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.

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.