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.