Donnelly had to make the right call. By tradition only Flight, or Surgeon, the mission doctor, could call an abort. NASA senior management had never before overridden a flight director’s decision during a mission.

It was a first Donnelly didn’t want to happen on his watch.

Natalie York, as capcom, was sitting in the workstation row in front of Rolf Donnelly. She watched the faces of the controllers around her. She’d gotten to know them all during the intensive training for this mission, the long, complex integrated sims, the frenetic drinking sessions later. They were all men, all very young. They shared a brand of intense, fragile intelligence which made them socially awkward, maybe temperamental, ultimately unstable.

They’d all had a tough time during the flight to orbit, and they still faced equally tough decisions.

Mike sat in the Trench, the row in front of her, a little to her left. He was hunched over his console, his posture redolent of tension, his hair loose and greasy at his neck. He was bent in some huddled discussion with a colleague from Marshall.

She remembered all her old doubts about Mike’s temperament — whether he was suited to high-pressure situations like this, involving erratic boosters and manned spacecraft and rapidly unraveling missions…

She had an impulse to reach out and touch him, to try to reassure or calm him. But she knew that her intrusion wouldn’t be welcomed. Mike was off on some trajectory of his own, as out of her control as had been the Saturn/NERVA stack, guiding itself into space.

Anyhow, she ought to be concentrating on herself. This assignment was a big moment for her. York was an ascan no more. She was officially on the flight roster, and this capcom posting was her first operational duty: quite a vote of confidence.

It was much more difficult than she’d expected. The capcom was the only person allowed to speak to the crew. She was the funnel for inputs from all around the MOCR, and beyond; she had to be alert, to think constantly, to filter and integrate all the information she received. Nobody was writing her a script; she had to figure it for herself, in real time.

So far, she reckoned, she was doing fine. But nobody was noticing her, one way or the other. They wouldn’t until she screwed up.

I just hope you make the right choices today, Mike. For Christ’s sake, it’s Ben up there…

Jones and Priest drifted down to sleeping compartments in the equipment bay. Each of them was actually just a six-foot-long shelf with a foot of clearance, big enough to take a body-sized mesh hammock.