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.

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.