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.