It was already after midnight when Bert Seger called Fay from his office.
He asked Fay to send him some fresh clothes. He made a mental note to arrange a security pass for her; JSC, and the Cape, had been sealed off as soon as news of the accident’s severity had started to break.
He asked after the kids and failed to hear the answers. Then he told Fay he loved her. He hung up.
It was evident he was going to be working out of Houston for a while, or maybe the Cape, if and when the Command Module was retrieved after reentry. Fred Michaels had already told him that Carter was ordering a Presidential Commission to look into the accident, to which he’d expect NASA to respond fully, and for which response he’d be holding Seger accountable.
Seger expected nothing else.
Sooner or later, he’d always known, an astronaut was going to die on him.
The systems they were building simply weren’t reliable enough to guarantee safety. Most of the astronaut corps were still test pilots; they knew the odds better than anyone else, and they accepted them. But the people on the ground were Seger’s greater concern. His ground crews would have to live with the knowledge that they might have done something differently. It won’t fail because of me. What happened when that transmuted to: It failed because of me?
The phone rang. It was Tim Josephson, who wanted to talk about nominees for NASA’s internal investigative panel, that would be set up to anticipate and assist the Presidential Commission.
Seger forced himself to focus on what Josephson was saying.
He and Josephson soon agreed on a core list, save for the astronaut representative.
“What about Natalie York?” Seger said. “She was capcom when the stack blew; she showed herself to be cool and analytical under pressure. And she’s a personal friend of Priest’s.”
Josephson vetoed that. “York is still a rookie. And besides, she’s attached to Mike Conlig. Had you forgotten that? How can she assess a case, maybe involving defective designs or suspect management practices, involving her boyfriend?”
They went through some more names, without success.
Josephson cut him off. “Bert, I’ll tell you who Fred wants. Joe Muldoon.”
“Muldoon? Are you crazy? Muldoon is a loose cannon.”
“Yeah. He’s been a loudmouth, but that maybe gives him a reputation for independence, which wouldn’t hurt right now. And he was a moonwalker. Fred has a lot of time for him.”
“Muldoon’s not available anyway. He’s in lunar orbit.”
“But he’s due to return in a week. That’s time enough…”
They argued around it for a while, but eventually Seger gave in.
He was uneasy about having someone as crass and loud as Muldoon in such a high-profile role. There was bound to be a lot of dirt to be dug out over this incident, particularly from Marshall; he shuddered when he imagined what kind of stuff Muldoon, hero astronaut, might start feeding the press.
He would have to keep a lid on all of that.
When Josephson hung up, it was 3 A.M.
Seger knew he needed sleep. He kept a fold-up bed in a closet for times like this.
He slipped off his shoes and got to his knees and tried to pray. But he couldn’t concentrate; his mind kept on making up lists of things he had to do, sorting them in priority order.
Strangely, the doubts he had felt earlier in the mission — doubts induced by the hostility of the antinuke protesters — had melted away, now that the worst had come to pass. He felt confident about his ability to cope with all of this. NASA’s ability, in fact. It was only some damned hardware fault, after all. A fault they could fix, once it had identified itself.
And NASA had survived problems like this before: he remembered that just two years after the Apollo 1 fire, Armstrong and Muldoon had landed on the Moon. And after Apollo 13 had blown up on the way to the Moon, not only had they gotten the astronauts back, but they’d gone on to fly, on 14, the most successful damned mission of them all.
He touched the gold crucifix at his lapel. He felt oddly light, almost giddy. They’d get through this; he had no doubt about it. With God’s help.
But it was difficult to pray. Somehow, he felt God was far away from him, that night.
Finally, at around 4 A.M., he slept. But he was up again and making his first calls of the day by seven.
Thursday, December 4, 1980
The pain was everywhere, unbelievably intense, a huge cellular agony that went on and on until he couldn’t bear it, and then went on some more. It felt as if every soft surface of Priest’s body, inside and out, had been coated with acid, as if he was rotting away from the outside in.
He still wore his pressure suit, and that was maybe just as well, because the pain was like one immense itch; he’d probably have rubbed himself raw if he could have gotten to his skin. But the suit had its disadvantages. His bowels had been loose for hours, and he’d thrown up inside the helmet, which was every aviator’s nightmare. But at least the floating globs of vomit had stopped drifting about in front of his face, and had stuck to something: the helmet’s visor, or maybe his hair and skin; he didn’t really care, as long as he could forget about the damn stuff.
He couldn’t seem to smell anything, and that was probably just as well.
He tried to turn his head to the left, to see Chuck and Jim. But he couldn’t move. Anyhow, they hadn’t answered the last time he’d spoken to them. They’d looked surprisingly composed, sealed up inside their pressure suits, as no doubt he did himself; all the vomit and shit and human pain was neatly confined to the inside of the suits, leaving the Command Module cabin antiseptic and efficient, save for the banks of glowing warning lights on the instrument panel.
Anyway, he didn’t really want to turn away from his window. That window was very, very important to him, because it framed the nightside of Earth. He could see the auroras: colored waves surging down from the poles, high layers of air glistening red and green under the impact of the particle wind from the sun. And he could see flashes, high in the atmosphere, and sometimes straight streaks of light that lingered in his retina for long seconds — meteors, specks of extraterrestrial dust plunging into the atmosphere…
Priest used to sit with Petey, when his son was small, gazing up at the meteor showers caroming into the roof of the air. And then, he was watching meteors burning up beneath him. This is one hell of a trip, Petey.
There were other lights in the night.
At the heart of South America, he saw a huge, dispersed glow: a fire, devouring trees at the center of the Amazon rain forest. And as Apollo-N sailed over deserts, he would spy oil and gas wells sparkling brightly, captive stars in all that darkness.
Cities stunned him with their night brightness. If there was cloud, it would soak up and diffuse the illumination, and he would see the shape of the city as a huge, amorphous bowl of light. And if the sky was clear, he seemed to be able to make out every detail as clearly as if he were taking a T-38 on a buzz just over the rooftops. He saw streets and highways like ribbons of light, yellow and orange, and tall buildings ablaze like boxes of diamonds. He saw bridges and out-of-town highways shining with the headlights of lines of cars. It was as if he could feel all that light, and heat, pouring up out of the atmosphere to him…
“We need you to help us, Ben. You’re the only one talking to us up there. Stay with it, now.”
“Yeah.” But it hurts, Natalie…
“I know it’s hard, Ben. Come on. Work with me. Can you reach the preburn checklist? It’s Velcroed over the—”
“Walk me through it, would you, Natalie.”