Sometimes he needed a little help to get to sleep. A couple of pills or a drink or two. He allowed himself that. He was on high blower, he told his wife; he was like a T-38 on afterburner. Thursday, January 8, 1981

…On admission, Colonel Priest was nauseated, chilled, and agitated, with glassy eyes. His temperature was 104 degrees. He had been cut from his pressure suit. He suffered repeated vomiting, and swelling of the face, neck, and upper extremities. His arms were so swollen, in fact, that his blood pressure could not be taken with the normal cuff, and the nurses had to enlarge it.

He was periodically conscious, and sometimes coherent and logical, but I judged he was not strong enough to contribute to any debriefпngs concerning the accident.

Priest’s difficulty in speaking and lapses into incoherence made his relatives in attendance, and some of my staff, feel uncomfortable.

Twenty-four hours after admission I ordered four samples of bone marrow to be taken from Priest’s sternum and iliac bones (both front and rear). Priest was very patient during the proceedings. The samples were used to determine the whole body dose.

During the fourth and fifth days after admission, Priest was in great pain from injuries to the mucous membranes of the mouth, esophagus, and stomach. The mucous membranes were coming off in layers. Priest lost both sleep and appetite. Starting on the sixth day his right shin, on which the skin was disintegrating, began to swell and feel as if it was bursting; it then became rigid and painful.

On the seventh day, on account of a profound agranulocytosis — that is, a drop in the number of granular forms of leucocytes, responsible for immunity — I ordered an administration of 750 milliliters of bone marrow with blood.

Priest was then moved to a room sterilized with ultraviolet light. A period of intestinal syndrome began: bowel movements occurred between twenty-five and thirty times every twenty-four hours, containing blood and mucus; there was tenesmus, rumbling, and movement of fluids in the region of the caecum.

Owing to the severe lesions in the mouth and esophagus, Priest did not eat for several days. We provided nutrient fluids intravenously. In the meantime, soft blisters appeared on the perineum and buttocks, and the right shin was bluish purple, swollen, shiny, and smooth to the touch.

On the fourteenth day Colonel Priest began to lose his hair, in a curious manner: all the hair on the back of his head and body fell out. He grew weaker, and his lapses into unconsciousness or incoherence grew more prolonged.

On Friday January 2, the thirtieth day after the accident, Priest’s blood pressure suddenly dropped.

Fifty-seven hours later, Colonel Priest died; I recorded the immediate cause of death as acute myocardial dystrophy.

Under the microscope, it was quite impossible to see Priest’s heart tissue. The cell nuclei were a mass of torn fibers. It is accurate to say that Priest died directly from the radiation itself, and not from secondary biological changes. Gentlemen, it is impossible to save such patients, once the heart tissue has been destroyed.

Of the three members of Apollo-N’s crew, only Colonel Priest was found to be alive when the capsule was recovered after reentry. The radiation from the ruptured NERVA core had hit Colonel Priest from behind, doing most harm to his back, his calves, his perineum, and buttocks.

His mother, wife, and son were in attendance at his death.

Source: Report of the Presidential Commission on the Apollo-N Malfunction, Vol. I: Testimony of Dr. I.S. Kirby to the Medical Analysis Panel (extract) (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1981)

One of the back rooms behind the MOCR had been turned into the primary site for investigating the telemetry data received from Apollo-N in the moments leading up to the accident. The walls were papered with strips displaying the readouts from every sensor they’d had the crew and craft wired up to.

And it was there that Natalie York had to sit and listen to voice tapes from the Command Module cabin, and read through and annotate typed transcripts.

Everyone was clinical, of course. Even scientific. The point was to gather data. Had the astronauts had any earlier indication that some problem was developing with the NERVA? Perhaps a close enough analysis of the tapes could tease that out, provide further clues about the cause.

And York, as capcom on the day, was the best placed to interpret their words.

She had to listen to the tapes over and over.

Every time York went through the tapes it was like reliving the whole incident. Did it fail because of me? If only Mike hadn’t frozen. If only she’d had a little more intuition about what was going on — if she could have warned Ben that the core was getting out of control, he might have overridden the automatics from the Command Module and shut the damn thing down…

Eventually York reached a point where she felt that if she had to listen to Ben’s weakening voice one more time, her heart was going to burst.

I guess our business will stay unfinished, Ben. Oh, God.

They hadn’t even let her see him before he died.

“Mom?”

“I’m coming out there, Natalie.”

“No, Mom.”

“Now, don’t try to stop me. I know you need me right now.”

“For what?”

“I know how much Ben meant to you.”

York was silent, for long moments; she even considered hanging up. “What do you know, exactly?”

“You aren’t very experienced in this stuff, are you, dear? When I saw you at that party, when you first moved into the Portofino… It was obvious, Natalie. Even if I hadn’t been your mother, I would have known. I only had to see the way you two behaved toward each other. The way you were careful not to pay each other attention. And the way, when you did come together somehow, it was as if you knew each other so well you could anticipate the other’s needs…”

Jesus. Well, I guess I’m not much of an actress. So does everybody know?

There was a rattle of keys at the door.

“I’ll have to go, Mom.”

“I’ll come out there.”

“No.”

“Ben Priest was married, wasn’t he? I read in—”

“Good-bye, Mom.” She put the phone down.

Mike Conlig stood in the middle of the room, looking at her. He carried a bag, with airline stickers that betrayed he’d been out to Marshall.

It was the first time she’d seen him since the accident. More than a month.

“You froze,” York said without hesitation. “You froze. What the hell were you thinking of, Mike?”

Mike put his bag down and started to pace about the apartment, his coat heavy. His hair straggled out of an unkempt ponytail, and his beard had grown down over his neck. “I didn’t freeze,” Conlig said.

“If you knew you were going to choke up like that, you should have just gotten out of that goddamn chair,” York said. She felt her throat tighten up, a pressure behind her eyes; but, by God, she was going to see this through without falling apart. “You had a responsibility! Those men in orbit were relying on you…”

He stood over her, his face twisted in disgust. “First time I see you in a month, and it’s straight on the attack. Happy fucking New Year to you, Natalie. So I killed them. Is that what you’re telling me?”

“But the damn NERVA wasn’t ready to fly. Was it?”

“Natalie, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Was it? You worked on the cooling systems for years, and in the end, with three men on board, the damn thing overheated and exploded—”

“I knew what I was doing, Natalie.”

“You knew you were letting the NERVA melt down?”

“No.” He shook his head. “No, damn it. Natalie, it’s the easiest thing in the world to abort. If I’d aborted, we’d have lost the mission—”