowledge,” Mike Conlig said quickly. The last amber lit.

“All right, people, tell me where we stand. What’s your most urgent item? Who wants to start?”

“Flight, Guidance. That attitude drift—”

“Rog. Capcom, please inform the crew that it needs to maneuver out of a threat of gimbal lock.”

“Acknowledge,” said York.

Bert Seger came stalking down from Management Row, gaunt, intense, every gesture stiff with nervous energy. He stopped at Donnelly’s elbow. He plugged into a console and listened in to the controllers’ loops.

“Flight.” It was EECOM. “I think the best thing we can do right now is start a power-down. Maybe we can look at the telemetry and then come back up.”

That sounded damned optimistic to Donnelly. “Hold on that, EECOM.” He wanted to keep the Command Module’s systems powered up, so he had available the option of bringing the crew down quickly. “Okay, who’s next?”

That asshole at Booster, Mike Conlig, still wasn’t speaking to him.

“It’s the NERVA,” Seger said in his ear.

“Yes. I—”

“The fucking nuke has blown on us. And it looks like it’s disrupted the Service Module as well. That’s obvious even to me. Rolf, you’re moving too slowly. You have to get them away from that thing, and get them home.”

“But—”

“Do it, Rolf, or I’m going to override you.”

Donnelly closed his eyes, for one second. Jesus. There goes my career.

“Capcom, please relay new instructions to the crew.”

Apollo-N continued to pitch and yaw. Metal groaned, and Priest could feel the motion as a wrench at his stomach.

“We’ve got to ditch the NERVA,” Chuck Jones said. His voice was a rasp. “These rates are killing us. Do it, Jim.”

Dana didn’t respond.

Priest looked to his left.

Jim Dana, in the center couch, seemed to have lost consciousness. His face, under his helmet, was severely blistered; in some places strips of flesh were hanging loose, drifting in the air. He looked as if he had vomited; globs of thin, brownish liquid clung to the inside of his faceplate.

Priest reached across to Dana’s station. Separating Apollo-N from the S-NB booster stage was a routine maneuver, something any of them could handle. But Priest’s thinking seemed to be cloudy, and he was having trouble seeing the panel before him. He couldn’t feel the switches through his pressure-suit glove. He fumbled at the glove, but his hand seemed to have swollen up, and the glove was tight. Finally he got the glove off, and let it drift away.

He looked at his bare hand, puzzled. The skin had turned a deep, uniform brown. A nuclear tan. How about that.

He snapped switches.

There was a series of sharp bangs, a shudder.

“Houston, we’ve got separation,” Jones said.

The Earth slid more rapidly past the windows, as the freed Apollo-N tumbled away from the S-NB. With separation, the tumbling seemed to ease; maybe, Priest thought, gas venting from the S-NB had been causing some of the pitching.

Jones worked at hand controllers which should have operated the RCS clusters on the Service Module. He was trying to kill the residual rates, the unwanted tumbling. “Zippo,” he said. “Still nothing, Houston; we don’t have any attitude control.”

“Acknowledged, Apollo-N,” Natalie York said. “We’re working on it. Watch out for gimbal lock.”

Priest could see the red warning disk painted on the eight-ball, drifting into the ball’s little window, the warning for incipient gimbal lock.

“Well, hell,” Jones groused, “I don’t see I can do much about that, Natalie.”

The tumble brought the discarded nuclear booster into Priest’s view. The slim black-and-white cylinder looked almost beautiful as it drifted away from him, silhouetted against the Earth’s shining skin, highlighted by sunlight. But he could see that a panel had blown out of the pressure shell surrounding the reactor core, at the base of the hydrogen tank. Inside the shell, Priest could see a tangle of pipes and Mylar insulation. And the hydrogen tank itself had been ripped open; a thin wisp of gas still vented from the tank.

Priest wondered vaguely if they ought to be focusing a TV camera on the booster.

Jones began to describe the S-NB to Houston. “There’s one whole side of the damn thing missing. I can see wires dangling, and the base of that hydrogen tank is just a mass of ripped metal. It’s really a mess…”

Now, as the S-NB rolled, Priest could see through the base of the ripped-open tank, all the way through to the NERVA reactor itself. And in there, he saw a point of light, white-hot. That’s the goddamn core. The reactor’s blown itself apart, and exposed the core. There was no sign of the biological shield, which must have been blown away. Perhaps that was what they had seen, in red-hot fragments, fountaining past the Command Module’s windows.

As he stared into the wreckage he thought he could actually feel heat on his face: heat radiating from the core itself, as if it were a tiny, captive sun.

He glanced at the radiation dosimeter number on his DSKY. Thirty thousand roentgens an hour were spewing out of the core, and through the spacecraft, in an invisible hail of gamma and neutron radiation.

Thirty thousand. It was a hard number to believe. The safe limit, according to the mission rules, was one-thousandth of a roentgen per day.

“I guess we’re kind of privileged,” Priest said. “Nobody in the history of mankind has ever gotten up so close to an exposed nuclear reaction before. The victims of the Jap bombings were killed by heat and the shock wave rather than by radiation…”

Jones cackled, and he closed his eyes. “Another first for the space program. Oh, thank you, Lord.”

Wednesday, December 3, 1980

Gregory Dana found it a scramble to get out of JSC. Dozens of TV, radio, and print reporters were turning up at the security blockhouse, requesting clearance and asking for access to whatever briefings NASA was planning. The parking lot opposite Building 2, the Public Affairs Office, was one of the busiest on the campus.

It was pitch-dark by the time Dana arrived at the ranch house in Lazywood Lane.

Jim and Mary lived in a pretty place. Timber Cove was a development that had sprung up in the 1960s, a couple of miles from JSC. Around the tidy, manicured streets the ranch houses were sprinkled in the greenery like huge wooden toys, individually styled, encrusted with stone cladding. The grass was rich and cool-damp, and the cultivated pine trees on the lawns were a dark green, almost black in the low lamplight.

The area was soaked with NASA connections. Once, Jim liked to boast, no less than Jim Lovell had lived next door, with his family. On happier days, Dana had come to throw baseballs with Jake, and to make paper airplanes for little Mary, and to argue the politics and engineering of spaceflight with his son…

For a few minutes Dana sat in the car. He felt as if the strength had been drawn out of him. He rolled down the window and let the cooler air waft over his face.

He could hear water lapping at the back of the house, the clink of the chain that tied up Jim’s little dinghy.

He took off his glasses and wiped them on his crumpled tie.

Later tonight Gregory was going to have to fly up to Virginia to be with Sylvia, and bring her back. He’d spoken to her on the phone several times already — the Mission Control people had given him a line — and she’d sounded calm enough. But Dana couldn’t begin to imagine how she was going to react to this.

Well, how am I reacting? Do I even understand that? My son, my only son, is in orbit right now — perhaps trapped up there — with his poor, fragile body irradiated by Marshall’s hellish abortion of a nuclear rocket. It was a situation, he thought, which the human heart simply wasn’t programmed to cope with.

And, under all his grief, he felt the dull, painful glow of anger that none of this need have been so — that it wasn’t, never had been, necessary to build nuclear rockets to get to Mars.

He pushed his glasses back on his face, shoved open the car door, and got out.

There was a Christmas wreath on Jim’s front door.

It was physically hard for him to walk up the drive, he observed, bemused. He watched his feet, his shoes of brown leather, as they lifted and settled on the gravel path, as if they belonged to some robot.

He reached the door.

He felt exhausted, as if the path had been a steep climb. It won’t be so bad, he told himself feverishly. Just ring the doorbell; that’s all you have to do. Seger had said someone from the Astronaut Office would have been there already. So you won’t have to give her the news, at least. And besides, Walter Cronkite was probably already intoning gloomy predictions on CBS.

You won’t even have to break the news. So ring the bell, damn you.

His hands hung at his sides, heavy, weak, useless.

Wednesday, December 3, 1980

“Apollo-N, Houston. We’re going to bring you home. Just take it easy, and we’ll bring you down. The Command Module systems are looking good at this time. You might want to dig out the medical kit—”

Natalie’s voice remained calm and controlled, and Priest, through the mounting pain in his chest and eyes, felt a surge of pride. Good for you, rookie. “I think we’ll have to pass on that,” he said. “I doubt if any of us could reach the kit, Natalie.”

“Just hang tight, Apollo-N.”

“Hey, bug-eyes,” Jones said to Priest. “I’ve got Jim’s pin in my pocket.”

“What pin?”

“His flight pin. The gold one. He’s no rookie now. I was going to give it to him after the burn. You want to reach over? He might like to see it.”

“Maybe later, Chuck. I think he’s sleeping.”

“Sure. Maybe later.”

Donnelly, listening to the clamor of voices on the loops, felt numb, unreal, as if all that radiation had gone sleeting through his own body.

The reentry was going to be a mess. The systems guys were hurrying through an improvised checklist, designed to get the Command Module configured to bring itself home. At the same time, the trajectory guys were figuring out where they could bring the bird down; it had to be near enough to a Navy vessel that could effect an emergency recovery and offer medical facilities…

He became aware that he’d said nothing, even in response to direct questions from the controllers, for — how long? A minute, maybe.

Christ, what a mess.

At the end of her shift York turned and looked for Mike, but his seat at the Booster console was already occupied by somebody else, some Marshall technician she didn’t know. He’d left, and she hadn’t realized — and nor, she thought, had he chosen to seek her out.

She considered asking where Mike had gone, but the new Booster guy was already immersed in his work.

Some of the controllers coming off shift were going to the Singing Wheel, a roadhouse near JSC that was a traditional hangout. They invited York, but she refused.

When she got out of JSC she drove quickly to the Portofino. Mike wasn’t there.

She prowled around the place, restless; she felt caged in by her few possessions, depressed by the images of Mars taped to the walls.

She took a bath and lay down on the double bed to try to sleep. It was past 11 P.M. But sleep wouldn’t come; she seemed to feel the pressure of the headset around her skull, see the numbers glowing on the screen before her, hear the voices whispering on loops in her head.

She tried the TV news; every channel was full of Apollo-N, of course, but there was no substantive information.

Ben’s up there.

Mike still hadn’t shown up.

She got dressed again, picked up her purse, and drove out to the Singing Wheel.

Some of the Indigo Team controllers were still there. The Wheel was usually a venue for bright, noisy conversations; it was a redbrick saloon crowded with dubious antiques, and the Mission Control staff went along to wind down after simulations or to celebrate milestones, like splashdowns. But tonight nobody was rowdy. They just sat around a cluster of tables, drinking and talking quietly. In that regard, York knew, the controllers had a lot in common with flight jocks, when they lost one of their number: their reaction was just to sit and talk about how and why it happened, and get drunk while doing so.

York stayed with them until the small hours.

When he finally got away from his desk Donnelly pulled his flight log toward him. He checked the clock on the wall to fill in the Mission Elapsed Time column, and signed himself out. His hands were trembling, and the signature was shaky.

He flipped back through the log. The last few pages were all but illegible.

Thursday, December 4, 1980

It was already after midnight when Bert Seger called Fay from his office.

He asked Fay to send him some fresh clothes. He made a mental note to arrange a security pass for her; JSC, and the Cape, had been sealed off as soon as news of the accident’s severity had started to break.

He asked after the kids and failed to hear the answers. Then he told Fay he loved her. He hung up.

It was evident he was going to be working out of Houston for a while, or maybe the Cape, if and when the Command Module was retrieved after reentry. Fred Michaels had already told him that Carter was ordering a Presidential Commission to look into the accident, to which he’d expect NASA to respond fully, and for which response he’d be holding Seger accountable.

Seger expected nothing else.

Sooner or later, he’d always known, an astronaut was going to die on him.

The systems they were building simply weren’t reliable enough to guarantee safety. Most of the astronaut corps were still test pilots; they knew the odds better than anyone else, and they accepted them. But the people on the ground were Seger’s greater concern. His ground crews would have to live with the knowledge that they might have done something differently. It won’t fail because of me. What happened when that transmuted to: It failed because of me?

The phone rang. It was Tim Josephson, who wanted to talk about nominees for NASA’s internal investigative panel, that would be set up to anticipate and assist the Presidential Commission.

Seger forced himself to focus on what Josephson was saying.

He and Josephson soon agreed on a core list, save for the astronaut representative.

“What about Natalie York?” Seger said. “She was capcom when the stack blew; she showed herself to be cool and analytical under pressure. And she’s a personal friend of Priest’s.”

Josephson vetoed that. “York is still a rookie. And besides, she’s attached to Mike Conlig. Had you forgotten that? How can she assess a case, maybe involving defective designs or suspect management practices, involving her boyfriend?”

They went through some more names, without success.

Josephson cut him off. “Bert, I’ll tell you who Fred wants. Joe Muldoon.”

“Muldoon? Are you crazy? Muldoon is a loose cannon.”

“Yeah. He’s been a loudmouth, but that maybe gives him a reputation for independence, which wouldn’t hurt right now. And he was a moonwalker. Fred has a lot of time for him.”

“Muldoon’s not available anyway. He’s in lunar orbit.”

“But he’s due to return in a week. That’s time enough…”

They argued around it for a while, but eventually Seger gave in.

He was uneasy about having someone as crass and loud as Muldoon in such a high-profile role. There was bound to be a lot of dirt to be dug out over this incident, particularly from Marshall; he shuddered when he imagined what kind of stuff Muldoon, hero astronaut, might start feeding the press.

He would have to keep a lid on all of that.

When Josephson hung up, it was 3 A.M.

Seger knew he needed sleep. He kept a fold-up bed in a closet for times like this.

He slipped off his shoes and got to his knees and tried to pray. But he couldn’t concentrate; his mind kept on making up lists of things he had to do, sorting them in priority order.

Strangely, the doubts he had felt earlier in the mission — doubts induced by the hostility of the antinuke protesters — had melted away, now that the worst had come to pass. He felt confident about his ability to cope with all of this. NASA’s ability, in fact. It was only some damned hardware fault, after all. A fault they could fix, once it had identified itself.

And NASA had survived problems like this before: he remembered that just two years after the Apollo 1 fire, Armstrong and Muldoon had landed on the Moon. And after Apollo 13 had blown up on the way to the Moon, not only had they gotten the astronauts back, but they’d gone on to fly, on 14, the most successful damned mission of them all.

He touched the gold crucifix at his lapel. He felt oddly light, almost giddy. They’d get through this; he had no doubt about it. With God’s help.

But it was difficult to pray. Somehow, he felt God was far away from him, that night.

Finally, at around 4 A.M., he slept. But he was up again and making his first calls of the day by seven.

Thursday, December 4, 1980

The pain was everywhere, unbelievably intense, a huge cellular agony that went on and on until he couldn’t bear it, and then went on some more. It felt as if every soft surface of Priest’s body, inside and out, had been coated with acid, as if he was rotting away from the outside in.

He still wore his pressure suit, and that was maybe just as well, because the pain was like one immense itch; he’d probably have rubbed himself raw if he could have gotten to his skin. But the suit had its disadvantages. His bowels had been loose for hours, and he’d thrown up inside the helmet, which was every aviator’s nightmare. But at least the floating globs of vomit had stopped drifting about in front of his face, and had stuck to something: the helmet’s visor, or maybe his hair and skin; he didn’t really care, as long as he could forget about the damn stuff.

He couldn’t seem to smell anything, and that was probably just as well.

He tried to turn his head to the left, to see Chuck and Jim. But he couldn’t move. Anyhow, they hadn’t answered the last time he’d spoken to them. They’d looked surprisingly composed, sealed up inside their pressure suits, as no doubt he did himself; all the vomit and shit and human pain was neatly confined to the inside of the suits, leaving the Command Module cabin antiseptic and efficient, save for the banks of glowing warning lights on the instrument panel.

Anyway, he didn’t really want to turn away from his window. That window was very, very important to him, because it framed the nightside of Earth. He could see the auroras: colored waves surging down from the poles, high layers of air glistening red and green under the impact of the particle wind from the sun. And he could see flashes, high in the atmosphere, and sometimes straight streaks of light that lingered in his retina for long seconds — meteors, specks of extraterrestrial dust plunging into the atmosphere…

Priest used to sit with Petey, when his son was small, gazing up at the meteor showers caroming into the roof of the air. And then, he was watching meteors burning up beneath him. This is one hell of a trip, Petey.

There were other lights in the night.

At the heart of South America, he saw a huge, dispersed glow: a fire, devouring trees at the center of the Amazon rain forest. And as Apollo-N sailed over deserts, he would spy oil and gas wells sparkling brightly, captive stars in all that darkness.

Cities stunned him with their night brightness. If there was cloud, it would soak up and diffuse the illumination, and he would see the shape of the city as a huge, amorphous bowl of light. And if the sky was clear, he seemed to be able to make out every detail as clearly as if he were taking a T-38 on a buzz just over the rooftops. He saw streets and highways like ribbons of light, yellow and orange, and tall buildings ablaze like boxes of diamonds. He saw bridges and out-of-town highways shining with the headlights of lines of cars. It was as if he could feel all that light, and heat, pouring up out of the atmosphere to him…

“We need you to help us, Ben. You’re the only one talking to us up there. Stay with it, now.”

“Yeah.” But it hurts, Natalie…

“I know it’s hard, Ben. Come on. Work with me. Can you reach the preburn checklist? It’s Velcroed over the—”

“Walk me through it, would you, Natalie.”

“Yes. Yes, sure. You just follow me. We’ll be fine. Okay. Thrust switches to normal.”

“Thrust switches normal.”

“Inject prevalves on.”

He had to reach for that one; the pain lay in great sheets across his back and arms. “Okay. Inject prevalves on.”

“One minute to the burn, Ben. Arm the translational controller.”

Priest pulled the handle over until the label ARMED showed clearly. “Armed.”

“Okay, now. Ullage.”

Priest pushed the translational controller; the Apollo-N shifted forward, the small kick of its reaction jets settling the propellants in the big Service Module SPS engine, in preparation for the main deorbit burn.

“Good. Very good, Ben. Thirty seconds,” York said. “Thrust-on enable, Ben.”

Priest unlocked the control and gave it a half turn. “Enabled.”

“Say again, Ben.”

“Enabled.” Even his throat hurt, damn it.

“Fifteen seconds. You’ve done it, Ben. Sit tight, now.”

Sure. And what if the SPS doesn’t fire? Christ knows what condition the Service Module is in after the goddamn NERVA blew up under it; we’ve been losing power and telemetry since the explosion… And they had to assume that the Command Module’s systems — the guidance electronics and the computers for instance — hadn’t been too badly damaged by NERVA; he didn’t think all those roentgens passing through could have done the ship’s brains a lot of good.

He braced himself for the kick in the back.

“Two, one. Fire.”

Nothing.

He shuddered, the tension in his aching muscles releasing in spasms.

“Okay,” York said calmly. “Direct delta-vee switch, Ben.”

“Direct delta-vee.” He reached for the manual fire switch and jerked it out and up, ignoring the pain in his arm.

There was a hiss, a rattly thrust which pushed him into his couch.

There was a green light before him. “Retrofire,” he whispered.

The pressure over his wounded back increased, and he longed for microgravity to return. But it didn’t, and he just had to lie there immersed in pain, enduring it.

“Copy the retrofire, Ben.” York’s voice was trembling. “We copy that. We’ll do the rest. Stay with me, now.”

The pain overwhelmed him, turning his thoughts to mud.

Beyond his window, Earth slid away from him. The big SPS was working, changing the ship’s trajectory.

“Be advised that old SPS is a damn fine engine, Houston,” he whispered. Even after having a nuke go off under it, the thing had still worked, faithfully bringing him home. How about that.

Then someone was talking to him. Maybe it was Natalie. He couldn’t even recognize her voice, through the fog of pain. That last checklist had just about used him up. Either this bird was going to fly him home or it wasn’t; there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it anymore.

He could see Natalie’s face before him: serious, bony, a little too long, with those big heavy eyebrows creased in concentration; he remembered her face above his, in the dark, that night after the Mars 9 landing.

He couldn’t visualize Karen at all.

What a mess he’d made of his life — the warm heart of it anyhow — by his negligence, his focus on his career, his indecision. And all for these few hours in space.

He’d change things when he got back down, and back to health. By God, I will.

The thrust sighed to silence, and he had a couple of minutes of blessed relief in the smooth balm of microgravity.

There was a muffled rattle, all around the base of the cabin. That would be the ring of pyrotechnic bolts at the base of the conical Command Module, firing under command from Houston, and casting off the messed-up Service Module.

He might be able to see the Service Module as it drifted away. His duty, probably, was to find a camera and photograph the damn thing. Sure. He couldn’t even close a fist; every time he tried, the pain in his hand was like an explosion of light.

There was something rising above the Earth’s atmosphere; it was golden brown, serene. The Moon. How about that. It was right slap in the middle of his window. He thought of Joe Muldoon and his crew up there with the Soviets; probably Muldoon would be following the progress of this reentry.

The couch kicked him, gently; fresh pain washed over his skin. That was the Command Module’s own small attitude controllers: Houston, or the onboard computer, was trying to keep the Command Module in its forty-mile-wide reentry corridor.

Through the pain, Priest felt a kind of security settle over him. As best he could tell, this was about the point in the reentry sequence when the automatics were supposed to kick in anyway. Apollo-N was back on its flight plan, for the first time since the NERVA core had blown.

“You got that pre-advisory data ready yet, Retro?”

“Not yet, Flight.”

It was getting damned late. Something is wrong. What isn’t he telling me?

Rolf Donnelly had thought that the most dangerous moment in this reentry would be when the Command Module dug deep into the atmosphere, when it would be totally reliant on its heat shield. And if that shield had been cracked during the explosion, the craft was going to split open and burn like a meteor. He couldn’t do anything about that; it was a question of waiting and hoping.

As yet they’d barely grazed the top of the atmosphere. But, then, totally out of the blue, he feared already he was about to lose the Command Module.

The controller called Retro, down in the Trench, was in charge of controlling the Command Module’s reentry angle. Just before the Service Module separation, Retro had been telling Donnelly that Apollo-N’s angle of attack was right in the middle of the entry corridor. It could hardly have been better, in fact. And that meant that the pre-advisory data Retro had prepared earlier was still valid. The pre-advisory data contained the final vector that would control the spacecraft’s degree of lift while it fought the atmosphere.

But Retro still had to feed the final pre-advisory to the Command Module’s onboard computers. And then, minutes before the atmosphere started to bite, Donnelly could hear Retro arguing with FIDO, the flight dynamics controller, who was passing Retro updated predictions on the spacecraft’s trajectory.

Retro blurted: “I don’t believe you, FIDO!”

Donnelly felt acid spurt into his stomach. “Clarify, Retro. You want to tell me what’s going on over there?”

“The trajectory is shallowing, Flight. We’re up by point three one degrees.”

Still within the corridor. But that was a heck of a lot of shallowing at this point. And if the shallowing continued, Retro was going to have to revise the pre-advisory data. “You have any idea what’s happening up there, Retro?”

“No idea, Flight.” There was tension in the voice, and Donnelly could see Retro peering over the shoulder of FIDO, next to him, trying to get the latest trajectory updates.

Was the trajectory going to shallow any more? That depended on the cause. If, say, one of the attitude thrusters was stuck open, the shallowing would continue. But if propellant or coolant was boiling off from some flaw in the hull, then the cause might dwindle and the shallowing stop.

The trouble was, nobody knew. None of them was sure about the extent of the damage the Command Module had suffered in the core rupture.

Donnelly, if he had to lose the crew, would prefer an undershoot, a burn-up. If the Command Module skipped off the atmosphere and was left in orbit, circling for months or years up there with a cargo of three radioactive corpses, the space program would be dead.

He took another poll of his controllers. None of them had any data to feed him on the trajectory. And besides, the telemetry was starting to get uncertain, as ionization built up around the Command Module.

It’s a gamble. I just have to leave it to Retro. Does he change his figures, or not?

Then Retro spoke again. “The rate of shallowing is slowing, Flight.”

“I need that pre-advisory data, Retro.”

“Yeah.” Again Donnelly could hear the tension in Retro’s voice. That controller was a very young man approaching the key moment in his life, a decision which would live with him forever.

Donnelly breathed a silent prayer; the only thing he couldn’t accept at that moment was indecision, freezing. Like that fucking asshole, Conlig.

“We’re still shallowing. I’ll stick with the pre-advisory data figures.”

“Say again, Retro.”

“I’ll stick with the original pre-advisory data. If the shallowing continues, we won’t tip up by more than another tenth of a degree.”

Suddenly Donnelly became aware that he’d been holding his breath; he let it out in one huge explosion of stale air. “Rog, Retro.”

There was a haze beyond his window, a soft, pink glow, like a sunrise. At first he thought it might be something to do with the thrusters. But then he realized the glow was ionized gas, atoms from the top layer of Earth’s atmosphere, broken apart by their impact with Apollo-N’s heat shield.

There was a soft pressure over his lower body — subtle, but enough to make his pain blaze anew. He thought he cried out. The cabin vibrated. Earth’s atmosphere was snatching at the Command Module, and Apollo-N was beginning to decelerate, hard.

Suddenly the pressure mounted, climbing fast, crushing him into the couch. He could feel his skin crumple and break open inside the pressure suit. He felt as if he was deliquescing, as if his body had no more substance than a piece of lousy fruit.

A cold white light flooded his window; misty, it glared into the cabin, drowning out the instrument lights.

The last moments before radio blackout seemed almost routine. As if this had been just another nominal mission, instead of the most dangerous and uncertain reentry since Apollo 13. The silence was broken only by occasional updates on the Command Module’s trajectory and attitude, and the disposition of the emergency recovery forces, and by the steady voice of capcom York as she tried to reach the crew.

You’d never know, Donnelly thought.

Then telemetry from Apollo-N was lost.

The MOCR fell silent. There was nothing to do but wait.

It was possible that any small crack in the heat shield would heal itself as the heat shield ablated in the heat of reentry. Possible. But it was another unknown. If, alternatively, the shield was damaged and failed, they would lose the bird anyway.

Priest, suffused by pain, lay on his back, buffeted, compressed, while the cabin rattled around him and fire lapped up from the base of the Command Module behind him.

The glowing chunks of heat shield falling upward past his window were big. Maybe something was wrong. Maybe the shield was failing.

If we’re really reentering. If I’m not hallucinating; if we’re not dead already.

Anyway, he couldn’t do a damn thing about it.

Ben Priest, falling to Earth butt-first, waited for sun heat to sear through the base of Apollo-N and engulf him. It would be a relief.

“Network, no instrumentation aircraft contact yet?”

“Not at this time, Flight.”

Four minutes passed. Five. That should have been enough time to reacquire after the blackout.

On the loops there was nothing but a hiss of static -

“ARIA 4 has acquisition of signal, Flight.”

“Rog,” Donnelly said, barely recognizing his own voice.

There was a stir around the MOCR, a shifting of tired shoulders, weary, tentative grins.

It was an odd feeling, a kind of half relief. Acquisition didn’t mean the crew was alive — and it was still possible that the electronics of the parachute system might be shot — but at least the Command Module wasn’t a cinder.

He heard York calling the crew, over and over, patient and plaintive.

The glow had died, fading out to an ordinary sky blue, and the G meter read 1.0, and he was falling toward the ocean at a thousand feet per second. The events of the splashdown ticked by, clear in his sharp, fragile thoughts.

There was a crack: that was the parachute cover coming off from the tip of the conical Command Module. And another sharp snap, as the three small drogue chutes were released. He saw bright streams of fabric beyond the window.

He took a kick in the back as the drogues plucked at the air, stabilizing the fall of the Command Module.

There was a loud hiss; that would be the vent opening to let the cabin’s pressure equalize with the air outside. Any second and -

There. Another bang. That had to be the mains, the three eighty-footers which would lower Apollo-N gently to the ocean’s surface.

As the mains filled with air, the cabin was jolted. Priest was rocked in his couch, and the pain climbed off the scale.

Through his window he could see a slab of blue sky, wisps of cloud.

There was a distant voice in his head, brisk, friendly, competent. “Apollo-N, Apollo-N, Air Boss 1, you have been reported on radar as southeast of your recovery ship at thirty miles. Apollo-N, Apollo-N. Welcome home, gentlemen; we’ll have you aboard in no time.”

Priest wanted to reply. But he was too far away, too sunk into the shell of his body.

The big screen at right front of the MOCR lit up with a TV picture of Apollo-N. Its three ringsail mains were safely deployed, three great, perfect canopies of red and white.

The cheering was so loud it drowned out Donnelly’s headset, and he had to call for quiet.

There was a lot of radio traffic, chattering remotely in his headset. “This is Recovery 2. I see the chutes. Level with me at precisely four thousand feet.” “Affirmative, we do have a capsule in sight…”

There was a checklist the crew was supposed to follow, Priest recalled vaguely. They should be closing that pressure relief valve, for instance, and setting the floodlights to postlanding, and getting set to cast off the mains after splashdown, so that the Command Module didn’t get dragged through the water.

But there was nobody to do it.

Priest tried to relax, to submit to the pain.

Then there was a huge impact, an astonishing eruption of agony throughout his battered body.

Water poured in through an open vent above him, showering Priest, so much of it that he thought the Command Module’s hull must have cracked open.

And the Command Module tipped. He could feel the roll, see the ocean wheel past his window.

When the windows dipped into the seawater, the cabin went dark. Priest found himself hanging there in his straps, with cabin trash raining down around him: bits of paper, urine bags, discarded washcloths. Stable 2, he thought. Upside down. Chuck will be furious. We screwed up. Nobody cut loose the mains.

He hung there like a bat in the inverted cabin, and the darkness, broken by just the Christmas-tree lights of the instrument panel, was kind of peaceful. In a moment the flotation bags would flip the Command Module upright, to the Stable 1 position.

He closed his eyes.

Sunday, December 7, 1980

The first image showed the five members of the crew in their Snoopy flight helmets, sitting on their T-cross chairs around the small table in Moonlab’s wardroom. Joe Muldoon sat at the center of the group, holding a piece of onionskin paper.

This is the crew of Moonlab, coming to you live from lunar orbit. The five of us — our guests Vladimir Viktorenko and Aleksandr Solovyov, and Phil Stone, Adam Bleeker, and myself — have spent the day following our flight program, and taking pictures, and maintaining the systems of our spacecraft…

Tim Josephson, sitting in his Washington office and watching the small TV on his desk, found he needed a conscious effort to keep breathing. Keep it bland, calm, unexceptionable. This will do, Muldoon.

In turn, the five astronauts spoke briefly about the work of the day — in the Telescope Mount, on the biomed machines, working on troublesome Moonlab equipment.

Interest in the previous telecasts from this mission — save for the original “handshake” — had been minimal. None of the major channels had carried live coverage, and the astronauts’ families had been forced to come into JSC to follow what was happening up there.

But all that changed as soon as the NERVA blew, and people grew morbidly fascinated anew by the spectacle of humans risking their fragile lives out there in space. It’s our biggest TV audience since Apollo 13, Josephson thought. Don’t foul it up, Joe.

…We’re a long way from home, and it’s hard not to be aware of it. If the Earth was the size of a basketball, say, then the Skylabs would be little toys orbiting an inch or two from the surface. But the Moon would be the size of a baseball, all of twenty feet away, and that’s where we are right now.

Our purpose is to do science out here. You may know we’re on an inclined orbit, so we’re seeing a lot more of the Moon than was possible during the old Apollo landing days. We’re carrying a whole range of cameras, both high-resolution and synoptic, and we have a laser altimeter and other nonimaging sensors, all of which has allowed us to map the whole surface of the Moon at a variety of scales.

And we’ve made some neat discoveries. For instance we’ve found a huge new impact crater on the far side of the Moon, fifteen hundred miles across — that’s nearly a quarter of the Moon’s circumference. I’m told that the Moon is turning out to be a much more interesting place than it was thought to be, even when Neil and I first walked on the surface.

In fact, just at the moment we’re sailing over the Sea of Tranquillity itself. If you look at the disk of the Moon from the Earth, that’s just to the right of center. So you can look up at us and see where we are, right now. And in our big telescopes, I can sometimes make out the glint of our abandoned LM descent stage.

Now, for all the people back on Earth at this difficult time, the crew of Moonlab has a message we would like to send to you.

Oh, Christ, Josephson thought. That sounds bad. What now?

Adam Bleeker drifted out of his seat toward the camera. He took the camera, his outstretched hand foreshortened to grotesque proportions, and swiveled it so that it was pointing out of the wardroom’s window. The image settled down; it was low quality and a little blurred, but Josephson could clearly see the blue crescent Earth, rising above the unraveling, monochrome desolation of the Moon.

The next voice was Phil Stone’s.

“Abide with me; fast falls the eventide;

“The darkness deepens; Lord, with me abide.

“When other helpers fail and comforts fee,

“Help of the helpless, o abide with me…”

Stone’s voice, made harsh by the radio link, was clipped, brisk, almost efficient. Next came the heavily accented tones of Solovyov, high and nervous.

“Swift to its close ebbs out life’s little day,

“Earth’s joys grow dim, its glories pass away;

“Change and decay in all around I see,

“O thou who changest not, abide with me…”

What in hell is Muldoon doing? When the Apollo 8 astronauts had done a Bible reading from lunar orbit, NASA had actually been sued by an atheist, for violating constitutional prohibitions against the establishment of religion. The Soviets have banned religion altogether! — and now here’s a cosmonaut reading out some old hymn from an American space station. My God. What a mess.

And yet — and yet…

Adam Bleeker read, simply and confidently.

“I need thy presence every passing hour;

“What but thy grace can foil the tempter’s power?

“Who like thyself my guide and stay can be?

“Through cloud and sunshine, o abide with me…”

And yet there was something beyond Josephson’s calculation. The old, simple words seemed electric, alive with meaning; it was impossible to forget who these men were, what they had achieved, where they were.

Vladimir Viktorenko’s gruff, heavy English took over.

“I fear no foe with thee at hand to bless;

“Ills have no weight, and tears no bitterness.

“Where is death’s sting? where, grave, thy victory?

“I triumph still, if thou abide with me…

Joe Muldoon read the last verse.

“Hold thou thy Cross before my closing eyes;

“Shine through the gloom, and point me to the skies;

“Heaven’s morning breaks, and Earth’s vain shadows flee;

“In life, in death, o Lord, abide with me.”

And from the crews of Apollo and Soyuz, we close with good night, good luck, and God bless all of you.

The image of Earth faded out.

Tim Josephson found his eyes welling over with tears. He bent over his paperwork, embarrassed, glad he was alone.

Monday, December 15, 1980

Bert Seger set up camp at Hangar “O” at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.

The hangar had been loaned to NASA by the USAF as a site to run the checking-out of the Apollo-N Command Module, since it had been recovered and brought to the Cape.

The Command Module itself was a victim, rather than a cause, of the accident, of course. But nevertheless the CM was the only portion of the Apollo-N stack that the investigators were going to be able to get their hands on, and it was expected that it would contain a lot of clues about how the accident had come about. So the spacecraft was going to have to be disassembled piece by piece.

When he first got to Hangar “O” Seger found things moving slowly. Nobody had touched anything in the interior of Apollo — except for the medical team on the recovery ship, who, in their radiationproof protective clothing, had removed the suited bodies of the astronauts — and the investigating teams at Canaveral were in a paralysis of indecision on how to proceed, for fear of fouling up this highly public operation.

So Seger made some calls, and looked up some old records, and radioed up to Muldoon a recommendation on how to proceed. Muldoon, still on his way home from the Moon, agreed.

The first task was to put together a cantilevered Lucite platform, hinged so that it could fit inside the hatch of the Command Module and then be unfolded to cover the interior of the craft. That way the investigators, hampered by radiationproof gear, could crawl on hands and knees around the interior, looking and photographing and disassembling, but without touching anything they didn’t need to.

Next Seger initiated the disciplines he wanted in the disassembly process itself.

For example he watched as a crew checklist — doused by seawater, pathetic and battered — was lifted out of the spacecraft. The disassembly team had prepared a TPS, a Test Preparation Sheet, for this, and every other action in the disassembly. The TPS detailed the physical action required, the part number of the checklist, its location. Before the checklist was touched the presiding engineer read out an instruction from the TPS. A Rockwell quality inspector moved into place to see, and a NASA inspector got ready. A photographer was called over. A Rockwell technician got carefully into the craft and then, using the specified procedure, took the checklist from its Velcro holder. The technician had to record the effort it took to get the checklist free, and any other anomalous observations he made.

The technician handed the checklist to the Rockwell quality inspector, who made sure that it was the right part and the right part number, recording his results on his copy of the TPS. The NASA inspector took the list, and he recorded his independent observations. The photographer took a picture of the part. The engineer put the list into a plastic bag, sealed it up, labeled it, and took it off to the appropriate repository.

If the engineer hadn’t been able to get the checklist out, because of some unanticipated obstacle, everything would have come to a halt while a revised TPS was sent to a review panel for approval of the modification.

…And on, and on.

And, meanwhile, everybody working on the hot Command Module was in a white radiation suit, and they had to shower and get tested for dosage every few hours.

It was painstaking, agonizing, intense work, made all the more difficult by the fact that only two or three workers could get into the Command Module at any one time. But Seger insisted on adhering to the procedure, and Muldoon supported him. It was the way they had done it on Apollo 1, after the fire, and it was the way they were going to do it on Apollo-N. It was just the kind of detailed, meticulous job Seger enjoyed getting his teeth into.

Sometimes he thought back over the incidents surrounding the flight. He recalled the hostile faces of the protesters on launch day. That still returned to haunt him. And he was worried by the way the internal communication of his organization had fallen apart, even within Mission Control, on the day. Seger as Program Office head had been keeping up the pressure, of budgets and time frames, on his people for years, and they’d seemed to be responding well; but he wondered if there were greater problems under the surface than he’d been perceiving. Hell, maybe he hadn’t wanted to perceive them.

Well, if there were such issues, he would address them. You had to be rational, to overcome doubt, in order to go forward, to achieve things. The crew had known the risks when they climbed aboard the NERVA ship in the first place. They’d paid the ultimate price. Seger owed it to their sacrifice to ensure that their lives hadn’t been wasted, that NASA learned from this and moved forward.

Away from the hangar, Seger spent a lot of time on the phone lines arguing with Fred Michaels and Tim Josephson and others about the future shape of the program.

It couldn’t be denied that the incident was going to set the program back. But Seger wanted to make up time by putting the all-up testing approach to work. The next flight, Seger argued, should be another manned Saturn/NERVA launch. Maybe they should even be more ambitious, such as by taking an S-NB out of Earth orbit and sending it around the Moon.

But he found Michaels opposing him. Michaels said if they weren’t forced to discontinue the nuclear program altogether, they should run a few more unmanned tests and then repeat the Apollo-N mission profile. If Apollo-N had been a useful mission (and if it wasn’t, why had they lost three men to it?) they owed it to the program and to the memory of the crew to do the mission.

Seger thought that was just an emotional argument.

They chewed it over for hours. Sometimes it bothered Seger that his personal position was so different from that of Michaels and Josephson. He had to take care not to get himself isolated. But, since the first shock of the accident had passed, he felt confident once more, in command; the accident was a finite thing, within the ability of human beings to comprehend and resolve, and they shouldn’t let this tragedy get in the way of their greater ambitions.

He tried to catnap in his office, but he couldn’t sleep.

By seven each morning he would be back in “O,” or on the phone to the people at the Cape and Houston and Marshall who were working around the clock on the various facets of the investigation.

At the end of the first week he flew out to Houston and spent the evening with his family. And then the next day he drove with Fay around Timber Cove and El Lago, visiting the wives and families of Jones, Priest, and Dana.

Then it was back to the Cape on Sunday, where he threw himself into the investigation once more.

He was working with an intensity that eclipsed any effort he had made in his life. It was the only way he knew to deal with the way he felt about the incident: to burn it out of his system with work, to make damn sure nothing like this happened again. And he spent a lot of his spare time in church, alone, praying and contemplating. Coming to terms with it all.

In a way he was enjoying it. As he came to grips with the issues he felt suffused with strength, courage, certainty. He prayed every day, and he felt that God was helping him.

Sometimes he needed a little help to get to sleep. A couple of pills or a drink or two. He allowed himself that. He was on high blower, he told his wife; he was like a T-38 on afterburner. Thursday, January 8, 1981

…On admission, Colonel Priest was nauseated, chilled, and agitated, with glassy eyes. His temperature was 104 degrees. He had been cut from his pressure suit. He suffered repeated vomiting, and swelling of the face, neck, and upper extremities. His arms were so swollen, in fact, that his blood pressure could not be taken with the normal cuff, and the nurses had to enlarge it.

He was periodically conscious, and sometimes coherent and logical, but I judged he was not strong enough to contribute to any debriefпngs concerning the accident.

Priest’s difficulty in speaking and lapses into incoherence made his relatives in attendance, and some of my staff, feel uncomfortable.

Twenty-four hours after admission I ordered four samples of bone marrow to be taken from Priest’s sternum and iliac bones (both front and rear). Priest was very patient during the proceedings. The samples were used to determine the whole body dose.

During the fourth and fifth days after admission, Priest was in great pain from injuries to the mucous membranes of the mouth, esophagus, and stomach. The mucous membranes were coming off in layers. Priest lost both sleep and appetite. Starting on the sixth day his right shin, on which the skin was disintegrating, began to swell and feel as if it was bursting; it then became rigid and painful.

On the seventh day, on account of a profound agranulocytosis — that is, a drop in the number of granular forms of leucocytes, responsible for immunity — I ordered an administration of 750 milliliters of bone marrow with blood.

Priest was then moved to a room sterilized with ultraviolet light. A period of intestinal syndrome began: bowel movements occurred between twenty-five and thirty times every twenty-four hours, containing blood and mucus; there was tenesmus, rumbling, and movement of fluids in the region of the caecum.

Owing to the severe lesions in the mouth and esophagus, Priest did not eat for several days. We provided nutrient fluids intravenously. In the meantime, soft blisters appeared on the perineum and buttocks, and the right shin was bluish purple, swollen, shiny, and smooth to the touch.

On the fourteenth day Colonel Priest began to lose his hair, in a curious manner: all the hair on the back of his head and body fell out. He grew weaker, and his lapses into unconsciousness or incoherence grew more prolonged.

On Friday January 2, the thirtieth day after the accident, Priest’s blood pressure suddenly dropped.

Fifty-seven hours later, Colonel Priest died; I recorded the immediate cause of death as acute myocardial dystrophy.

Under the microscope, it was quite impossible to see Priest’s heart tissue. The cell nuclei were a mass of torn fibers. It is accurate to say that Priest died directly from the radiation itself, and not from secondary biological changes. Gentlemen, it is impossible to save such patients, once the heart tissue has been destroyed.

Of the three members of Apollo-N’s crew, only Colonel Priest was found to be alive when the capsule was recovered after reentry. The radiation from the ruptured NERVA core had hit Colonel Priest from behind, doing most harm to his back, his calves, his perineum, and buttocks.

His mother, wife, and son were in attendance at his death.

Source: Report of the Presidential Commission on the Apollo-N Malfunction, Vol. I: Testimony of Dr. I.S. Kirby to the Medical Analysis Panel (extract) (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1981)

January 1981

One of the back rooms behind the MOCR had been turned into the primary site for investigating the telemetry data received from Apollo-N in the moments leading up to the accident. The walls were papered with strips displaying the readouts from every sensor they’d had the crew and craft wired up to.

And it was there that Natalie York had to sit and listen to voice tapes from the Command Module cabin, and read through and annotate typed transcripts.

Everyone was clinical, of course. Even scientific. The point was to gather data. Had the astronauts had any earlier indication that some problem was developing with the NERVA? Perhaps a close enough analysis of the tapes could tease that out, provide further clues about the cause.

And York, as capcom on the day, was the best placed to interpret their words.

She had to listen to the tapes over and over.

Every time York went through the tapes it was like reliving the whole incident. Did it fail because of me? If only Mike hadn’t frozen. If only she’d had a little more intuition about what was going on — if she could have warned Ben that the core was getting out of control, he might have overridden the automatics from the Command Module and shut the damn thing down…

Eventually York reached a point where she felt that if she had to listen to Ben’s weakening voice one more time, her heart was going to burst.

I guess our business will stay unfinished, Ben. Oh, God.

They hadn’t even let her see him before he died.

“Mom?”

“I’m coming out there, Natalie.”

“No, Mom.”

“Now, don’t try to stop me. I know you need me right now.”

“For what?”

“I know how much Ben meant to you.”

York was silent, for long moments; she even considered hanging up. “What do you know, exactly?”

“You aren’t very experienced in this stuff, are you, dear? When I saw you at that party, when you first moved into the Portofino… It was obvious, Natalie. Even if I hadn’t been your mother, I would have known. I only had to see the way you two behaved toward each other. The way you were careful not to pay each other attention. And the way, when you did come together somehow, it was as if you knew each other so well you could anticipate the other’s needs…”

Jesus. Well, I guess I’m not much of an actress. So does everybody know?

There was a rattle of keys at the door.

“I’ll have to go, Mom.”

“I’ll come out there.”

“No.”

“Ben Priest was married, wasn’t he? I read in—”

“Good-bye, Mom.” She put the phone down.

Mike Conlig stood in the middle of the room, looking at her. He carried a bag, with airline stickers that betrayed he’d been out to Marshall.

It was the first time she’d seen him since the accident. More than a month.

“You froze,” York said without hesitation. “You froze. What the hell were you thinking of, Mike?”

Mike put his bag down and started to pace about the apartment, his coat heavy. His hair straggled out of an unkempt ponytail, and his beard had grown down over his neck. “I didn’t freeze,” Conlig said.

“If you knew you were going to choke up like that, you should have just gotten out of that goddamn chair,” York said. She felt her throat tighten up, a pressure behind her eyes; but, by God, she was going to see this through without falling apart. “You had a responsibility! Those men in orbit were relying on you…”

He stood over her, his face twisted in disgust. “First time I see you in a month, and it’s straight on the attack. Happy fucking New Year to you, Natalie. So I killed them. Is that what you’re telling me?”

“But the damn NERVA wasn’t ready to fly. Was it?”

“Natalie, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Was it? You worked on the cooling systems for years, and in the end, with three men on board, the damn thing overheated and exploded—”

“I knew what I was doing, Natalie.”

“You knew you were letting the NERVA melt down?”

“No.” He shook his head. “No, damn it. Natalie, it’s the easiest thing in the world to abort. If I’d aborted, we’d have lost the mission—”

“But not three men.”

“ — and maybe,” he went on doggedly, “we’d never have known what went wrong. And we’d have had to risk throwing three more men up there to try all over again.” He pulled at his beard in quick, nervous gestures. “At the time — it happened so fast — I just wasn’t sure. I thought the situation might stabilize, that we might be able to salvage control of the NERVA. It might have happened that way, Natalie, and saved us risking more lives. As we’ll have to now. It’s a question of cost and benefit.”

She was appalled. “You did kill them.”

“But it isn’t like that.” He sounded querulous, hurt, misunderstood. “Look: NASA is too cautious. Every safety precaution increases the complexity and cost of the mission. With fewer safety precautions we could have reached the Moon a little sooner, done a lot more exploring, learned more, and” — defiantly — “yes, and created a martyr or two—”

“How can you talk about martyrs? If you hadn’t screwed up, Ben might be alive now. And the others, damn it.”

“Oh, sure. Precious Ben. That’s what this is all about, isn’t it?” He was angry.

“What are you saying?”

He snorted. “I know all about you and Ben Fucking Priest, Natalie. Come on. I’ve known for years.”

You, too? She considered protesting, telling him he was mistaken. But Ben was dead. It would be beneath her.

He shook his head. “I don’t want to hear when, or how, or why. I don’t give a damn. And you know what? Right now, I don’t know if I ever did.”

She watched him pace around the room. He was like a stranger, an alien, there in her apartment. “No. You never did give a damn, did you? I can’t believe—”

“What?”

“I can’t believe I ever thought I loved you.”

That took him aback for a moment, and he looked at her; but then his face resumed its mask of anger. “Yeah, well, you can believe what you like.”

“How can you rake up all of this now? Ben’s dead, for God’s sake.”

“I know he’s dead!” he shouted. “As dead as my fucking career!”

“Is that all you care about?”

His anger was consuming him. “Yeah. Yeah, maybe it is. That and the fact that this will probably kill off the nuke program.”

“Get out,” York said.

“Omelets and eggs, Natalie! You don’t get anywhere without taking a few risks! And with what we learned from this flight — if we’re allowed to fly again — we’ll get it right next time.” Under the anger in his voice, she thought she heard vulnerability, still, a plea for understanding. “Christ, Natalie, we could be on Mars by now. But fucking NASA—”

She turned away from him. “Get out. Go, Mike.”

She didn’t watch him leave.

Mike was right, in a way. He spoke a truth, as perceived by many within NASA. If only public sentiment would get out of the way, and let us move as fast as we know we can…

Lower reliability would mean lower development costs, and a faster schedule.

It was an insidious, strangely seductive argument.

The machine is everything! Oh, we have to put men inside those machines, and we have a few problems with that, and some of them are driven crazy by their experiences, and some of them die, in squalid, painful, unheroic ways — as dear Ben had died, decaying in a hospital bed, a month after his flight — but it’s worth it for the goal.

And besides, we’re never short of volunteers.

What made it worse was that NASA — a child of the Cold War — never told the truth about a situation if it didn’t have to. And certainly not if the truth damaged PR. So much was hidden behind the glamour: the dangers, the awful shitty deaths, the almost psychotic desire by some, engineers and crew, to keep on flying.

It isn’t just Mike. There isn’t even a “them” to blame for this.

All the astronauts were implicated: all of those who would volunteer for the most dangerous mission, and go along with the cover-ups. Even Ben himself. He’d worked on NERVA; he must have had a good idea of its lack of flight readiness.

Even me, she admitted at last. Even I am guilty. I agonize about compromising my scientific principles by being here. But it’s more than that.

By being in the program, by giving it my tacit support, I killed Ben, as surely as that failed NERVA.

She sat in a chair and curled over on herself, tucking her arms into her belly, letting her head drop to her knees.

And now I have to decide. Do I get out? Maybe start shrieking the truth to the world?

Or will it make Ben’s death mean something, if I stay?

Something inside her, cold and hard and selfish, pointed out that it was Ben who had died, not her. And Mars was still there, waiting for her.

Maybe she was just rationalizing; maybe she was just trying to find a way to justify staying in the program.

And maybe she’d thrown out Mike and his talk of martyrs so angrily because — somewhere inside her — there was a part of her own soul that agreed with his brutal analysis.

The next day she had the locks changed. She packed up Mike’s stuff and sent it to Huntsville. And she made the Portofino apartment available for sublet.

Tuesday, January 20, 1981

When the first draft of NASA’s internal report landed on his desk, Michaels called a meeting of Seger, Muldoon, and Udet in his office in Washington.

The three of them sat in a row on the other side of his desk. Muldoon was tense, angry, uncomfortable; Seger seemed eager, energetic, somehow too bright; and Udet was reserved, watching Michaels and the others through his pale blue eyes.

Michaels picked up the draft report and dropped it on his desk. “I’ve tried to read this. I know I’m going to have to answer for it line by line. Gentlemen, I want you to walk me through this fucking blowout. Step by step, over and again, until I understand. You got that? Hans, you want to lead?”

Udet nodded crisply. “Of course, Fred. The malfunction occurred at the time at which we were preparing the S-NB for its restart burn. I will remind you that the rocket had functioned flawlessly during its first burn—”

“I remember.”

“The moderators were adjusted to lift the temperature of the core to its working range of three thousand degrees. The turbopumps were started, and hydrogen began to flow through the cooling jackets and the core. We registered thrust rising to its nominal levels; the cabin transcript indicates the crew was aware of this. Then—”

“And then,” Joe Muldoon observed drily, “we hit a glitch.”

The flow of liquid hydrogen into the coolant jackets became intermittent, Udet said. It turned out later that a flaw was developing in the piping carrying the hydrogen to the engine.

Michaels asked, “Shouldn’t you have shut down the core as soon as that happened?”

“Yeah, that’s standard procedure,” Muldoon put in. “Without coolant, the core is going to overheat.”

“We had a split second to make the decision,” Udet said. “That is all. If we had allowed emergency shutdown immediately, we might have lost the engine altogether, and the mission would have been scrubbed. And perhaps for nothing, if the flow problems had rectified themselves. We were trying to keep options open. The report describes all this.”

“All right, Hans. Go on.”

“We adjusted the moderators to reduce the temperature in the core, short of shutting it down. But we could not reach the target temperature—”

Muldoon said, “And there you have your first basic design flaw, Fred.”

Both Udet and Seger leaned forward to protest, but Michaels waved them silent.

“We only had one control system — the reactor moderator — and so only one shutdown option. When that failed, we had no way to stop the runaway temperature climb.”

Michaels nodded. “Hans?”

Udet spread his hands. “We must balance reliability against weight, Fred. This has been the dilemma of all spaceflight: to carry an additional redundant system, or to add value elsewhere? In our opinion, in this case, the moderator system was sufficiently reliable to justify flying without the weight penalty of a backup.”

“Bert? You want to comment?”

Seger, his eyes brilliant, shrugged his narrow shoulders. “We made the best call we could; we did all the tests. We got it wrong. Next time we fly a NERVA, we’ll fix it.”

These things happen. Not an answer to satisfy the Presidential Commission, Michaels thought sourly.

“Go on, Hans.”

“By now,” Udet said, “the crew was aware that the thrust had died, after that first shove. We were only a few seconds after the first glitch in the flow. Now the hydrogen flow increased, markedly,” Udet continued. “It was like a spurt, from the faulty piping. The hydrogen passed its nominal flow rate and effectively flooded the core. We withdrew the moderator further—”

“And this is another point at which the standard procedure said shutdown,” Muldoon said harshly. “The moderators’ control margin was too low now; we didn’t have full control of the core. But again, we overrode the automatics.”

“We tried to save the mission,” Udet said.

“All right. Let’s stick to the facts for now; we can justify ourselves later. What next?”

“Now the flow of coolant into the core stopped altogether,” Udet said. “Perhaps at this point the piping failed completely.”

“This is the key moment, Fred,” Muldoon said. “You have a reactor that’s already unstable. The hydrogen flood has made the core isothermal — that is, at the same temperature throughout — so any changes happen all over the core, simultaneously. And the coolant flow has stopped; the core’s main heat sink, the flow of hydrogen through the jackets, has gone.”

“So it starts to heat up.”

“So it starts to heat up. Uniformly. And a lot faster than before.”

Udet said, “We tried to shut down. But the moderator was too far out of the core to have any immediate effect. The hydrogen in the core and the jacket boiled quickly and started to expand…”

“And now you’ve got a runaway,” Muldoon continued. “Because the reactor was designed with a positive temperature coefficient.”

Michaels sighed and locked his hands behind his head. “Just pretend I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Muldoon grinned tightly. “I know. It took me a while to figure this stuff out. Look: suppose the temperature of your core rises. And suppose that the core is designed so that when it heats up, the reactivity drops — that is, the reaction rate automatically falls. That’s what’s meant by a ‘negative temperature coefficient.’ In that case you have a negative feedback loop, and your reaction falls off, and the temperature is damped down.”

“Okay. It’s kind of self-correcting.”

“That’s right; the whole thing is stable. That’s how they design civilian reactors. But in the case of NERVA, that coefficient was positive, at least for some of the temperature range. So when the temperature went up, the reactivity went up, too—”

“And the rate of fission increased, leading to a further temperature rise.”

“And so on. Yes.”

Michaels glared at Udet. “I can see the fucking headlines now, Hans. Why the hell did we fly an unstable reactor?”

Udet sat forward, his face pale, a muscle in his neck rope-taut with anger. “You must understand that we are not building a reactor to supply domestic electricity, here. We are not heating coffeepots. NERVA 2 is a high-performance booster, a semiexperimental flight model. Stability is not always the condition we require.”

Michaels frowned. And you just hate having to answer these asshole questions, don’t you, Hans? “Why do we need instability? What do you mean?”

Seger put in, “It’s like a high-performance aircraft, Fred. A ship that’s too stable will wallow like a sow. So you might design for instability. If a bird’s unstable, it can flip quickly from one mode to another; if you can control that, you’ve gained a lot of maneuverability”

“But that’s a big if, Bert. And evidently, when it got to the wire, we couldn’t control it. Hans, why didn’t you beef up the control system to cover for this?”

Udet punctuated his words by thumping the edge of his hand on Michaels’s desk. “Because — of — unacceptable — weight — penalties.”

Michaels dreaded having to put this man in front of the commission. “Let’s move on. What next?”

Udet said, “Events unfolded rapidly. The power output began to rise exponentially, doubling in a fraction of a second. The fuel pellets — which are uranium carbide coated with pyrolytic carbon — shattered from the thermal shock of the sudden power rise. The flow passages within the core melted. The moderator systems became inoperative. There was a hydrogen explosion, which ruptured the pressure shell and the biological shield—”

“All right.” Michaels found himself shuddering. “We know the rest.” Jesus. What a mess. “So the whole damn thing was caused by faulty hydrogen pipelines.”

Bert Seger nodded, and then he startled Michaels by saying: “It’s actually not as bad a scenario as you might have feared.”

“Not as bad? What the hell are you talking about, Bert?”

“The glitches in the hydrogen flow came from a simple component failure. What you had was ruptures in a six-foot length of stainless-steel fuel line, five-eighths of an inch in diameter, carrying liquid hydrogen from the tank into the nuclear engine. That’s all. So it’s easy to fix.”

“Why did the damn pipe rupture?”

“Well, we were flying with a new innovation,” Seger said, “that was supposed to guard against the effects of vibration. Each length of the pipeline had two vibration-absorbing ‘bellows’ sections in it, with wire-braid shielding on the outside. When the new line was put through vibration tests on the ground, it worked perfectly.”

“So how come—”

Udet said, “It turned out that in the atmosphere, the liquid hydrogen running through the pipe caused ice to gather on the braided shield. And that altered the characteristics of the pipe, enough to enable it to dampen out the most severe vibrations in the bellows during our testing.”

“Oh,” Michaels said. “But in the vacuum, no ice could form.”

“And those little bellows sang like a rattlesnake,” Joe Muldoon said. “When the Saturn first stage started its pogoing, the bellows couldn’t handle it. They just fell apart.”

Michaels asked Udet, “But how come you didn’t pick up the ice thing when you ran vacuum ground tests on the bellows?”

Udet faced Michaels squarely; he looked calm, somehow confident. “We did not run vacuum tests on this component. We did not anticipate the necessity.”

Michaels held his gaze for long seconds, but nothing more was forthcoming: no more data, no justification, no apology. “Well, I will be dipped in shit. Joe?”

Muldoon leaned over the desk and tapped the report. “This is where we show ourselves as culpable, Fred. Those goddamn bellows were Criticality One components: that is, their failure was liable to cause the loss of the spacecraft. But we didn’t test them out under true flight conditions. And, what’s worse, we’ve now dug out evidence of bellows problems on the S-NB’s previous unmanned test flight, although in that case we didn’t lose the mission.”

I’m dead meat, Michaels thought.

They could have anticipated the fault, and that was always deadly. And, it was always the way, some obscure little asshole technician somewhere at Marshall or the Cape would have written a report predicting precisely the failure they’d suffered, a report which no doubt had been laughed off and suppressed by NASA senior management, a report which was no doubt falling into the hands of some congressman even then…

“Culpable. Jesus. How I hate that word.”

Michaels got to his feet. He crossed to his window and folded his hands behind his back as he stared out over Washington. The light was fading from the sky, softened and stained by smog.

“I don’t want to minimize the impact of this, gentlemen. Quite apart from losing the crew, this is a genuine catastrophe. I have the ecology lobby around the world jumping up and down on my back. We’ve even been criticized for bringing a radioactive Command Module back into the atmosphere. There was strong opposition to flying nuclear materials into space even before the flight. And now the Russians have a fucking Soyuz up there taking pictures of the out-of-control glowing radioactive core we’ve abandoned in orbit.

“You’re right, Joe; there’s no doubt in my mind — and there won’t be in the minds of public, Congress, and White House — that we’re culpable. And now we have to put our house in order, and be seen to be doing it.

“All right, gentlemen. Your recommendations as to what we do next?”

Seger was the first to speak. “The main recommendation is not to panic here, Fred. I hear what you say; this accident we’ve suffered is unacceptable. There’s no doubt about that. But the problems are straightforward and limited in scope. We have to get S-NB flying again, as soon as possible, with men aboard, and push on for Mars. We can’t lose our nerve. That’s the message you have to take back to the Hill, Fred.”

More bland generalities, Michaels thought, delivered in Seger’s weird, intense, gung-ho style.

“Hans?”

Udet sighed. “Bert is right. We must repair our NERVA program and move on. We have no other option, if we are to reach Mars. It is as simple, and as dramatic, as that.”

“Well, hell, I disagree,” Muldoon said harshly. “With both of you. I think that if they let us keep on flying at all after this fuck-up, we’re going to have to do a sweeping review of the whole system, spacecraft, booster stages, management procedures. Everything.”

“And if you do that,” Seger said hotly, “you risk throwing away everything. You’ll come out of that process with an immature system, overdesigned and carrying too many changes, which will hit us with a host of problems we’ve not even thought of yet.” He turned his glassy stare on Michaels again. “Look, Fred, this is a lousy business, and I wish it hadn’t happened, and I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to come to terms with this: what I did wrong, what I could have done differently to avoid this, and all the rest of it. And I’ll do all in my power to avert such an accident in future. But at the end of the day, we’re flying experimental craft here. Pilots die flying experimental craft; they always have. You lose crew. And that’s a truth we’ve got to learn to live with.”

Michaels grunted. The trouble is, I don’t think we’re going to be allowed to live with it.

When Udet, Seger, and Muldoon had gone, he stood by his window for a long time.

He couldn’t imagine that the manned program would be shut down altogether. That would have such a devastating impact on the American aerospace industry that it was surely politically unthinkable.

But it seemed highly likely to him, almost certain in fact, that the NERVA was going to be grounded.

And without NERVA, how the hell were they going to get to Mars, in the eighties or any other decade? Were they going to be reduced to pottering around in low Earth orbit?

…Maybe he had more immediate problems.

Seger had sounded like he was fraying at the edges. That disturbed Michaels. Both houses of Congress were going to convene their own hearings on the accident, just as soon as the Presidential Commission reported. Michaels had already had a few clues as to the tone of those hearings; they would be intent on charging NASA’s engineers — meaning Seger, primarily — with criminal negligence.

But Michaels had heard, from Tim Josephson and others, that Seger was working a sixteen-hour day, sleeping for three or four hours, and spending his spare time on his knees in some church. It was as if Seger was using physical exhaustion, and an immersion in his religion, like a drug. But even that wasn’t always enough, and — so Michaels had heard — Seger was using Seconals and scotches to knock himself out.

Michaels was worried that Seger might be under too much stress to testify. And besides, if Seger started to come out with his line about limited damage and everything’s under control, they’d all sound like such complacent bastards that the congressmen would cut out their livers.

He poured himself a drink. Hell. Were we, after all, going too far, too fast?

He couldn’t get the glassy, feverish look in Bert Seger’s eyes out of his mind.

He knew he had a decision to make.

Wednesday, January 21, 1981

The day after the meeting in Washington, Fred Michaels called up Seger in Houston.

He leaned on Seger to take some leave.

Seger was reluctant; he felt fit and energetic, and he was getting on top of the issues coming out of the accident.

They finished the call without resolving the issue.

Later that day, Tim Josephson, who’d been working out of Houston since the disaster, went to see Seger in his office.

“Look, Bert, we want you to take an extended leave.”

“But I’ve discussed this with Fred.”

“So have I. And I’ve already drafted an announcement, to go out tomorrow.”

Seger was furious. “In that case, you can announce my resignation instead.”

Josephson met his stare, steadily, analytical. “Bert, you’re overstressed. You’re not thinking straight.”

“Oh, is that so? How the hell do you know that? What are you, a doctor that you can diagnose me?” He stared into Josephson’s thin, intelligent face. “What’s going on here, Tim? Overstressed, what the hell is that? I think you’re acting on rumors, and half-truths, and things you don’t understand.”

“Really?” Josephson asked drily.

“Really. Listen, me and my guys down here are doing fine. We’re working through the issues with the guys in Huntsville. With the grace of God, we’re going to get through this. In spite of whatever you’re hearing, I’m not going into shock.”

“It’s not like that, Bert. Nobody wants—”

“Listen, Tim. If you want to fix up some kind of psychiatric hearing, then you do it; I’ll abide by the decision of any competent psychiatrist. If he thinks I need R R, then I’ll discuss it with you. But I’m not having you, or Fred Michaels, or any other amateur, diagnosing my psyche. Now, you got that?”

Josephson seemed to think it over. Then he nodded, his face expressionless, and left the office.

Seger got on with his work; he hoped he’d heard the end of that.

But a little later Josephson called back and said that he’d arranged a hearing with two psychiatrists in the Houston Medical Center for that very evening.

Seger spent three hours with the psychiatrists, talking things over. They fed back their conclusions to him quickly.

He was obviously under a strain, they said, but he didn’t have a psychosis. There was no danger that Seger was going to fall apart under further pressure.

Seger went back to his office, elated. He called Tim Josephson and told him he should cancel his press release. Then he got to his knees, in his darkened office, and prayed his thanks.

He felt like laughing; if he was truthful, he felt as if he had fooled the psychiatrists.

The next day Fred Michaels phoned. Michaels began to describe a new job to him, a more senior position in the Office of Manned Spaceflight.

“You’ve spent long enough at the detail level, Bert, and you’ve done a damned fine job. But now we’re going to need help steering NASA through the next few years, which will be as hard as any we’ve faced before. I want you to move up to the policy level. I want you to get to know the Cabinet people; I can arrange the introductions for you. It’s a job on the mountaintop, Bert.”

Yeah. The mountaintop, in Washington.

Seger hesitated. “You’re making it sound good, Fred.” But I know what this is all about. “Fred, I’ll say what I believe, one more time: whether you push me out of your way or not, it’s going to be a mistake to go back into our systems now and make sweeping changes. We have to make fixes, obviously, but they should be straightforward and limited; if we go beyond that, we risk coming out with a less mature system, with new problems hiding from us…”

“Look, Seger, I’m tired of hearing that. I can’t agree with you. I just don’t see it that way, and I don’t think that’s the prevailing view inside NASA. And I know for sure that’s not how they see it up on the Hill.”

“What are you saying, Fred? I’ve seen your tame shrinks, and—”

“I know.”

“I’m no psychotic, Fred.”

“I know that,” Michaels said gruffly. “And I’m glad for you. But that isn’t really the question.”

“Then what is?”

“Whether you’re the right man to continue leading the program, right now.”

Seger picked up a paper clip from his desk and began to fold and unfold it with his free hand.

Friday, January 30, 1981

Michaels found himself shivering, despite his topcoat. The sky was overcast, the clouds impossibly low. Thank Christ this is the last.

The mourners stood in rows: there was Jim Dana’s grieving family, with poor, beat-up old Gregory Dana, the dreamer from Langley, standing in the front row with his arms around his wife and his widowed daughter-in-law; there were the usual ranks of NASA managers and engineers, of congressmen and senators; and there was the Vice President of the United States himself. And right at the front there was a row of astronauts, standing straight and tall, saluting their fallen comrade: Muldoon, York, Gershon, Stone, Bleeker, others — men who had flown the first Mercurys, men who had once walked on the Moon, men — and women — who might walk on Mars. And there was Vladimir Viktorenko, who had flown with Joe Muldoon to lunar orbit, and who Muldoon had insisted should be there — the Afghanistan situation or not — to represent that other astronaut corps, from the other side of the world.

There was a volley of rifle shots, a slow litany from a bugler. The ceremony dragged on, poignant and exquisitely painful.

There was a roar that seemed to shake the ground. Michaels looked up into the sky, startled.

Four Air Force T-38s were coming in from the southwest, in a close diamond formation, no more than five hundred feet from the ground. The planes gleamed white against the lead gray sky. As the formation roared overhead, their jets screaming, the wingman veered out of the diamond and climbed vertically, disappearing into the clouds in a couple of seconds.

The other three T-38s carried on toward the north, their afterburners glowing.

Michaels recognized the formation. The missing man. He could see the astronauts at the graveside, the row of them, rookies and veterans alike, all with their heads turned up to the jets.

As the ceremony broke up, Michaels worked his way through the milling, black-coated throng, toward Joe Muldoon.

“Joe, I need to speak to you. I have an assignment for you.”

Muldoon just glared back at him. He towered over Michaels, rigid, intimidating. His muscles were visible under his uniform, his face a scowling mask. Michaels could see a righteous, terrible anger burning in there.

Michaels drew a deep breath. It was that anger he wanted to tap into. “I want you to keep this to yourself for now. I’m transferring Bert Seger. I’m bumping him further up in the Program Office. I’ve found him a job here in Washington.”

“He won’t accept it.”

“Well, he’s going to have to accept it. Hell, man, you saw how he was, in that meeting with Udet. I’ve had to take him out of the line.”

Muldoon shook his head. “Bert worked damned hard. And none of it was his fault—”

“I’m not interested in allocating blame,” Michaels said firmly. “Let them do that up on the Hill. All I’m concerned about is taking the program forward, from here on in to the end zone. And I don’t think Bert Seger is the right man to do that anymore.”

“So who is?”

“You.”

Muldoon looked at him with his mouth open and his eyes round blue disks, a caricature of amazement. “Me? You’re kidding. I’m no manager. I’m the asshole with the big mouth you nearly grounded, remember.”

“Yes, you are an asshole sometimes,” Michaels said testily. “But I trust your judgment, over the things that matter. You’re a moonwalker, for God’s sake. And you handled the Moonlab mission well. That broadcast—”

“That was a stunt.”

“Don’t decry yourself. Down here, that broadcast was like a catharsis. I think it helped a lot of people, in NASA and beyond, come to terms with what happened. And you’ve done a good job with the post-accident review.” He sighed. “Look, Joe, I need you because we’re in a damned hole. I still don’t know which way Reagan is going to swing. But I know the accident looks bad, very bad, up on the Hill. I think it’s highly likely we won’t be allowed to proceed with the nuclear rocket program. And the MEM isn’t even a bucket of bolts yet; it was months behind schedule even before this mess… What I need is someone impatient, tough, charismatic — you, Joe — to get hold of the program and pull the damned thing out of Marshall, and the contractors, and all the rest, and make it happen.”

Muldoon looked across the cemetery. “Let me get something clear,” he said quietly. “If I take this job, I won’t be able to remain on the active roster.”

Michaels took a breath. “No. There’s no way you could maintain both schedules.”

“So if I take this job, to get your ass out of a sling, I pass up on my chance of going to Mars.”

“I’m not going to pretend that’s not true, Joe. But if you don’t take the job, I think the chances are nobody will be going to Mars, not in my lifetime or yours.”

Muldoon’s mouth worked. “It’s one hell of a price you’re asking me to pay.”

“I know it.”

“And it’s not exactly orderly, Fred,” Muldoon said. “How are all those engineers and managers and space cadets going to feel when you put a dumb jock like me at the top of the structure chart?”

Michaels smiled. “Well, back in the Apollo days managers used to bounce around the organigram without paying too much attention to that kind of thing. Maybe we need that spirit back again. I don’t think you ought to worry about the color of the carpet on the floor, Joe. And if anyone does start bothering you about ranks and status — well, you just come to me.”

“Hell, no,” Muldoon said. “If any paper-pusher with his thumbs up his ass tries to fuck me over—”

“Does that mean you’re taking the job?”

“It means I’ll think about it. You’re a bastard, Michaels.”

They began to walk toward their waiting cars.

Tuesday, February 3, 1981

The wind across the steppe pierced the layers of York’s pressure suit. She tried walking around, to keep warm. But the Soviet-design suit, wired for internal strength, resisted her motion, and she soon felt herself tiring; and the “appendix,” the bunched-up opening at the front of the suit, irritated her chest.

Beside her Ralph Gershon was huddled over on himself. His head was tucked into the collar of his suit, his helmet was under his arm. Gershon’s eyes were glazed. He had a knack, York had observed, of retreating into some private cosmos when the outside world got sufficiently shitty. Well, just now that was a knack she envied.

The mock-up of the Soyuz Command Module sat squat on the Kazakh plain. A handful of trucks — battered, unpainted — stood around the capsule. Beside the Soyuz was the flatbed truck which had carried the capsule dummy out there. Fifty yards beyond that stood a Soviet Army helicopter, its rotors turning slowly. Cables trailed from the Command Module, coiling across the dust of the steppe, leading to winches attached to the chopper.

There was a smell of wormwood grass: thin, almost lost on the cold air. The ground was baked to a yellowish, brick-hard glaze, with just a few tufts of grass. In some places patches of snow lingered. Vladimir Viktorenko had told her that in the early spring, the steppe would be covered in flowers. York found it hard to believe.

She didn’t know what had caused the latest delay. Technicians stood around, showing no apparent concern for timetables or schedules. That seemed to be the way in the Soviet Union, even around the space program.

York tried to be tolerant, but she found it hard. She didn’t feel she had the time to hang around on a steppe with a bunch of ragged-assed Soviets. Let’s get on with this. Get it over.

Vladimir Viktorenko came stalking up to her, compact and purposeful, his flight helmet fixed over his head. “So,” he said, and he clapped her on the shoulder. She was braced for the blow, and managed not to stumble. “You are ready for your ride? And you, Ralph?”

Gershon lifted his head out of his suit neck, like a turtle poking out of its shell.

York stared up at the wall of the Command Module, her apprehension growing. “We’ve had no preparation for this. Where’s the hatch? At the top of the Soyuz?”

“Yes, it is at the top. I will climb in first.” He tapped her shoulder, then Gershon’s. “Then you, then you. You will see. It will be easy.”

The technicians were snickering. York felt her resentment build.

“So, Vladimir, why are these guys of yours laughing at me?”

He raised his eyebrows. “Vlad-im-ir,” he said, accenting the second syllable. “Oh, it is nothing.”

“Like hell it is.” She felt anger surge in her. She’d been burning up with it since Apollo-N, lashing out at anything that came in her way. She suspected it was one reason she’d been sent over there, despite her involvement in the post-accident investigations. To keep her out of the way. To cool her off, on the steppe.

Well, it wasn’t working.

She stalked over to one of the techs, a burly guy in a shirt, grease-stained, that strained at his ample belly. “What’s so funny? Huh?”

Viktorenko came to her side and took her elbow. “You must be calm, my dear.”

She shook his hand off. “Oh, sure. Just as soon as these ill-mannered assholes—”

“No,” he said, and there was some steel in his voice.

“Why the hell not?”

“Soy-uz.” He pronounced the word the way she had, as an American-eared best guess, with the syllables rhyming with “boy” and “fuzz.” Even to York’s ears it sounded clumsy. “That is what is so amusing. I suspect your English transliterations are at fault,” he said smoothly. “That ‘y’ is perhaps deceptive. You see, in the standard orthography, ‘yu’ stands for a specific Cyrillic letter, and so the ‘y’ and ‘u’ should not be split. The syllables are So-yuz, you see. Now. Since the stress is on the second syllable, we would allow the unstressed ‘o’ of ‘So’ to soften into a weaker ‘ah.’ And then ‘yuz’ has a long ‘u,’ like ‘shoe.’ Sah-yooz. But, of course, in speaking, final consonants tend to drift to the unvoiced. One must soften the ‘z’ to ‘s.’ So: Sah-yooss Sah-yooss.”

She tried it a couple of times, and drew an ironic hand-clap from the big, burly tech.

“Better,” Viktorenko said. “Now, you see, you have taken the trouble, here in my country, to pronounce correctly one of the three or four words of Russian with which one could reasonably expect an American astronaut to be familiar.”

She was aware of the tech watching her, a leer in his eyes. She glared back. These Russians were even more full of macho bull than their American counterparts.

But then, some of that might be to do with the lousy international situation. She tried to imagine what these men must feel about their countrymen fighting and dying in Afghanistan — and what went through their heads when they looked at her, a vulnerable, isolated American, and remembered the aggressive anti-Soviet rhetoric that had been emanating from the White House from the day Reagan had walked in. They’d be entitled to despise her, she supposed.

Her anger dissipated. Hell. Maybe I deserve it.

She shivered, and tried not to think about it.

A rope ladder came snaking down out of the Soyuz toward the ground.

She knelt at the summit of the Command Module, with the heavy hand of a tech on her shoulder to steady her. The Command Module was like the headlight of some huge car, upended on this plain, its green paint a striking contrast with the washed-out brown of the soil. From up there the steppe looked immense, intimidating, deserted save for the small group around the capsule; the sky was iron-gray, a lid clamped tight over the land.

In the remote distance she spotted a silvery glint that might have been water. Some godforsaken landlocked salt lake.

Viktorenko clambered into the capsule first. He told York to give him a couple of minutes before following; he said he had to check the bolts holding the seats in place. As far as she could tell he was serious.

At last Viktorenko poked his head out of the hatch and waved her in. The technician pulled off her outer boots, and the antiscratch cover she had worn over her helmet.

The cabin was laid out superficially like an Apollo Command Module — which, after all, was of the same vintage as this Soyuz technology — with three lumpy-looking molded couches set out in a fan formation, their lower halves touching. Gingerly, feetfirst, she lowered herself.

Vladimir Viktorenko was already in the commander’s seat, over at the left of the cabin. He waved her toward the other side. “Be my guest!”

She slid herself down, wriggling until she could feel the contours of the right-hand seat under her. The couch was too short for her, and compressed her at her shoulders and calves. The couches in a Soyuz were supposed to be molded to the body of the cosmonaut; in this training rig the couches came in one size, to fit all, and were scuffed and battered from overuse.

The capsule was cramped even compared to the Apollo trainers she’d used, and was jammed full of bales of equipment for postlanding: parachutes, emergency rations, flotation gear, survival clothing. The main controls were set out in a panel in front of Viktorenko: a CRT screen, orientation controls on Viktorenko’s right, and maneuvering controls to his left. There was an optical orientation viewfinder set up on a small porthole to one side of the panel. York recognized few of the instruments, actually. But it didn’t matter; she wouldn’t be doing any flying. And besides, in this landing-drill mock-up, most of the controls were obviously dummies.

The capsule layout struck her as truly clunky. It was all sharp corners; and some of the controls were so far from the cosmonauts’ hands that they were provided with sticks to poke at the panels. It was low-tech, utilitarian.

There was a small, circular pane of glass at York’s right elbow. She peered out, trying to lose herself in the view of gray sky and flat steppe.

Ralph Gershon came clambering down from the hatch. His boots and knees were everywhere, clattering into the equipment banks and against York and Viktorenko. The Russian laughed hugely and playfully batted away Gershon’s clumsier movements.

Gershon twisted into the center seat and plumped down, compressing her against the wall; their lower legs were in contact, and there was no space for her to move away. “Oh, Jesus Christ, Ralph.”

Gershon, chewing Juicy Fruit, seemed cheerful enough. “Lighten up, York. This ain’t so bad. At least we’re out of the fucking wind.”

Viktorenko reached over Gershon and pushed closed the inner hatch, a fat plug of metal. Immediately the wind noise, the chattering of the technicians, was cut off, and York felt sealed in. Entombed.

She heard the techs slam shut the outer hatch.

The noise of the chopper increased to a muffled drone. She felt her heart pump harder. There was a pounding on the hull, and then a soft, slithering scraping, as, York guessed, cables slid over the surface of the craft.

Ralph Gershon picked his gum out of his mouth and stuck it under his seat, seemingly unconcerned.

The chopper’s engine roared. There was a brief strobing of the light at her window — helicopter blades, passing over the Command Module — and then a yank upward, as if the Soyuz had turned into a high-speed elevator.

York felt the air rush out of her lungs, and the pressure points of her couch dug into her back and hips.

Beyond her window the receding steppe rocked back and forth like a plaster-of-paris model in a sim. She saw a little circle of engineers, waving their caps, their faces turned up like dusty flowers.

Grit fled in concentric circles across the steppe, away from the capsule, and the technicians staggered back, shielding their eyes.

Then she could no longer see the ground: her window was a disk of clouded sky.

York’s pressure suit was getting hot. She could feel perspiration pooling under her, in a little slick that gathered in the small of her back. But at the same time, thanks to some quirk of the Soviet suit’s cooling system, her feet were cold. She tried to curl up her toes inside the layers which constrained them.

Gershon, lying beside her, was all elbows.

There was a TV camera — a crude-looking thing, like something out of the 1950s — fixed to the cabin wall, just above Gershon’s head. York didn’t know if it was live or not. A small metal toy, a spaceman, dangled in front of the lens on a metal chain; as the cabin swung about under the chopper, the little toy rocked back and forth.

Viktorenko caught her eyeing the model. “You are admiring my friend Boris.” He pronounced it Bah-reess “Boris has a major role to play, in the correct functioning of the Soyuz.” He pointed. “You see the TV camera. That is trained on Boris at all times. By watching his antics, the ground can determine the exact moment at which we become weightless. Ingenious, no?…”

Then the capsule lurched to the right. York felt the weight of the two men compressing her against the wall.

Viktorenko roared with approval. “It is just like Disney World! Ha-ha! Now, Ralph and Natalie. You must imagine that we are returning to Earth aboard a real Soyuz, perhaps after spending a hundred days or more aboard our wonderful space platform Salyut. We have endured the gentle buffeting of reentry — a mere three or four Gs, thanks to the cunning aerodynamic design of the Command Module — and soot has coated our window following the scorching friction of the air. But we discard our window shields, and we see bright sunlight, a Kazakhstan morning. Now here come the parachutes: the three drogues, crack crack crack in swift succession, and then the main chute, a great white sail above us.” Viktorenko mimed a slow, featherlike rocking. “So we drift downward, like a snowflake, all three tonnes of us…”

She closed her eyes. She was certain something was intended to go wrong, somewhere down the line. It was just a question of when, and how bad it would be, and whether she’d be able to cope when it came. It was like every sim: it was a sadistic game, in which Viktorenko was in complete control. And the bastard knew it.

“And now the moment approaches,” Viktorenko said. “The reunion with the mother planet! But her embrace is hard. So compressed gases have been pumped into the base of your seats, to absorb the shock, you see. And, less than two meters from the ground, retrorockets will fire to cushion the impact. Of course we have no retrorockets, for this is only a training mock-up… Perhaps we will be fortunate, and the wind will be low; otherwise, we may bounce—”

There was a crackle, a brief Russian message on the radio. Viktorenko acknowledged and checked a chronometer.

“Three, two, one.”

Loose cables clattered against the hull. The chopper had released the capsule.

The Command Module fell, dragging her down with it.

The Soyuz slammed against a hard surface, with a vast metallic slap.

The impact was more violent than York had expected. Her ill-fitting couch rammed into her back, all the pressure points gouging her body.

“Fuck,” Gershon gasped.

At least I’m down She glanced around, quickly, at the still, almost silent cabin; she could hear the distant noise of the climbing chopper. Is that it? Is it over? No bouncing, no dragging — are we down?

Then the capsule tipped to her left, quite smoothly, so that her weight was pressed against Gershon’s.

“Fuck,” Gershon said again.

York shouted, “What the hell’s this, Vladimir?”

The window beyond Viktorenko was briefly darkened, though York couldn’t see by what. Viktorenko grinned. “Evidently something has gone wrong.”

The capsule started to roll the other way, to York’s right, and the weight of the two men came down on York again.

Beyond her window, obscuring the glass, water, silvery gray with murk, was bubbling up.

So that’s it. This is the carefully designed screwup. The Soyuz is supposed to come down on land…

“Fuck,” said Gershon.

“Welcome to Ozero Tengiz,” Viktorenko said. “Tengiz Lake, a salt lake all of twenty miles wide, and less than a hundred miles from—”

York groaned. “Do we really have to go through with this? I mean, rehearsing for an emergency water landing? After an emergency retrieval from orbit by a Soyuz?”

“Would you rather endure such an occurrence without preparation? All of your training has a context. You must understand that. Our cosmonauts are trained to handle all conceivable survivable emergencies.”

“Not the unsurvivable ones,” York said.

“But few points in a mission are true dead zones; in most situations there are options. The present exercise covers just one contingency. Of course for this particular exercise you must thank my old friend, Joseph Muldoon.”

Gershon retrieved his wad of gum from the base of his chair, mashed it in his gloved hand to make it soft, and pushed it back into his mouth. “Fuck Muldoon,” said Gershon. “And fuck you.”

The Russian watched with appalled fascination.

York said, “All right, Vladimir, we’ll play ball. What’s the drill?”

“Survival gear,” Viktorenko said. He unzipped his pressure suit.

York felt enormously weary. But she didn’t have a choice.

She took off her helmet and jammed it behind her seat.

The outermost layer of her suit was a coverall of a tough artificial fabric, with pockets and tool-loops and flaps. It opened up at the front, revealing the flaps of cloth called the “appendix,” bound up with rubber bands; when York slipped off the bands the bunched material unfolded.

With the outer suit layer lolling around her like a deflated balloon, York went to work on the inner layer, of an airtight, elasticized material.

In the restricted space, with the ceiling of the cabin just inches from her nose, movement was virtually impossible, and she kept catching at controls and switches with her feet and hands. The interior of the cabin was becoming chaotic, with the squirming bodies of the three of them and discarded bits of equipment sloshing back and forth in the confined, rocking space.

“It is easier if you help each other!” Viktorenko called cheerily.

“Fuck off,” York said.

When her pressure garment was off, she was down to her long thermal underwear. She started to pull on her survival gear: a red sweater, a jumpsuit, a jacket, thickly padded trousers, an outer jacket…

“But this is poor,” growled Viktorenko. “Poor! You must work as a team. On Mars, forty million miles from Earth, there are only your crewmates. You must turn to each other for aid as a child might turn to his mother, instinctively, without asking. Do you understand? And that aid must be offered without calculation or hesitation. It is the way you must adopt. Tomorrow we will do this better.”

“You must be kidding,” York snapped. “We have to go through all this again?”

Viktorenko, pulling on his own gear, continued to lecture them. “Listen to me. Our Soviet training is tougher than yours, and some within NASA have come to understand this. In some of our exercises, there is no chance of seeking help. There is no rescue team! For there will be none on Mars! It is all purposeful. For, when a man realizes a mistake might cost him his health or even his life, the situation is transformed. Suddenly there is an incentive to concentrate.

“In space, one needs the courage and resourcefulness to continue to work on a problem long after an average person, with hope of rescue, might have given in. And this is what I begin to instill in you now.”

York was tired, in pain, hugely irritated. The trouble was, there was a strand of thinking inside NASA that approved of the Soviets’ tough approach: mostly the old military flyboys, who seemed to think NASA astronauts were getting pampered. Joe Muldoon, for instance, Viktorenko’s great Moon-orbiting buddy. Yeah, pampered. Especially all these goddamn newfangled hyphenated-astronauts who want to go to Mars…

She said, “All this macho training didn’t help Ben Priest and the others, did it?”

Viktorenko studied her. More gently he said, “No. It did not help Ben Priest.” He plucked at the cuffs of his thick sweater. “Listen, Natalie. There is an old Russian folktale. A young woman named Marushka was famous for being able to embroider fantastical designs. Her fame reached the attention of Kaschei the Immortal, an evil sorcerer, who fell in love with her and wished her to go away with him. She turned him down, despite his magic powers, for she was modest, and wished only to stay in the village where she was born.

“Enraged, Kaschei turned her into a firebird with brilliant plumage, and himself into a huge black bird of prey.

“The bird of prey seized the firebird in its talons and flew away with it.

“Marushka, realizing she was dying, willed that she should shed her plumage. Her feathers fell to the ground on the land she loved.

“Marushka died, but her feathers were magical; for they remained alive, but only to those who appreciated beauty and chose to share it with others…

“So it is with death, among us. No kosmonaut dies in vain, Natalie York.”

The Command Module rocked harder, swinging back and forth through thirty, forty degrees. Water lapped, gurgling, against the hull. York had a nightmare vision of the capsule sinking, dragging them, padded trousers and all, down to the bottom of the lousy little salt lake.

It’s so hot in here. Her head seemed full of blood; she could feel her pulse at her neck, and there was a yellow haze at the edge of her vision.

Christ. I’m going to faint.

But then the cabin tipped again, over to the right, and her stomach knotted up. Saliva pooled at the back of her throat. No. No, that’s not fainting.

She turned away from the others, toward the wall; when it came, the vomit splashed against the port and wall and slid down under her seat.

There was a hand on her shoulder. “York. You okay?”

It was Gershon; she waved him away. She tried to talk, but her throat was still closed up.

And then the stink hit Gershon. “Oh, Jesus.” He lunged, sticking his head over the back of his couch, and began to throw up, too, in huge, noisy spasms.

Viktorenko laughed. “So, Bah-reess, only you and I are able-bodied seamen, eh?”

“Fuck,” Ralph Gershon groaned.

The water lapped against the hull of the Soyuz, and Boris the cosmonaut dangled from his silver chain above York’s head.

She wondered what had happened to Gershon’s gum. Washington Post, Monday, February 23, 1981

…We have no hesitation in devoting this editorial exclusively to the report of the Presidential Commission into the Apollo-N space disaster, which has at last, after weeks of leaks, rumors and counterrumors, been formally published. The report is 3,300 pages long and weighs in at 19 pounds, and it does not mince words. The report makes it clear that the accident was not the result of a chance malfunction, in a statistical sense, but rather resulted from an unusual combination of mistakes, coupled with a deficient design.

The Apollo-N disaster has sparked a fresh national debate, led by a skeptical Congress, over whether the country should be spending tens of billions of dollars on a “footprints-and-flags” program to send men to space, when it faces so many problems at home. Public opinion polls find many citizens asking if the program is costing too much and feeling that any trip to Mars would be as much a political stunt as was the Apollo race to the Moon.

Meanwhile, many prominent scientists, such as Professor Leon Agronski, a former science advisor to President Nixon, are arguing in public fora that less expensive unmanned probes could teach us more about the composition of Mars and the other planets than astronauts.

On the other hand, supporters of the space program point out that the average American spends much more per year on cigarettes and alcohol than on sending fellow countrymen to other planets, and that untold scientific and technological benefits will flow from the continuing program.

This paper remains skeptical.

The most damaging part of the Commission report is a frank indictment of NASA and its senior contractors. The Commission’s investigation revealed many deficiencies in design and engineering, in manufacturing and quality control. Numerous examples have been unturned, in addition to the simple and avoidable defect that led to the tragedy itself.

This newspaper is appalled at the incredible complacency of NASA engineers. Even a high-school physics student would have known not to allow a nuclear core with instability built into its very design onto an operational space mission.

It seems likely that this nation will continue on to Mars, and beyond; successes in space travel have become essential to the image of the United States as the world’s leading power in science and technology: an image projected to the Soviet Union, our allies around the world, the uncommitted nations of the Third World, and — perhaps most importantly — to our own citizenry. And we should not forget the cold, cynical political calculation that a cancellation of the space program would immediately cause a drastic oversupply in the aerospace industry, and inevitable job losses and shutdowns in that area.

But as we put Apollo-N behind us and strive to move forward, we should never forget how the dry technical prose of the Presidential Commission report convicts those in charge of NASA of gross incompetence and negligence…

Friday, February 27, 1981

Joe Muldoon called on Fred Michaels in his office in Washington. He arrived a little after seven, having flown out from Houston.

Without getting up, Michaels waved Muldoon to a chair. “Sit down, Joe. It’s good to see you. You want a drink?”

“Sure.” Muldoon sat uncertainly, studying Michaels.

There were glasses and a decanter in a corner of Michaels’s desk; Michaels poured Muldoon a careless couple of fingers and passed it over. It was good Kentucky bourbon. The place was darkened, somber, with the lights dimmed; the brightest source of light was the small TV set in one corner of the room, which was showing a news program, with the sound off.

Michaels rocked back in his chair, with his boots on the corner of his wide desk; his gold-braided vest hung open, and the dim light emphasized the deep grooves in his face as — in typical Michaels style — he waited for Muldoon to say what he wanted to say.

Muldoon began to tell the Administrator about the progress he was making in his new role as head of the Program Office. “The NERVA contractors were running a fucking country club, Fred. And those bastards at Marshall have been letting them get away with it.”

Michaels, with one eye on the TV, shrugged. “That’s maybe a little harsh, Joe. We’ve been putting them all under a hell of a lot of schedule pressure. Maybe too much.”

“No, it’s not that. In a lot of cases it’s just sloppy practice. For instance, the first time I went up to the S-NB test installation at Michoud I found some of the technicians going for a few beers with their lunch. That’s just outrageous, when you’re working on man-rated hardware. And I saw some guy pumping lox out of a tank on the ground up into an umbilical tower. I asked him where the lox was going. ‘Beats the hell out of me,’ he said. Once it got out of the other end of his hose, that little guy didn’t have a clue what happened to the lox. After that, I told them that I wanted every engineer to learn everything there is to know about every system he was running — where the stuff came from, where it was going, and all the things that might go wrong in between. Every one of those guys has got to know his system from womb to tomb.

“I made a list — I copied you on it — of thirty-odd things that got up my ass, in my first hour up there. Lousy materials handling, mixed-up demarcation of workspaces, wasted time…

“Sure, the schedule pressures are working against us, too. With the sloppy practices the manufacturers have, there’s no way they can keep to their development timetables. And then they cut corners on testing, to try to make the end date, which means you end up with a candle that’s late and lousy quality.”

Michaels was nodding, rubbing the thick jowls under his chin. “Yeah. I understand. You’re doing a good job, Joe. You’re doing just the job I hired you for.”

“Fred, we’ve gone wrong, somewhere. We scraped this kind of crap out of Apollo; back then we had an operation, right across the country, that was as slick as snot. But now we’ve slipped back.”

Michaels grunted and sipped his drink. “Maybe. But we had lots of things working for us, back then. A goal you couldn’t have defined more sharply, a lot of goodwill — even though Congress squeezed the budgets — and, hell, I don’t know, a kind of romance about it all. We were still moving outward, Joe; it was still a great adventure, a time of firsts, every year. And we had one hell of a schedule pressure; we still thought the Russians might beat us to it.

“Now,” he ruminated, “it’s different. All the forces working on us have changed. Even though we’ve got the prospect of Mars, somewhere out there in the future, we’ve been mooching about in Earth orbit for a decade, and what the hell do we have to show for it but a couple of tin-can fuel-tank ’Labs, Apollo hardware still in orbit a decade after the Moon landings, a Saturn upgrade booster that hasn’t flown once, and a lethal bucket of bolts called NERVA?”

“Yeah, but you have to take a positive view of it, Fred. Skylab A is still operational, nearly a decade after it was launched. What if we’d abandoned it? — let it fall back to Earth? What a hell of a waste that would have been; we’d have been a laughingstock. And Moonlab is still up there—”

“Okay, okay. But it’s still just Apollo applications. Nothing we didn’t design in the sixties. And meanwhile, the world is moving on, Joe. We don’t have the lead that we had a decade ago. The Russians have kept on flying Soyuz and Salyut—”

“But our stuff is advanced over theirs.”

“Maybe, but their endurance records have been beating the pants off us. And the Soviets aren’t the only ones. Even our buddies are moving into the gaps we’re leaving. The Europeans have been flying their Ariane for a couple of years, so we’re soon going to lose out in terms of commercial launches, too, to our so-called allies.”

He rubbed the bridge of his nose with his fleshy fingers and closed his eyes. “Ah, hell. Another eight or nine years on, and here I am again trying to reshape the space program for another new president. And once again I’m trying to figure out the way the future is going to pull at us, and which way the new White House is likely to jump. Maybe it’s not so obvious to you guys; I know what it’s like when you’re buried inside the program. But things are so different now, from 1971, and 1960; so different…”

Muldoon grunted. “Oh, I look around, Fred. I can see the changes. In spite of the Afghanistan thing, the Cold War is done now. Or at least people want to think so. And if space was all about fighting the war symbolically—”

“Then what use is it now?” Michaels smiled over his glass. “You got that right. We were happy enough to play that card when it suited us, Joe; maybe we couldn’t have flown without it. But now people have had enough, and we’re being paid back. But on the other hand…”

Muldoon prompted, “Yeah?”

“On the other hand, maybe there are still some angles we can use. You know Reagan is expanding his military spending.”

Muldoon grunted. “Sure. Just as he’s cutting taxes, and the rest of the budget.”

“And I don’t think that’s going to go away, not during Reagan’s term.” Michaels was thoughtful, calculating. “Haig is saying that all of Carter’s human rights stuff was misguided; that what we’ve got to do now is counter the Soviets, who are still the main threat.”

“So what does that mean for us, Fred?”

Michaels smiled, tiredly. “You need to see the angles. We have to position ourselves so we’re in the part of the budget that gets expanded, not the part that gets cut. If all that money is going to flow into defense, then we’ve got to be in the way of that flow. Divert a little bit.” He sipped his drink. “Then you have Reagan himself. That old ham. You know, I’ve been working with Reagan and his people since he was nominated. And I think it’s possible he might want to emulate Kennedy. Or rather, finally put Kennedy in his box, after all these years. You know that in the Republican platform last year, Reagan attacked Carter/Kennedy for not keeping up NASA’s funding the way they should have. Now, he has to deliver on that.

“And maybe, for Reagan, the state of flux we’re in after the NERVA thing is an opportunity. A chance for him to shape events. The space program is like a litmus test for new administrations when they come in, a way for them to prove themselves. You had Kennedy and the Moon, and Nixon and his long-range Mars program… Joe, I think if we could come up with some program, some clear goal, that promised to restore our image, and put us back in the lead in space in a few years time — say, in five or six years, within his possible term of office — Reagan might buy it.” His rheumy eyes gleamed. “And now’s the time to strike, while his administration is settling in. But—”

“But what?”

“But Reagan’s no Kennedy. And Bush sure as hell is no LBJ. An announcement isn’t enough. I’m not sure if we’re going to be able to assemble, and keep, a coalition of interests behind any such program. And besides, if NERVA’s a busted flush, what the hell do we have to give Reagan anyhow, Joe?” He poured himself another drink. “Ah, God. I tell you, I don’t know if I can do it anymore. I’ve used up a lot of credit on the Hill over the years, in the endless program delays and overspends. And now this NERVA thing. I don’t know if I can go in there and start fighting again. I don’t know if I should even be trying anymore.”

He’s thinking of giving up, Muldoon realized The sudden perception was painful to him, almost a physical shock. Fuck. How come I haven’t seen this before?

Because, he thought, he hadn’t wanted to admit it.

A NASA without Fred Michaels at the top was all but inconceivable to Muldoon, as it no doubt was to most Americans.

Muldoon knew enough about the workings of NASA to know what kind of man it needed as its Administrator. It shouldn’t be a scientist, or an engineer. It had to be someone who understood the great issues of national and public policy. It had to be a manager, someone able to keep the multiple warring centers in effective and efficient operation. It had to be a man who knew his way around Congress, and the Pentagon, and the Bureau of the Budget.

Such a man was Fred Michaels.

Michaels, as had James Webb before him, had shown himself to have the ability to build up a political lobby behind a space program — and then, crucially, to sustain it across the years. Michaels’s continuity, and his endless energy and commitment, had probably meant as much as Kennedy’s advocacy in keeping the NASA show on the road, over all these long and seemingly fruitless years.

With lesser men in the Administrator’s office, Muldoon realized, NASA might have fallen on bad times years before.

And now, at this lowest moment, he wants to give up, to slink back to fucking Dallas.

Muldoon sat there in the gloom of the office, listening to Michaels, watching the flickering of the TV screen.

He was reminded of the day, long ago, when his own father had admitted to him that he was terminally ill; he felt the same loss of foundations, of surety.

I guess I’m going to have to become one of the grown-ups now, he thought.

But what the hell am I supposed to do?

March-April 1981

From Joe Muldoon’s point of view, the arguments and decision making about the future shape of the space program accelerated dramatically over the next few weeks.

Reagan asked his White House counsel to review options. A small meeting was pulled together in a room of the White House, overlooking the South Lawn. Tim Josephson briefed Muldoon on how the session had gone. Just a handful of men had been in there, talking and arguing for hours: the counsel, the budget director, Fred Michaels, Josephson and a couple of assistants, and Michaels’s old adversary, Leon Agronski.

“It was important to us, Joe. It could have been maybe the single most important meeting since the decision to go to the Moon. But we spent most of the time bitching about the lousy decisions that have landed us in this mess in the first place. And you had Agronski weighing in yet again about how manned spaceflight is a waste of time… I still feel Reagan is looking for something positive, and feasible, and real, that he can unite us all around; but so far we haven’t come up with anything. We’re in danger of being picked apart; Reagan will find his prestigious morale-boosters somewhere else, and we’ll end up flying nothing but goddamn low-orbit spy missions.”

Muldoon wasn’t sure why Josephson was getting into the habit of taking him into his confidence. Muldoon guessed Josephson spent a lot of time making tentative calls to a host of other contacts inside NASA and out, trying, in his own way, to help Fred Michaels through this difficult time.

Josephson had said: We haven’t come up with anything. Muldoon knew that was true.

So Muldoon — already working all his waking hours on the Apollo-N investigations and organizational changes — started using the hours he should have been asleep to do his own research.

“What kind of program can we run?” he asked Phil Stone. He riffled a pile of photostats, journals, and books on his desks. “If I could eat proposals, I’d be a fat man; the one thing we’re not short of is ideas. Should we go back to the Moon and start mining it for minerals? Or maybe we should capture an asteroid, push it toward the Earth, and mine that. Maybe we can build colonies at the libration points of the Earth-Moon system. Maybe we should have factories in space, making crystals, or drugs, or perfect, seamless metal spheres. Maybe we could build huge hydroponic farms in space, where the sun always shines. Or maybe we ought to put up square miles of solar arrays, for clean power. Maybe we could mine the Earth’s upper atmosphere for lox…”

NASA wasn’t short of visionaries, and new ideas, and proposals of all sorts. But there was no unity. Historically, NASA as an organization was lousy at long-range planning; fragmentary ideas and plans came bubbling up from the bottom, from the centers, and almost all of them fell afoul of turf wars.

Stone waved a hand. “All this stuff is great, Joe. But I don’t see what’s distinctive about any of it.”

“What do you mean?”

“The Soviets are already ahead of us in putting together big structures in orbit, and they have more experience of long-duration spaceflight. So we’re behind before we start. Whatever we try to do in this area, the Russians ought to be able to pass us easily. And there’s something about all this, factories and power plants in orbit, that’s kind of…”

“What?”

“Lacking inspiration. It’s dour. Russian. Joe, with this stuff we’re not going anywhere; and we haven’t been anywhere since Apollo.”

“So what do we do? Some kind of stunt?”

“Go to Mars. That was the point of the last ten years anyhow, wasn’t it?”

“But we never had a Mars program, in the way that we had a Moon program back in the sixties. The point was that we were going to develop the technology bit by bit — the nuke rocket, and new heat shields, and new navigation techniques, and long-duration experience, and so on. All of which could be put together into a Mars mission one day, if we chose to; but it would all be modular, and able to be configured into a lot of flexible mission requirements—”

Stone laughed. “You’ll have to get out from behind that desk, Joe. You’re beginning to sound like you belong there.”

Muldoon grunted and rubbed his eyes. “Well, anyhow, we sure as hell ain’t going to Mars. Not anymore; not in my lifetime or yours, Phil.”

“You’re so sure? We’ve got most of the elements. We do know how to survive long-duration missions.”

“Sure I’m sure. The fucking nuke rocket blew up in orbit, remember. The Russians are still sending down pictures of the damn thing glowing blue in the dark. From what I hear there’s no way we’re going to be allowed to fly a NERVA again. And without NERVA—”

“There goes your Mars mission. Unless you fly chemical.”

“Yeah,” Muldoon growled. “But how? Here — look at this thing.” He grubbed on his desk until he found a glossy report, full of spectacular color images. “This is from Udet and his guys, at Marshall. They’ve reworked some old papers that go all the way back to the early sixties. Have you heard of the EMPIRE studies?”

“Nope.”

“Marshall and a couple of contractors, back in ’62 and ’63. Back then, Apollo-Saturn had just about crystallized, and the engineers were asking, what the hell else can we do with this stuff? And they came up with EMPIRE — Early Manned Planetary-Interplanetary Round-trip Expeditions. Look at this. Some of the options needed nuke stages, but others were chemical only. There were a lot of studies like that, from that period. Soon after, every aerospace engineer in the country had his head up Apollo’s ass, and the flow dried up.”

Stone leafed through the report. “So what is Udet doing with this now?”

“He wants to revive a chemical-only Mars flyby option. A couple of S-IVB third stages in orbit, ganged together and fired off on a minimum-energy trajectory, looping around Mars. You’d need two, maybe three Saturn launches to do it.”

“A flyby of Mars? What the hell kind of mission is that?”

Muldoon rubbed his face. “Well, you’re talking maybe a seven-hundred-day round-trip, and about one day of useful work at Mars.”

“Whipping by at interplanetary speeds…”

“Oh, and by the way. You’d pass on the dark side.”

Stone laughed. “You’re kidding.”

“Well, that was the kind of mission they were proposing, back in 1963. The point was to go — just like Apollo, really — nobody cared what you did when you got there.”

Stone threw the report on Muldoon’s desk. “You can’t approve this, Joe. We’re beyond stunts like this now. Aren’t we? In the long run, they come back to bite you. Damn it, Udet and his boys ought to know better than this. We’d probably get laughed out of Congress anyhow.”

Muldoon shrugged, cautious. “Hell, it might get past Reagan, Phil.”

Stone looked reflective. “Look at it this way. What would Natalie York think of this?”

Muldoon laughed; then the laugh tailed off, and he studied Stone. “You know, you’re right. York’s a good touchstone.” Awkward pain in the ass as she is, if she wouldn’t approve a mission, he thought, it’s probably not worth flying. “All right. So we need to find some way of devising an all-chemical mission that will deliver a crew into Mars orbit for a respectable chunk of time — including a landing. But that brings us back where we started; it doesn’t look as if we can do it with chemical.”

Stone shrugged. “So find some smarter way of getting there.”

“Like what?”

“How should I know? Joe, you’re head of the program now, for Christ’s sake. There are a lot of smart guys around here. Use them.” He looked thoughtful. “Natalie York, huh.”

“Yeah. Makes you think, doesn’t it?”

Muldoon got back to his work on the investigation.

Except, as he tried to sleep that night in a small, stuffy room in JSC, with his head full of the conflicting demands of his new and complex job, Muldoon found himself thinking of a conference he’d sat in on long ago. It was in the von Braun Hilton over at Marshall, as he recalled: a seminar on Mars mission modes. And some little guy had stood up with a strange proposal — Muldoon had spent most of the conference sleeping off a hangover, and couldn’t recall the details — some way to boost the lower delta-vee offered by chemical technology by using gravitational assists. Bouncing off Venus, en route to Mars. And the little guy had been laughed off the stage by Udet and those other assholes from Marshall.

Now, what the hell was that about?

At 3 A.M. he got out of bed and padded down to his old desk in the Astronaut Office, and began digging through his old notes and diaries, chasing down the elusive memory.

By 5 A.M. he’d found what he was looking for. Gregory Dana. Jesus. It was Jim Dana’s father.

By 7 A.M. he was on the phone, trying to find Dana.

So Muldoon started to dip his toes, tentatively, into the shark-pool of NASA politics.

He pulled strings and set up a short-term working group, of NASA people and contractors, which would be able to flesh out in detail the idea that was lodging in his head. While that was coming together he drafted a hasty report to Michaels, summarizing the research he’d been doing.

He had Tim Josephson polish up a final draft for him, thus further extending their unspoken, ambiguous alliance. And when Muldoon sent his report to Michaels, he sent a copy to Josephson, to make sure it was leaked to the White House.

Natalie York was the Astronaut Office representative on Joe Muldoon’s task force. She was sent to NASA HQ for an initiation meeting.

Before arriving, she’d hardly thought much about this assignment. She was just grateful to have a break in Washington — to get away from the grind of training that had become meaningless in the context of a rudderless program, to get away from her empty, unlet apartment, and from all the holes in her life where Ben used to be.

But she found herself in a meeting the likes of which she had only imagined a couple of months earlier — and which she’d thought would never take place again, not after the disaster.

Muldoon had called in staff from all the major NASA centers, including Udet and his team from Marshall, and senior engineers and managers from all of NASA’s major contract partners: Boeing, Rockwell, Grumman, McDonnell, IBM, others. Pulling out so many senior staff put a dent in a lot of other projects, including the post-Apollo-N inquiries and the rectification program, and really Muldoon was going far beyond his organizational authority.

But he evidently hadn’t been shy about using his new position to pull strings.

Standing on a stage at the front of an overcrowded conference hall, Muldoon briefed the opening session.

“The meeting is scheduled for the next fourteen days,” Muldoon said. “The objective is to come up with a new core space program in that time. Nothing less than that. I’m expecting you to work all the hours it takes, including the weekends; I’m going to isolate this group from your other commitments by putting you up here in Washington, and I’ve arranged workrooms and computer facilities and phone lines…”

Despite Muldoon’s vigorous presentation, York became aware of some muttering in the room around her as he spoke. What the hell’s he talking about? A plan to do what? Without the fucking nuke, we ain’t going anywhere except low Earth orbit for a generation.

But York had never seen Muldoon like this.

She’d come to know him as a difficult man: a moonwalker, obsessive about getting back into space again, forceful, foul-mouthed, with maybe too much anger ready to spill out over the incompetence of anyone on the ground he saw getting in his way. She watched as he dominated a room full of the toughest heavyweights in NASA, with passion and anger and a visible will to succeed. He’d grown, remarkably; for the first time she realized how perceptive Fred Michaels had been in selecting this man to run his spacecraft program after Bert Seger.

Muldoon sketched the guidelines for the meeting.

“I want you to focus on a baseline mission profile of a crew of four, with a thirty-day stopover, to be launched for the 1985 opportunity. It will be a very different mission from what we thought we were doing previously: all we have available now is chemical technology, and it is going to need some smart thinking from your trajectory planners.

“We need self-discipline. I can’t emphasize that enough. The objective is to devise a bare-bones program based on what must be done, and what can be done based on the technology we have, not on what you’d like the program to do. The resultant plan, including the schedule, is going to have to be honest: no promises we can’t keep, no wishful thinking…”

And slowly, through her vague numbness, York began to realize what Muldoon was talking about, what the subject of this task force actually was.

Going to Mars. Maybe it’s still possible.

For the first time since Ben’s death, York felt her interest quickening.

After a week, it seemed to Muldoon — amid the blizzard of computer printout, technical journals, Vu-graph foils, flip chart pages, half-eaten sandwiches, and paper coffee cups — that something feasible was beginning to emerge.

His gut instinct was confirmed. We really do have something here.

He began to understand why Michaels had selected him for this job.

The Mars program had dominated the development of NASA since 1972… No, Muldoon reflected, more than that: it had warped the Agency’s post-Apollo growth, and that of all its programs. The Agency had become obsessed with one largely unspoken goal: men on Mars Everything else was subordinated: the Earth-orbit programs were tailored to preparing for the long-haul flights to come, the unmanned programs were either canned or cut around to serve operational purposes.

So he could see why Michaels had put so much trust in him, Muldoon. Because he was a monomaniac, too. His own obsessions were a kind of scale model of the Agency’s.

He was the ideal champion.

After his couple of weeks, Muldoon had enough to put in front of the Administrator.

Muldoon had Josephson call a meeting in front of Michaels, with Udet, Gregory Dana, representatives of the contractors, and even a couple of tame senators: all zealots for the new, embryonic program.

Muldoon summarized the proposed mission mode. “We still need an orbital transfer booster to thrust the ship from Earth to Mars and back. That was the role that had been planned for the S-NB.” He looked at Michaels. “But, even without the S-NB, we have an option, Fred. A chemical technology option. We can use an enhancement of the S-II second stage of the Saturn V. We have design studies by Rockwell dating back to 1972 showing how the S-II could be upgraded for such a role, by providing it with restartable engines, insulation, course-adjustment verniers, docking facilities…”

Michaels grunted. “Yeah. And those studies have been completely trashed by those bastards at Marshall since their inception.”

Udet kept his eyes fixed on Muldoon’s foil and did not react.

Dana said, “I would need confirmation that development of the S-II is possible in the time frame.”

Michaels nodded seriously. “You’ll get it, Doctor.” He made a note to himself on a piece of paper.

Muldoon put up another foil. “Fuel. If we assume that hydrogen/oxygen will be used, we’ve calculated that we will need a total of a thousand tons to depart from the Earth, three hundred tons to brake at Mars, and depart subsequently; and seventy tons to brake at Earth orbit. That’s one thousand, three hundred and seventy tons in Earth orbit at the start of the mission. It would be a lot more if we didn’t have Dr. Dana’s gravity assist maneuver to save fuel. Now, the largest weight we can loft to orbit, with the Saturn VB, is on the order of four hundred thousand pounds — about one hundred and eighty tons…”

“The Saturn VB has yet to fly,” Dana pointed out.

“I realize that.” Muldoon changed his foil. “But this is assumptive planning, Doctor; we do have time to remedy the problems in that area. Here’s how the mission would proceed. We would deliver, first, an enhanced S-II to orbit, empty. The S-II would be docked to a new facility, which we will call the Orbital Assembly Facility. This would be a simple affair, just struts and attitude motors; it would be put into an orbit close to Skylab.

“Next, supplementary fuel tanks would be orbited by unmanned VB launches. Each of these External Tanks will contain, when fully loaded, seven hundred tons of liquid hydrogen and oxygen, securely insulated. The tanks would be docked with the assembly facility. Pods of fuel will be brought up by subsequent Saturn VB flights, and dumped into the tanks and the S-II stage itself. In all we’ll need a minimum of ten Saturn VB launches. Remember, the whole purpose of the Saturn VB configuration is its reusability — we can refurbish the four Solid Rocket Boosters and fly them again — which will reduce costs per launch. We are already devising operational facilities which will allow fast pad turnaround and rapid refurbishment of flight articles. And we can combine the fuel-delivery flights with other objectives, such as the flight tests of the Mars Excursion Module. The MEM is the main undefined article, by the way; we’ll issue a Request For Proposals in a few weeks, if we get approval…”

Josephson orchestrated a series of follow-up presentations; there were tables and charts showing costings, development and testing timetables. The funding slides were based on the assumption that there would be an incremental program of test shots of the various components and configurations in cislunar space, leading up to an initial set of three operational missions. The presenters showed how the new technology could be extended beyond the first landings to be used for a return to the Moon, establishing a Mars base, orbital missions to Venus; the new program would serve as a base, not just for a one-shot Mars trip, but a new expansion into the Solar System.

Michaels’s jowly, politician’s face was free of expression as he listened; some of the time he sat with his eyes closed, almost as if he was falling asleep.

As the presentations closed, Michaels massaged the bridge of his nose and the pads of fat under his rheumy eyes.

He asked Muldoon to stay behind.

“You’ve done a damn good job, Joe. What you’ve brought me is convincing. And I’m already under pressure from the White House to come up with some such proposal as this.”

Muldoon felt his heart pump a little harder at that.

Michaels reached into his desk and pulled out a bottle of Kentucky bourbon and two glasses; he poured them both a shot. “Tell me what you think of NASA’s long-term plans.”

Muldoon thought it over, and began to frame a complex, considered answer. Then he decide to shortcut.

“What long-term plans?”

Michaels grunted. “You have that right. You have all kinds of goddamn schemes coming out of the think tanks in the centers. Well, that’s fine. But I’ve always resisted, hard, any demand for a firm long-term strategy for the Agency. In all my time here. You know why? Because there’s so much damned opposition to the manned space program. Always has been, always will be. And every plan I produce — every damn statement — is a political fall guy, just a target for the opposition to shoot at. I learned all this from Jim Webb, back in the sixties. Webb defended Apollo at all costs — even at the expense of its own sequel. He knew what success with Apollo would mean: even more, its failure or cancellation. That’s partly responsible for the mess we’re in now. But, Joe, we’ve got to learn the lesson. Even if it means we’re mortgaging the future…”

Michaels poured them more drinks and talked some more, about tactics, detailed aspects of the proposals, about obtaining support from the military, the aerospace industry, other lobbies.

Slowly, Muldoon began to figure out that Michaels was thinking aloud, groping for a way forward. He’s talking tactics. He may be tired, but he isn’t played out yet; he’s telling us what he’s going to have to do to make this happen. He’s buying it.

After Michaels’s meeting, Udet sought out Dana. “Dr. Dana. We must speak. At heart we two are, I believe, at one in our ambition.”

Dana’s voice was disconcertingly thin, his eyes unreadable behind his glasses. “Once I would have said so, I think. But, I am now not so sure. Now, I am prepared to accept that I will not see humans travel to Mars in my lifetime — if the attempt incurs unacceptable risk.”

Yes, yes. But you did, nevertheless, accept Muldoon’s invitation to participate in this task group. If the dream was so feeble in you as you protest, then you would not even be here.

Udet felt oddly exhilarated; he felt a surge of kinship, almost, with this odd, bitter little man. But the battle is won, Hans. Do not endanger it with recklessness.

Udet disregarded the prompting of caution.

“Dr. Dana. I think we must address what is unspoken between us. We have worked together, in our strange way, for many years now. And we have, despite personal difficulties, achieved great things. I will build this ship. And it will be a memorial to your son.”

Dana’s head swiveled, like a gun turret. “My son has no connection to you, Udet. Make no claim on him.”

“Of course not. I only meant—”

“And as for us, you and I — we have roots far deeper than you may believe.”

Udet felt a prickle of fear. “Tell me what you mean.”

“That I was at the Mittelwerk.”

Dana picked up his briefcase then and, with a curt nod, walked away.

All Udet’s exhilaration, his mood of triumph, drained away from him; he felt as if he had been toying, ignorantly, with a loaded pistol.

The Mittelwerk He was there; one of those invisible thousands. My God.

There may be no limit to the power which this absurd little man can wield over me.

After Michaels’s meeting, events began to move with a speed that stunned Muldoon.

There was predictable opposition to the new proposal from Leon Agronski of MIT. Agronski attacked NASA for continuing to give too much attention to manned spaceflight. And he raised economic objections. He had studies to show that whereas aerospace R D attracted 35 percent of the national effort into R D, it accounted for only 4 percent of the total value added by U.S. manufacturers to their raw materials.

But Michaels was ready with other evidence which argued that two-thirds of all economic growth from the Crash of 1929 to Sputnik was traceable to new technology; and that the return on investment on NASA was, by 1980, around 43 percent.

Agronski, as Michaels expected, also attacked the new program as bad science. Michaels responded by saying that NASA was planning to deliver several astronaut-months on Mars, for a fraction of the cost of Apollo, which had delivered just a few man-weeks on the Moon…

Meanwhile, on another front, Michaels started negotiations with the secretary of defense, who suspected — rightly — that Michaels was trying to siphon off some of the billions Reagan had promised on military spending. So Michaels had to get the endorsement of the DoD for this new civilian space effort.

But it wasn’t immediately obvious why such support should be forthcoming. Having seen the Soviets send up a whole series of low-orbit military Salyut flights, the DoD, and the USAF in particular, were fighting hard for a new program based on a restriction to low Earth orbit, for reconnaissance and other purposes, and maybe some accelerated experimentation with space-based weapons systems — such as anti-ICBM particle and projectile guns — that would fit in with Reagan’s broader strategic thinking.

Michaels offered consolations to the military people. He showed how the Mars mission’s technology — orbital refueling techniques, for instance — could be adapted to military uses. And military personnel and experiments could fly on the Mars program test flights.

And there were larger considerations, to do with the health of the aerospace industry, which Michaels was able to point to. A new, big aerospace initiative would give the economy a massive — if inflationary — boost. And, for the benefit of the politicians, he played on a suspicion dating back to the 1950s that of all the services, the USAF was the most out of political control when it came to space. The service had campaigned from the beginning to be given its own space program, independently of whatever NASA got up to; and in recent years, it was felt, USAF insistence had damagingly distorted the goals of the Skylab project. Besides, a manned Mars mission coupled with the new military work could be attractive in PR terms: the U.S. is not afraid to defend itself, but it is still rich and strong enough to dream of other worlds…

So a new, focused civilian space program — rich in new technology, but lying outside the reach of the DoD, in particular the USAF — could be presented as politically attractive.

And so the arguments went on, orchestrated by Michaels and Josephson, who gathered the forces of national policy around themselves to shape the program the way they wanted it; until, at last, it all spiraled into realms of economic theory and political infighting that left Joe Muldoon, a mere moonwalker, stranded on the ground.

Late in the process, Michaels and his staff, including Muldoon, were summoned to a meeting at the White House with DoD and Bureau of the Budget delegations to discuss NASA’s proposals. And then Reagan himself called a meeting of Cabinet members, and NASA, BoB, DoD, and MIT officials.

Michaels was obviously exhausted, but Muldoon could see he did his best to bring his remaining energies to bear on the Cabinet Room meeting. He knew he had almost won the argument, but this final hurdle still had to be crossed.

Reagan asked surprisingly sharp questions on wider aspects of the proposal. It seemed to Muldoon that he was seeking to pick out some element of it which he could deploy to his own advantage — just as had Kennedy two decades earlier. And Michaels was trying to work to Reagan’s expectations; he implied that, just as with Kennedy, Reagan would find a big space initiative helpful with congressional power brokers, and he could use it to build up support for other plans…

But Reagan balked anew at the cost, and he and his staff began to scour through the program, picking away elements of it.

Muldoon was forced to watch, helpless, as in the rooms of the White House his careful test and development program was cut to the bone, all talk of Venus-orbit missions and Mars bases was dropped, and the three Mars flights were reduced — incredibly — to just a single shot.

And as the meeting developed, Muldoon became aware of another undercurrent. NASA had screwed up royally over the Apollo-N thing; still, Reagan was offering to endorse a new, huge program. But there was going to be a price to pay. And the head of Bert Seger and some internal reorganization at NASA weren’t going to be enough.

Muldoon came to see, quite clearly, the act of repentance that would be expected if NASA was to be cleansed.

Michaels compiled a final report for Reagan, setting the agenda for the new mission and laying out a program to obtain House and Senate approval.

When it was done, he refused to leave the document with aides. Instead, he walked the document himself into the Oval Office, and, shaking with fatigue, handed it to Reagan in person.

There was a note of resignation stapled to the cover.

Thursday, April 16, 1981

…Our great goal is to build on America’s pioneer spirit, and to develop new frontiers. A sparkling economy spurs initiatives, sunrise industries, and makes older ones more competitive.

Nowhere is this more important than our next frontier, space. Nowhere do we so effectively demonstrate our technological leadership and ability to make life better on Earth. The Space Age is barely a quarter of a century old. But we’ve already pushed civilization forward with our advances in science and technology. Opportunities and jobs will multiply as we cross new thresholds of knowledge and reach deeper into the unknown.

Our progress in space — taking giant steps for all mankind — is a tribute to American teamwork and excellence. Our finest minds in government, industry, and academia have all pulled together. And we can be proud to say: we are first, we are the best, and we are so because we’re free.

America has always been greatest when we dared to be great. We can reach for greatness again. We can follow our dreams to distant stars, living and working in space for peaceful, economic, and scientific gain.

My advisors are developing an overall National Space Policy which I will outline in full later in the year. This policy will establish basic goals for the U.S. space program, which will include: to strengthen the security of the United States, maintain United States space leadership, expand United States private sector investment and involvement in civil space and space-related activities, and to promote international cooperative activities in the national interest. As we look to the future, we must begin to secure leadership in space through the end of the century and beyond. The way to do that is to set a fruitful new direction for the space program, one which will make the best use of our present capabilities, in chemical rocket technology and our ability to live and work for long periods in space. And the time to do it is now.

Tonight, against the background of the forthcoming space policy, I am directing NASA to proceed with the preparation of a manned mission to Mars, and to do it within five years. Such a mission will permit quantum leaps in our research in science and communications, and our understanding of the nature of our universe.

Just as the oceans opened up a new world for clipper ships and Yankee traders, space holds enormous potential for commerce today…

Source: Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Ronald Reagan, 1981 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1981), p.362.

Thursday, April 16, 1981

Michaels called Tim Josephson into his office. He had loosened his tie and broken open a fresh bottle of his favorite Kentucky bourbon. But there was little mood of celebration, as the two of them sat there sipping their drinks in the half-light; Michaels seemed more exhausted than Josephson had ever seen him.

Josephson raised his glass. “Here’s to you, Fred. You’ve done one hell of a job, these last few weeks.”

Michaels drank. “Yeah. Yeah, so I have. Well, we’ve gotten our announcement out of Reagan. And when I go, I’ll take most of the blame for Apollo-N with me, away from NASA.”

“Fred—”

“That’s my job now, Tim,” Michaels said, his voice harder. “My last assignment. It’s the way these things work. But the biggest job lies ahead, still. Delivering this thing.” He eyed Josephson. “And that’s going to be a job you’ll have to handle yourself, Tim. I’ve already made my recommendation to the White House.”

Josephson had been expecting this, but still, panic spurted briefly in him. “I’m — delighted by your faith in me, Fred. But, am I the right guy? Hell, I’m a backroom boy. A functionary; a natural follower.”

“Jesus Christ, don’t you think I know that?” Michaels snapped. “But I also know there’s no better candidate available. You’re just going to have to overcome your weaknesses, Tim. You’ll get there if you work at it.”

Josephson hid a smile behind his glass. “Thanks, Fred. Hell, I’m going to miss you.”

“And I want you to lean on Muldoon. Use him. The two of you should make a hell of a team.”

“I’ll remember that.”

Michaels stared into his drink. “You know, sometimes I think we’ve lost something along the way in all this. I mean, the people furthest from the decision making have been the guys whose idea it was in the first place — the engineers of Langley and Goddard and Marshall — people who have given their whole lives to dreams of spaceflight. People like Gregory Dana. We take their studies and reports and use them as ammunition for our games of politics. But all that visionary stuff about exploration and destiny, all their efforts to stretch our hearts and minds — it’s gotten lost somewhere.”

Josephson sipped his drink. “But could it be any other way, Fred? It was the same with Apollo. Once spaceflight becomes the religion of the empire, it becomes immensely powerful; but it can’t stir us to dream in the same old way. And all of us involved — NASA, the White House, the DoD — just figure out ways in which the space program can serve our own interests. It’s the way things are.”

“Maybe. And I know those guys at Langley are going to hate this one-shot business. Who the hell knows when we’ll be back again? I remember LBJ saying to me once that Americans are a lot better at breaking new ground than caring for the ground already broken. He was sure right. Anyway, the hell with it. We can forget all the political crap now, Tim, and start dreaming about Mars.” He studied Josephson again. “Tell you what I’ve been thinking,” he said. “Now that we have this nice tight goal, our new Apollo, this one-shot trip to Mars, we’re going to need a new name. Something to sum the whole thing up.”

“I guess you’re right,” Josephson said. “In fact, maybe we should have done that before issuing the press briefings.”

“Well, you’re in the hot seat now,” Michaels said. “What are you going to choose, Tim?”

Josephson pulled his lip. “Hmm. How did the name ‘Apollo’ come about? That was before my time—”

Michaels said, “It was picked out by Abe Silverstein in 1960. Now Abe was the head of the Office of Manned Spaceflight at the time — or rather, its predecessor. Silverstein kind of dabbled in the classical myths. He’d picked the name ‘Mercury’ a year earlier, because he liked the idea of a messenger in the sky. And then von Braun’s people called their new launch vehicle ‘Saturn,’ and so another classical god seemed a natural choice to Silverstein.”

“Maybe so,” Josephson said with half smile, “but that’s rather muddled. Isn’t it true that von Braun was actually naming his rockets after planets? There was the ‘Jupiter,’ and then the ‘Saturn’—”

“Give me a break,” Michaels said good-humoredly. “Silverstein was a research engineer; what did he know? Anyhow, Silverstein remembered from his schooldays the story of the god who rode the chariot of the sun drawn by four winged horses: Apollo, the son of Zeus. So Silverstein did a bit of checking to make sure Apollo hadn’t done anything that would be too inappropriate for the American public, such as screwing his mother, and found he hadn’t — and so Apollo it was.”

Josephson studied his drink and thought about it. “Well, maybe we ought to follow the same tradition. I know a little mythology too. Apollo had a half brother. Another great Olympian god. He had his own mythology; it was only later that he was identified with the Romans’ war-god… Only battle and bloodshed gave him any pleasure; his twin children Phobos and Deimos — Panic and Fear — accompanied him onto the battlefield…”

Michaels grunted. “Panic and Fear. Sounds like the kind of guy who’d prosper up on the Hill.”

Josephson smiled. No other name was possible.

And the press would love it.