It’s a gamble. I just have to leave it to Retro. Does he change his figures, or not?
Then Retro spoke again. “The rate of shallowing is slowing, Flight.”
“I need that pre-advisory data, Retro.”
“Yeah.” Again Donnelly could hear the tension in Retro’s voice. That controller was a very young man approaching the key moment in his life, a decision which would live with him forever.
Donnelly breathed a silent prayer; the only thing he couldn’t accept at that moment was indecision, freezing. Like that fucking asshole, Conlig.
“We’re still shallowing. I’ll stick with the pre-advisory data figures.”
“Say again, Retro.”
“I’ll stick with the original pre-advisory data. If the shallowing continues, we won’t tip up by more than another tenth of a degree.”
Suddenly Donnelly became aware that he’d been holding his breath; he let it out in one huge explosion of stale air. “Rog, Retro.”
There was a haze beyond his window, a soft, pink glow, like a sunrise. At first he thought it might be something to do with the thrusters. But then he realized the glow was ionized gas, atoms from the top layer of Earth’s atmosphere, broken apart by their impact with Apollo-N’s heat shield.
There was a soft pressure over his lower body — subtle, but enough to make his pain blaze anew. He thought he cried out. The cabin vibrated. Earth’s atmosphere was snatching at the Command Module, and Apollo-N was beginning to decelerate, hard.
Suddenly the pressure mounted, climbing fast, crushing him into the couch. He could feel his skin crumple and break open inside the pressure suit. He felt as if he was deliquescing, as if his body had no more substance than a piece of lousy fruit.
A cold white light flooded his window; misty, it glared into the cabin, drowning out the instrument lights.
The last moments before radio blackout seemed almost routine. As if this had been just another nominal mission, instead of the most dangerous and uncertain reentry since Apollo 13. The silence was broken only by occasional updates on the Command Module’s trajectory and attitude, and the disposition of the emergency recovery forces, and by the steady voice of capcom York as she tried to reach the crew.
You’d never know, Donnelly thought.
Then telemetry from Apollo-N was lost.
The MOCR fell silent. There was nothing to do but wait.
It was possible that any small crack in the heat shield would heal itself as the heat shield ablated in the heat of reentry. Possible. But it was another unknown. If, alternatively, the shield was damaged and failed, they would lose the bird anyway.
Priest, suffused by pain, lay on his back, buffeted, compressed, while the cabin rattled around him and fire lapped up from the base of the Command Module behind him.
The glowing chunks of heat shield falling upward past his window were big. Maybe something was wrong. Maybe the shield was failing.
If we’re really reentering. If I’m not hallucinating; if we’re not dead already.
Anyway, he couldn’t do a damn thing about it.
Ben Priest, falling to Earth butt-first, waited for sun heat to sear through the base of Apollo-N and engulf him. It would be a relief.
“Network, no instrumentation aircraft contact yet?”
“Not at this time, Flight.”
Four minutes passed. Five. That should have been enough time to reacquire after the blackout.
On the loops there was nothing but a hiss of static -
“ARIA 4 has acquisition of signal, Flight.”
“Rog,” Donnelly said, barely recognizing his own voice.
There was a stir around the MOCR, a shifting of tired shoulders, weary, tentative grins.
It was an odd feeling, a kind of half relief. Acquisition didn’t mean the crew was alive — and it was still possible that the electronics of the parachute system might be shot — but at least the Command Module wasn’t a cinder.
He heard York calling the crew, over and over, patient and plaintive.
The glow had died, fading out to an ordinary sky blue, and the G meter read 1.0, and he was falling toward the ocean at a thousand feet per second. The events of the splashdown ticked by, clear in his sharp, fragile thoughts.
There was a crack: that was the parachute cover coming off from the tip of the conical Command Module. And another sharp snap, as the three small drogue chutes were released. He saw bright streams of fabric beyond the window.
He took a kick in the back as the drogues plucked at the air, stabilizing the fall of the Command Module.
There was a loud hiss; that would be the vent opening to let the cabin’s pressure equalize with the air outside. Any second and -
There. Another bang. That had to be the mains, the three eighty-footers which would lower Apollo-N gently to the ocean’s surface.
As the mains filled with air, the cabin was jolted. Priest was rocked in his couch, and the pain climbed off the scale.
Through his window he could see a slab of blue sky, wisps of cloud.
There was a distant voice in his head, brisk, friendly, competent. “Apollo-N, Apollo-N, Air Boss 1, you have been reported on radar as southeast of your recovery ship at thirty miles. Apollo-N, Apollo-N. Welcome home, gentlemen; we’ll have you aboard in no time.”
Priest wanted to reply. But he was too far away, too sunk into the shell of his body.
The big screen at right front of the MOCR lit up with a TV picture of Apollo-N. Its three ringsail mains were safely deployed, three great, perfect canopies of red and white.
The cheering was so loud it drowned out Donnelly’s headset, and he had to call for quiet.
There was a lot of radio traffic, chattering remotely in his headset. “This is Recovery 2. I see the chutes. Level with me at precisely four thousand feet.” “Affirmative, we do have a capsule in sight…”
There was a checklist the crew was supposed to follow, Priest recalled vaguely. They should be closing that pressure relief valve, for instance, and setting the floodlights to postlanding, and getting set to cast off the mains after splashdown, so that the Command Module didn’t get dragged through the water.
But there was nobody to do it.
Priest tried to relax, to submit to the pain.
Then there was a huge impact, an astonishing eruption of agony throughout his battered body.
Water poured in through an open vent above him, showering Priest, so much of it that he thought the Command Module’s hull must have cracked open.
And the Command Module tipped. He could feel the roll, see the ocean wheel past his window.
When the windows dipped into the seawater, the cabin went dark. Priest found himself hanging there in his straps, with cabin trash raining down around him: bits of paper, urine bags, discarded washcloths. Stable 2, he thought. Upside down. Chuck will be furious. We screwed up. Nobody cut loose the mains.
He hung there like a bat in the inverted cabin, and the darkness, broken by just the Christmas-tree lights of the instrument panel, was kind of peaceful. In a moment the flotation bags would flip the Command Module upright, to the Stable 1 position.
He closed his eyes.
Sunday, December 7, 1980
The first image showed the five members of the crew in their Snoopy flight helmets, sitting on their T-cross chairs around the small table in Moonlab’s wardroom. Joe Muldoon sat at the center of the group, holding a piece of onionskin paper.
This is the crew of Moonlab, coming to you live from lunar orbit. The five of us — our guests Vladimir Viktorenko and Aleksandr Solovyov, and Phil Stone, Adam Bleeker, and myself — have spent the day following our flight program, and taking pictures, and maintaining the systems of our spacecraft…