Donnelly knew he had to work systematically. He was going to “down-mode,” in the jargon, move from one set of options to another, more restricted set. He had to preserve as much of the mission objectives as he could without further endangering the lives of the astronauts. If you can’t land on the Moon, can you at least orbit it? And he didn’t want to close out any options he didn’t have to, because he didn’t know what else was likely to be thrown at him, and he needed to keep contingencies open. For example, it was conceivable they might have to use the S-NB engine to direct a reentry, if the problems turned out to be with the Service Module after all.
Tread lightly, lest ye step in shit. That was the motto. The trouble was, Donnelly was quickly running out of options altogether.
In the background, he heard Natalie York talking to the crew. “Apollo-N, we’ve got everyone working on this. We’ll get you some dope as soon as we have it, and you’ll be the first to know.”
Good girl.
Chuck Jones replied. “Thank you, Houston.” On the air-to-ground, Jones’s voice sounded dry, weak.
In response to the sound of Jones’s voice there was a brief, distressed silence in the MOCR, despite the array of amber lights before Donnelly.
He scanned the MOCR. Each of his controllers was staring into his own screen, digging deeper and deeper into the problems he saw in his own area. As if his own problems were somehow separate from the rest.
Donnelly had a pang of doubt, suddenly. Am I handling this the wrong way? The controllers were getting isolated from each other and from the real spacecraft up there; some of them were probably still convincing themselves that there was nothing worse going on than a booster shutdown and some funny instrumentation glitches.
But we already know that isn’t true. The crew heard a bang. And they can see gas venting.
He needed to start talking to his controllers again, to try to keep them thinking as a team.
“Okay,” he said, “I want to get everybody on the loop. Retro, Guidance, Control, Booster, GNC, EECOM, INCO, FAO. Give me an amber, please.”
An amber light on the Flight’s console indicated talk-and-listen; it meant that controller wanted attention. One by one, the lights turned from listen-only green to amber.
Except Booster.
“Goddamn it,” Donnelly snapped. “Booster, Flight. Give me an amber, please.”
“Acknowledge,” Mike Conlig said quickly. The last amber lit.
“All right, people, tell me where we stand. What’s your most urgent item? Who wants to start?”
“Flight, Guidance. That attitude drift—”
“Rog. Capcom, please inform the crew that it needs to maneuver out of a threat of gimbal lock.”
“Acknowledge,” said York.
Bert Seger came stalking down from Management Row, gaunt, intense, every gesture stiff with nervous energy. He stopped at Donnelly’s elbow. He plugged into a console and listened in to the controllers’ loops.
“Flight.” It was EECOM. “I think the best thing we can do right now is start a power-down. Maybe we can look at the telemetry and then come back up.”
That sounded damned optimistic to Donnelly. “Hold on that, EECOM.” He wanted to keep the Command Module’s systems powered up, so he had available the option of bringing the crew down quickly. “Okay, who’s next?”
That asshole at Booster, Mike Conlig, still wasn’t speaking to him.
“It’s the NERVA,” Seger said in his ear.
“Yes. I—”
“The fucking nuke has blown on us. And it looks like it’s disrupted the Service Module as well. That’s obvious even to me. Rolf, you’re moving too slowly. You have to get them away from that thing, and get them home.”
“But—”
“Do it, Rolf, or I’m going to override you.”
Donnelly closed his eyes, for one second. Jesus. There goes my career.
“Capcom, please relay new instructions to the crew.”
Apollo-N continued to pitch and yaw. Metal groaned, and Priest could feel the motion as a wrench at his stomach.
“We’ve got to ditch the NERVA,” Chuck Jones said. His voice was a rasp. “These rates are killing us. Do it, Jim.”
Dana didn’t respond.
Priest looked to his left.
Jim Dana, in the center couch, seemed to have lost consciousness. His face, under his helmet, was severely blistered; in some places strips of flesh were hanging loose, drifting in the air. He looked as if he had vomited; globs of thin, brownish liquid clung to the inside of his faceplate.
Priest reached across to Dana’s station. Separating Apollo-N from the S-NB booster stage was a routine maneuver, something any of them could handle. But Priest’s thinking seemed to be cloudy, and he was having trouble seeing the panel before him. He couldn’t feel the switches through his pressure-suit glove. He fumbled at the glove, but his hand seemed to have swollen up, and the glove was tight. Finally he got the glove off, and let it drift away.
He looked at his bare hand, puzzled. The skin had turned a deep, uniform brown. A nuclear tan. How about that.
He snapped switches.
There was a series of sharp bangs, a shudder.
“Houston, we’ve got separation,” Jones said.
The Earth slid more rapidly past the windows, as the freed Apollo-N tumbled away from the S-NB. With separation, the tumbling seemed to ease; maybe, Priest thought, gas venting from the S-NB had been causing some of the pitching.
Jones worked at hand controllers which should have operated the RCS clusters on the Service Module. He was trying to kill the residual rates, the unwanted tumbling. “Zippo,” he said. “Still nothing, Houston; we don’t have any attitude control.”
“Acknowledged, Apollo-N,” Natalie York said. “We’re working on it. Watch out for gimbal lock.”
Priest could see the red warning disk painted on the eight-ball, drifting into the ball’s little window, the warning for incipient gimbal lock.
“Well, hell,” Jones groused, “I don’t see I can do much about that, Natalie.”
The tumble brought the discarded nuclear booster into Priest’s view. The slim black-and-white cylinder looked almost beautiful as it drifted away from him, silhouetted against the Earth’s shining skin, highlighted by sunlight. But he could see that a panel had blown out of the pressure shell surrounding the reactor core, at the base of the hydrogen tank. Inside the shell, Priest could see a tangle of pipes and Mylar insulation. And the hydrogen tank itself had been ripped open; a thin wisp of gas still vented from the tank.
Priest wondered vaguely if they ought to be focusing a TV camera on the booster.
Jones began to describe the S-NB to Houston. “There’s one whole side of the damn thing missing. I can see wires dangling, and the base of that hydrogen tank is just a mass of ripped metal. It’s really a mess…”
Now, as the S-NB rolled, Priest could see through the base of the ripped-open tank, all the way through to the NERVA reactor itself. And in there, he saw a point of light, white-hot. That’s the goddamn core. The reactor’s blown itself apart, and exposed the core. There was no sign of the biological shield, which must have been blown away. Perhaps that was what they had seen, in red-hot fragments, fountaining past the Command Module’s windows.
As he stared into the wreckage he thought he could actually feel heat on his face: heat radiating from the core itself, as if it were a tiny, captive sun.
He glanced at the radiation dosimeter number on his DSKY. Thirty thousand roentgens an hour were spewing out of the core, and through the spacecraft, in an invisible hail of gamma and neutron radiation.
Thirty thousand. It was a hard number to believe. The safe limit, according to the mission rules, was one-thousandth of a roentgen per day.