There was a loud hiss; that would be the vent opening to let the cabin’s pressure equalize with the air outside. Any second and -

There. Another bang. That had to be the mains, the three eighty-footers which would lower Apollo-N gently to the ocean’s surface.

As the mains filled with air, the cabin was jolted. Priest was rocked in his couch, and the pain climbed off the scale.

Through his window he could see a slab of blue sky, wisps of cloud.

There was a distant voice in his head, brisk, friendly, competent. “Apollo-N, Apollo-N, Air Boss 1, you have been reported on radar as southeast of your recovery ship at thirty miles. Apollo-N, Apollo-N. Welcome home, gentlemen; we’ll have you aboard in no time.”

Priest wanted to reply. But he was too far away, too sunk into the shell of his body.

The big screen at right front of the MOCR lit up with a TV picture of Apollo-N. Its three ringsail mains were safely deployed, three great, perfect canopies of red and white.

The cheering was so loud it drowned out Donnelly’s headset, and he had to call for quiet.

There was a lot of radio traffic, chattering remotely in his headset. “This is Recovery 2. I see the chutes. Level with me at precisely four thousand feet.” “Affirmative, we do have a capsule in sight…”

There was a checklist the crew was supposed to follow, Priest recalled vaguely. They should be closing that pressure relief valve, for instance, and setting the floodlights to postlanding, and getting set to cast off the mains after splashdown, so that the Command Module didn’t get dragged through the water.

But there was nobody to do it.

Priest tried to relax, to submit to the pain.

Then there was a huge impact, an astonishing eruption of agony throughout his battered body.

Water poured in through an open vent above him, showering Priest, so much of it that he thought the Command Module’s hull must have cracked open.

And the Command Module tipped. He could feel the roll, see the ocean wheel past his window.

When the windows dipped into the seawater, the cabin went dark. Priest found himself hanging there in his straps, with cabin trash raining down around him: bits of paper, urine bags, discarded washcloths. Stable 2, he thought. Upside down. Chuck will be furious. We screwed up. Nobody cut loose the mains.

He hung there like a bat in the inverted cabin, and the darkness, broken by just the Christmas-tree lights of the instrument panel, was kind of peaceful. In a moment the flotation bags would flip the Command Module upright, to the Stable 1 position.

He closed his eyes.

The first image showed the five members of the crew in their Snoopy flight helmets, sitting on their T-cross chairs around the small table in Moonlab’s wardroom. Joe Muldoon sat at the center of the group, holding a piece of onionskin paper.

This is the crew of Moonlab, coming to you live from lunar orbit. The five of us — our guests Vladimir Viktorenko and Aleksandr Solovyov, and Phil Stone, Adam Bleeker, and myself — have spent the day following our flight program, and taking pictures, and maintaining the systems of our spacecraft…

Tim Josephson, sitting in his Washington office and watching the small TV on his desk, found he needed a conscious effort to keep breathing. Keep it bland, calm, unexceptionable. This will do, Muldoon.

In turn, the five astronauts spoke briefly about the work of the day — in the Telescope Mount, on the biomed machines, working on troublesome Moonlab equipment.

Interest in the previous telecasts from this mission — save for the original “handshake” — had been minimal. None of the major channels had carried live coverage, and the astronauts’ families had been forced to come into JSC to follow what was happening up there.

But all that changed as soon as the NERVA blew, and people grew morbidly fascinated anew by the spectacle of humans risking their fragile lives out there in space. It’s our biggest TV audience since Apollo 13, Josephson thought. Don’t foul it up, Joe.

…We’re a long way from home, and it’s hard not to be aware of it. If the Earth was the size of a basketball, say, then the Skylabs would be little toys orbiting an inch or two from the surface. But the Moon would be the size of a baseball, all of twenty feet away, and that’s where we are right now.

Our purpose is to do science out here. You may know we’re on an inclined orbit, so we’re seeing a lot more of the Moon than was possible during the old Apollo landing days. We’re carrying a whole range of cameras, both high-resolution and synoptic, and we have a laser altimeter and other nonimaging sensors, all of which has allowed us to map the whole surface of the Moon at a variety of scales.

And we’ve made some neat discoveries. For instance we’ve found a huge new impact crater on the far side of the Moon, fifteen hundred miles across — that’s nearly a quarter of the Moon’s circumference. I’m told that the Moon is turning out to be a much more interesting place than it was thought to be, even when Neil and I first walked on the surface.

In fact, just at the moment we’re sailing over the Sea of Tranquillity itself. If you look at the disk of the Moon from the Earth, that’s just to the right of center. So you can look up at us and see where we are, right now. And in our big telescopes, I can sometimes make out the glint of our abandoned LM descent stage.

Now, for all the people back on Earth at this difficult time, the crew of Moonlab has a message we would like to send to you.

Oh, Christ, Josephson thought. That sounds bad. What now?

Adam Bleeker drifted out of his seat toward the camera. He took the camera, his outstretched hand foreshortened to grotesque proportions, and swiveled it so that it was pointing out of the wardroom’s window. The image settled down; it was low quality and a little blurred, but Josephson could clearly see the blue crescent Earth, rising above the unraveling, monochrome desolation of the Moon.

The next voice was Phil Stone’s.

“Abide with me; fast falls the eventide;

“The darkness deepens; Lord, with me abide.

“When other helpers fail and comforts fee,

“Help of the helpless, o abide with me…”

Stone’s voice, made harsh by the radio link, was clipped, brisk, almost efficient. Next came the heavily accented tones of Solovyov, high and nervous.

“Swift to its close ebbs out life’s little day,

“Earth’s joys grow dim, its glories pass away;

“Change and decay in all around I see,

“O thou who changest not, abide with me…”

What in hell is Muldoon doing? When the Apollo 8 astronauts had done a Bible reading from lunar orbit, NASA had actually been sued by an atheist, for violating constitutional prohibitions against the establishment of religion. The Soviets have banned religion altogether! — and now here’s a cosmonaut reading out some old hymn from an American space station. My God. What a mess.

And yet — and yet…

Adam Bleeker read, simply and confidently.

“I need thy presence every passing hour;

“What but thy grace can foil the tempter’s power?

“Who like thyself my guide and stay can be?

“Through cloud and sunshine, o abide with me…”

And yet there was something beyond Josephson’s calculation. The old, simple words seemed electric, alive with meaning; it was impossible to forget who these men were, what they had achieved, where they were.

Vladimir Viktorenko’s gruff, heavy English took over.

“I fear no foe with thee at hand to bless;

“Ills have no weight, and tears no bitterness.

“Where is death’s sting? where, grave, thy victory?

“I triumph still, if thou abide with me…

Joe Muldoon read the last verse.