Through the pain, Priest felt a kind of security settle over him. As best he could tell, this was about the point in the reentry sequence when the automatics were supposed to kick in anyway. Apollo-N was back on its flight plan, for the first time since the NERVA core had blown.

“You got that pre-advisory data ready yet, Retro?”

“Not yet, Flight.”

It was getting damned late. Something is wrong. What isn’t he telling me?

Rolf Donnelly had thought that the most dangerous moment in this reentry would be when the Command Module dug deep into the atmosphere, when it would be totally reliant on its heat shield. And if that shield had been cracked during the explosion, the craft was going to split open and burn like a meteor. He couldn’t do anything about that; it was a question of waiting and hoping.

As yet they’d barely grazed the top of the atmosphere. But, then, totally out of the blue, he feared already he was about to lose the Command Module.

The controller called Retro, down in the Trench, was in charge of controlling the Command Module’s reentry angle. Just before the Service Module separation, Retro had been telling Donnelly that Apollo-N’s angle of attack was right in the middle of the entry corridor. It could hardly have been better, in fact. And that meant that the pre-advisory data Retro had prepared earlier was still valid. The pre-advisory data contained the final vector that would control the spacecraft’s degree of lift while it fought the atmosphere.

But Retro still had to feed the final pre-advisory to the Command Module’s onboard computers. And then, minutes before the atmosphere started to bite, Donnelly could hear Retro arguing with FIDO, the flight dynamics controller, who was passing Retro updated predictions on the spacecraft’s trajectory.

Retro blurted: “I don’t believe you, FIDO!”

Donnelly felt acid spurt into his stomach. “Clarify, Retro. You want to tell me what’s going on over there?”

“The trajectory is shallowing, Flight. We’re up by point three one degrees.”

Still within the corridor. But that was a heck of a lot of shallowing at this point. And if the shallowing continued, Retro was going to have to revise the pre-advisory data. “You have any idea what’s happening up there, Retro?”

“No idea, Flight.” There was tension in the voice, and Donnelly could see Retro peering over the shoulder of FIDO, next to him, trying to get the latest trajectory updates.

Was the trajectory going to shallow any more? That depended on the cause. If, say, one of the attitude thrusters was stuck open, the shallowing would continue. But if propellant or coolant was boiling off from some flaw in the hull, then the cause might dwindle and the shallowing stop.

The trouble was, nobody knew. None of them was sure about the extent of the damage the Command Module had suffered in the core rupture.

Donnelly, if he had to lose the crew, would prefer an undershoot, a burn-up. If the Command Module skipped off the atmosphere and was left in orbit, circling for months or years up there with a cargo of three radioactive corpses, the space program would be dead.

He took another poll of his controllers. None of them had any data to feed him on the trajectory. And besides, the telemetry was starting to get uncertain, as ionization built up around the Command Module.

It’s a gamble. I just have to leave it to Retro. Does he change his figures, or not?

Then Retro spoke again. “The rate of shallowing is slowing, Flight.”

“I need that pre-advisory data, Retro.”

“Yeah.” Again Donnelly could hear the tension in Retro’s voice. That controller was a very young man approaching the key moment in his life, a decision which would live with him forever.

Donnelly breathed a silent prayer; the only thing he couldn’t accept at that moment was indecision, freezing. Like that fucking asshole, Conlig.

“We’re still shallowing. I’ll stick with the pre-advisory data figures.”

“Say again, Retro.”

“I’ll stick with the original pre-advisory data. If the shallowing continues, we won’t tip up by more than another tenth of a degree.”

Suddenly Donnelly became aware that he’d been holding his breath; he let it out in one huge explosion of stale air. “Rog, Retro.”

There was a haze beyond his window, a soft, pink glow, like a sunrise. At first he thought it might be something to do with the thrusters. But then he realized the glow was ionized gas, atoms from the top layer of Earth’s atmosphere, broken apart by their impact with Apollo-N’s heat shield.

There was a soft pressure over his lower body — subtle, but enough to make his pain blaze anew. He thought he cried out. The cabin vibrated. Earth’s atmosphere was snatching at the Command Module, and Apollo-N was beginning to decelerate, hard.

Suddenly the pressure mounted, climbing fast, crushing him into the couch. He could feel his skin crumple and break open inside the pressure suit. He felt as if he was deliquescing, as if his body had no more substance than a piece of lousy fruit.

A cold white light flooded his window; misty, it glared into the cabin, drowning out the instrument lights.

The last moments before radio blackout seemed almost routine. As if this had been just another nominal mission, instead of the most dangerous and uncertain reentry since Apollo 13. The silence was broken only by occasional updates on the Command Module’s trajectory and attitude, and the disposition of the emergency recovery forces, and by the steady voice of capcom York as she tried to reach the crew.

You’d never know, Donnelly thought.

Then telemetry from Apollo-N was lost.

The MOCR fell silent. There was nothing to do but wait.

It was possible that any small crack in the heat shield would heal itself as the heat shield ablated in the heat of reentry. Possible. But it was another unknown. If, alternatively, the shield was damaged and failed, they would lose the bird anyway.

Priest, suffused by pain, lay on his back, buffeted, compressed, while the cabin rattled around him and fire lapped up from the base of the Command Module behind him.

The glowing chunks of heat shield falling upward past his window were big. Maybe something was wrong. Maybe the shield was failing.

If we’re really reentering. If I’m not hallucinating; if we’re not dead already.

Anyway, he couldn’t do a damn thing about it.

Ben Priest, falling to Earth butt-first, waited for sun heat to sear through the base of Apollo-N and engulf him. It would be a relief.

“Network, no instrumentation aircraft contact yet?”

“Not at this time, Flight.”

Four minutes passed. Five. That should have been enough time to reacquire after the blackout.

On the loops there was nothing but a hiss of static -

“ARIA 4 has acquisition of signal, Flight.”

“Rog,” Donnelly said, barely recognizing his own voice.

There was a stir around the MOCR, a shifting of tired shoulders, weary, tentative grins.

It was an odd feeling, a kind of half relief. Acquisition didn’t mean the crew was alive — and it was still possible that the electronics of the parachute system might be shot — but at least the Command Module wasn’t a cinder.

He heard York calling the crew, over and over, patient and plaintive.

The glow had died, fading out to an ordinary sky blue, and the G meter read 1.0, and he was falling toward the ocean at a thousand feet per second. The events of the splashdown ticked by, clear in his sharp, fragile thoughts.

There was a crack: that was the parachute cover coming off from the tip of the conical Command Module. And another sharp snap, as the three small drogue chutes were released. He saw bright streams of fabric beyond the window.

He took a kick in the back as the drogues plucked at the air, stabilizing the fall of the Command Module.