York sat in the center couch, the Command Module Pilot’s. She was looking up toward the apex of the cone. The windows seemed small and far away; even though the hatch was open, she felt enclosed in there. Directly in front of her there was a big, battleship-gray, 180-degree instrument panel. There were five hundred controls: toggle switches, thumbwheels, push buttons, and rotary switches with click stops. The readouts were mainly meters, lights, and little rectangular windows containing either “gray flags” or “barber poles”; the barber pole was a stripy piece of metal that would fill the window when the setting had to be changed. There were a tiny computer keypad, a small cathode-ray tube, and eight-balls — artificial horizons. There were small joysticks and push buttons: translational controllers, to work the Command Module’s clusters of attitude rockets.

The panel seemed complex, almost ludicrously so. How the hell was she going to find her way around all this?

She experimented with the switches. They were mostly of two types: little silver three-way tabs, or — for more critical functions — cylindrical levers, two-way, that you had to pull out before they would move. These would be awkward in pressure-suit gloves, she thought. The switches were protected by little metal gates on either side, to save them being kicked by a free-fall boot. She worked her way across the panel, practicing flipping the dead switches, getting used to the feel of them.

There were little diagrams etched into the panel, she saw, circuit and flowcharts. She consulted her manuals. For example, there was one diagram which connected a set of switches that controlled water output from the fuel cells. The little gray lines mirrored the way the water flowed, either to controls for the storage tanks, or for the dumps.

All the switches were contained by one diagram or another. Once she started to see the system behind the diagrams, she began to figure the logic in the panel, how the switches clustered and related to each other.

Sitting alone inside the quiet Apollo, she worked her way through her manuals, learning how the spaceship was flown.

Monday, June 11, 1979

STARRY TOWN, MOSCOW

The convoy of buses skirted around Moscow, following the freeways. They were heading northeast, toward Kaliningrad. There was a lot of traffic, most of it freight, and the road was lined with apartment blocks, huge, drab monoliths.

Joe Muldoon stared out of a grimy window. It was the most depressing sight he had ever seen.