Ascent to orbit was always the most difficult and dangerous phase of a mission: the phase when a hell of a lot of energy was being expended to get those tons of metal up to an orbital speed of five miles per second. Reentry was infinitely easier since you could dissipate all that energy at your leisure. Ascent was the phase when you were buying the most risk, the phase when Donnelly always braced himself for problems.

He felt he needed more control than he’d had on this flight so far.

The trouble was, the Marshall Germans had developed their skills in an era of automated, unmanned vehicles. You couldn’t send a command to a V-2 once it was off the pad. And the thought of trying to control a bird in flight was still alien to them. So the Germans had done their best to turn their controllers, the people involved, into robots — extensions of the machine. Don’t improvise. Be disciplined. Follow the book, you’re paid to react, not to think.

Donnelly made a silent vow that he would campaign to have procedures changed. He didn’t want to be put in the position of having to trust the judgment of the Marshall people again.

Still — although the Saturn was riding a little above its planned path, on the big trajectory plot at the front of the room — the crew seemed to have ridden out the pogo, and the booster’s telemetry looked nominal. The stack had survived its first staging, the discarding of the spent S-IC, and the second-stage burn looked smooth.

Maybe we’ll get away with this…

Donnelly could feel a pressure on his back. There were men in that Viewing Room, among the VIPs and celebrities and headquarters people and politicians and crew families, who would know things were going wrong. There was Fred Michaels himself, with his nose practically pressed up against the glass. And beside Michaels was Gregory Dana, Jim’s father. Donnelly didn’t know Dana senior personally, but he understood he was some kind of mission specialist from Langley. The pressure exerted by the man was worse even than anything induced by the presence of Michaels. Goddamn it, that’s my son up there.

Donnelly was a man on the climb. He looked forward to a bright future — a few more years there in the arena, then maybe a move up into program management. And when he’d pulled off this complex and difficult mission, it would be one hell of a feather in his cap.

He loved his job. He wanted to go a lot farther; he wanted to run the flight to Mars. He did not want this mission to fail.

It was time to light the nuke.

Apollo-N shuddered as explosive bolts severed the spent S-II second stage. Dana drifted, weightless, waiting for the next kick.