“Yes. Yes, sure. You just follow me. We’ll be fine. Okay. Thrust switches to normal.”
“Thrust switches normal.”
“Inject prevalves on.”
He had to reach for that one; the pain lay in great sheets across his back and arms. “Okay. Inject prevalves on.”
“One minute to the burn, Ben. Arm the translational controller.”
Priest pulled the handle over until the label ARMED showed clearly. “Armed.”
“Okay, now. Ullage.”
Priest pushed the translational controller; the Apollo-N shifted forward, the small kick of its reaction jets settling the propellants in the big Service Module SPS engine, in preparation for the main deorbit burn.
“Good. Very good, Ben. Thirty seconds,” York said. “Thrust-on enable, Ben.”
Priest unlocked the control and gave it a half turn. “Enabled.”
“Say again, Ben.”
“Enabled.” Even his throat hurt, damn it.
“Fifteen seconds. You’ve done it, Ben. Sit tight, now.”
Sure. And what if the SPS doesn’t fire? Christ knows what condition the Service Module is in after the goddamn NERVA blew up under it; we’ve been losing power and telemetry since the explosion… And they had to assume that the Command Module’s systems — the guidance electronics and the computers for instance — hadn’t been too badly damaged by NERVA; he didn’t think all those roentgens passing through could have done the ship’s brains a lot of good.
He braced himself for the kick in the back.
“Two, one. Fire.”
Nothing.
He shuddered, the tension in his aching muscles releasing in spasms.
“Okay,” York said calmly. “Direct delta-vee switch, Ben.”
“Direct delta-vee.” He reached for the manual fire switch and jerked it out and up, ignoring the pain in his arm.
There was a hiss, a rattly thrust which pushed him into his couch.
There was a green light before him. “Retrofire,” he whispered.
The pressure over his wounded back increased, and he longed for microgravity to return. But it didn’t, and he just had to lie there immersed in pain, enduring it.
“Copy the retrofire, Ben.” York’s voice was trembling. “We copy that. We’ll do the rest. Stay with me, now.”
The pain overwhelmed him, turning his thoughts to mud.
Beyond his window, Earth slid away from him. The big SPS was working, changing the ship’s trajectory.
“Be advised that old SPS is a damn fine engine, Houston,” he whispered. Even after having a nuke go off under it, the thing had still worked, faithfully bringing him home. How about that.
Then someone was talking to him. Maybe it was Natalie. He couldn’t even recognize her voice, through the fog of pain. That last checklist had just about used him up. Either this bird was going to fly him home or it wasn’t; there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it anymore.
He could see Natalie’s face before him: serious, bony, a little too long, with those big heavy eyebrows creased in concentration; he remembered her face above his, in the dark, that night after the Mars 9 landing.
He couldn’t visualize Karen at all.
What a mess he’d made of his life — the warm heart of it anyhow — by his negligence, his focus on his career, his indecision. And all for these few hours in space.
He’d change things when he got back down, and back to health. By God, I will.
The thrust sighed to silence, and he had a couple of minutes of blessed relief in the smooth balm of microgravity.
There was a muffled rattle, all around the base of the cabin. That would be the ring of pyrotechnic bolts at the base of the conical Command Module, firing under command from Houston, and casting off the messed-up Service Module.
He might be able to see the Service Module as it drifted away. His duty, probably, was to find a camera and photograph the damn thing. Sure. He couldn’t even close a fist; every time he tried, the pain in his hand was like an explosion of light.
There was something rising above the Earth’s atmosphere; it was golden brown, serene. The Moon. How about that. It was right slap in the middle of his window. He thought of Joe Muldoon and his crew up there with the Soviets; probably Muldoon would be following the progress of this reentry.
The couch kicked him, gently; fresh pain washed over his skin. That was the Command Module’s own small attitude controllers: Houston, or the onboard computer, was trying to keep the Command Module in its forty-mile-wide reentry corridor.
Through the pain, Priest felt a kind of security settle over him. As best he could tell, this was about the point in the reentry sequence when the automatics were supposed to kick in anyway. Apollo-N was back on its flight plan, for the first time since the NERVA core had blown.
“You got that pre-advisory data ready yet, Retro?”
“Not yet, Flight.”
It was getting damned late. Something is wrong. What isn’t he telling me?
Rolf Donnelly had thought that the most dangerous moment in this reentry would be when the Command Module dug deep into the atmosphere, when it would be totally reliant on its heat shield. And if that shield had been cracked during the explosion, the craft was going to split open and burn like a meteor. He couldn’t do anything about that; it was a question of waiting and hoping.
As yet they’d barely grazed the top of the atmosphere. But, then, totally out of the blue, he feared already he was about to lose the Command Module.
The controller called Retro, down in the Trench, was in charge of controlling the Command Module’s reentry angle. Just before the Service Module separation, Retro had been telling Donnelly that Apollo-N’s angle of attack was right in the middle of the entry corridor. It could hardly have been better, in fact. And that meant that the pre-advisory data Retro had prepared earlier was still valid. The pre-advisory data contained the final vector that would control the spacecraft’s degree of lift while it fought the atmosphere.
But Retro still had to feed the final pre-advisory to the Command Module’s onboard computers. And then, minutes before the atmosphere started to bite, Donnelly could hear Retro arguing with FIDO, the flight dynamics controller, who was passing Retro updated predictions on the spacecraft’s trajectory.
Retro blurted: “I don’t believe you, FIDO!”
Donnelly felt acid spurt into his stomach. “Clarify, Retro. You want to tell me what’s going on over there?”
“The trajectory is shallowing, Flight. We’re up by point three one degrees.”
Still within the corridor. But that was a heck of a lot of shallowing at this point. And if the shallowing continued, Retro was going to have to revise the pre-advisory data. “You have any idea what’s happening up there, Retro?”
“No idea, Flight.” There was tension in the voice, and Donnelly could see Retro peering over the shoulder of FIDO, next to him, trying to get the latest trajectory updates.
Was the trajectory going to shallow any more? That depended on the cause. If, say, one of the attitude thrusters was stuck open, the shallowing would continue. But if propellant or coolant was boiling off from some flaw in the hull, then the cause might dwindle and the shallowing stop.
The trouble was, nobody knew. None of them was sure about the extent of the damage the Command Module had suffered in the core rupture.
Donnelly, if he had to lose the crew, would prefer an undershoot, a burn-up. If the Command Module skipped off the atmosphere and was left in orbit, circling for months or years up there with a cargo of three radioactive corpses, the space program would be dead.
He took another poll of his controllers. None of them had any data to feed him on the trajectory. And besides, the telemetry was starting to get uncertain, as ionization built up around the Command Module.