And then the massive pressure started working on the structure of the pressure shell itself.
I’ve lost it. I’ve lost the reactor. It had taken seconds for his life to fall apart. He tried to react, to think of something to do, to make a report to Flight. But his mouth was dry, the muscles of his jaw locked.
There was a loud, dull bang, and the Command Module shook: bang, whump, shudder.
Dana, strapped into his center seat, could feel the spacecraft quake under him. Hollow rattles and creaks sounded from around the cabin, a groan of metal as the can around him was stressed; it was a noise oddly like a deep-throated whale song.
The master alarm shrilled in Dana’s headset, a shrill of staccato beeps. Yellow warning lights lit up all over the control panels.
He turned to look at his companions. Jones was staring at the instrument panel, and Priest’s eyes were round. That sure as hell wasn’t routine, whatever it was.
Jones cleared the master alarm.
The feeling of thrust died abruptly. It was like a slow collision in a car; Dana was thrown forward, gently, against his straps.
Jones said, “Jim. The Main A light is on. Check it out.”
Dana looked at his console. A red undervolt light was glowing. Damn. I should have been the first to see it. The Command Module’s systems were Dana’s responsibility.
“Confirm that,” he said. “We’ve got a Main A undervolt.” He was surprised his voice was level. He began to check voltage and current levels; they were showing erratic, inconsistent readings.
He heard pinging and popping noises. It was the sound of metal flexing. The spacecraft was still shuddering. Some damn thing has blown up on us.
Earth was wheeling past the windows. The Service Module thrusters ought to be firing as the spacecraft tried to maintain its orientation. But he couldn’t hear any solenoids thumping.
Jones was talking to Houston. “Natalie, we be a sorry bird up here. We’ve got a problem.” He unbuckled his restraints and floated up to the left-hand window. Dana knew he was following an old pilot’s instinct: at a moment like this, regardless of the telemetry, you needed to take a walk around the bird, to look for leaks and kick the tires, see for himself what was wrong.
Dana glanced out of the window to his right, past Ben Priest.
He saw sparks, chunks of some material, flying up past the Command Module. The material was glowing, red-hot.
Then he could smell something, inside his helmet. It reminded him, oddly, of Hampton: his childhood, the ocean.
Ozone.
Donnelly didn’t even need to hear the specific words. He could feel the event, see it in the changed postures of controllers all over the room, hear it in the sudden urgency of their voices.
Something had fouled up. But at first the cause wasn’t clear; all Donnelly got was a rash of symptoms, monitored by his controllers.
“We’ve got more than a problem.” That was EECOM, in charge of electrical and environmental systems: life support in Apollo-N. He was shouting. “I have CSM EPS high density. Listen up, you guys. Fuel cell 1 and 2 pressure has gone away.” Controller jargon, for fallen to zero. “And I’m losing oxygen tank 1 pressure and temperature.”
Natalie York was talking to the crew. “This is Houston. Repeat that, please.”
“…We’ve got a problem,” Jones said over the air-to-ground. “The NERVA is out, and we’re seeing a Main Bus A undervolt.”
“Roger. Main Bus A. Stand by, Apollo-N; we’re looking at it.”
Guidance said, “We’ve had a hardware restart. We don’t know what it was.”
A hardware restart meant some unusual event had caused the computer to shut itself down and reboot. Donnelly called for confirmation from another controller.
The crew kept reporting the Bus A undervolt.
The electrical power for Apollo-N came from three fuel cells in the Service Module. The current from the cells flowed through the A and B Buses, conduits which fed the rest of the spacecraft’s components. An undervolt alarm meant the spacecraft was losing its electrical power.
Donnelly tried to get confirmation of the problem from EECOM. “You see a Bus undervolt, EECOM?”
“…Negative, Flight.”
But EECOM had hesitated.
He knows more than he’s telling me. He’s still trying to figure it through. What the hell was happening? The mission seemed to be falling apart before his eyes.
Donnelly pressed EECOM again; he needed more data. “The crew is still reporting the undervolt, EECOM.”
“Okay, Flight. I have some instrumentation problems. Let me add them up.”
Instrumentation problems. EECOM sees the undervolt, all right. But he doesn’t believe what the instruments are telling him. He’s looking at a lot of ratty data, he thinks some kind of major telemetry failure is under way. He wants to be sure before he reports it to me.
Donnelly said, “I assume you’ve called in your backup EECOM to see if we can get more intelligence applied here.”
“We have him here.”
“Roger.”
Then INCO, the instrumentation and communications controller, called in. “Flight, INCO. The high-gain antenna has switched to high beam.”
What in hell did that mean? “INCO, can you confirm the time when that change occurred?” If he could, it might be a clue in pinning down what was happening…
Before INCO could reply there was another call. “Flight, Guidance. We have attitude changes.”
“What do you mean, attitude changes?”
“The RCS valves appear to be closed. They should be open.”
Reaction control problems. Antenna problems. Problems with the oxygen tanks, and the fuel cells.
He’d never seen a systems signature like this before, not in any of the sims he’d gone through. But then, even after twelve years of flights, Apollo-Saturn was still an experimental system. You’d test-fly an airplane far more times than any spacecraft had ever flown, before declaring it operational.
So what was hitting him? It could be instrumentation problems, flaky readouts, as EECOM seemed to suspect. Or it could be that the Service Module had blown out, knocking the whole stack sideways. Or something else might have blown, and damaged the Service Module.
INCO’s timing came in. His antenna problems dated from a few seconds after they’d lit the NERVA.
For the first time in several seconds Donnelly glanced at the trajectory plot board. The spacecraft was diverging, markedly, from the path it should have followed, had the NERVA been burning smoothly.
The S-NB looked to have shut down.
“Guidance, you want to confirm that deviation?”
“Rog, Flight.” Guidance was the ground navigator. Guidance must be looking at multiple problems, too, as the spacecraft drifted from its trajectory and tumbled away from its intended attitude.
“Booster, you have anything to report?”
Mike Conlig did not reply. Donnelly could see how he was hunched over his console. “Booster?”
York said, “The crew is reporting a smell of ozone, inside their helmets.”
“Flight, this is Surgeon. I have a contrary indication.” The flight doctor on this flight was a crop-headed Oklahoman sitting in the row in front of Donnelly, with the systems guys, at the left-hand end next to Natalie York. He was wearing a button badge which read FUCK IRAN. His voice was taut, urgent.
Donnelly switched him onto a closed loop. “Go, Surgeon.”
“Flight, I’m monitoring a surge of radiation flux through the spacecraft cabin. And some changes in the crew’s vital readings.”
Donnelly was thinking through York’s brief report. They can smell ozone. Oxygen, ionized by radiation. Radiation from the NERVA. Jesus Christ almighty.