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.