Dana strapped himself into the left couch, in front of the control panel. He knew that being in the couch he’d drawn the most comfortable sleeping berth. But as Command Module Pilot, Dana had to keep his headset on during the night, in case the crew had to be woken by Houston. And even if Houston restricted their chatter, there was always a dull roar of static, which wasn’t going to help him sleep.

None of that mattered.

My first night in space. All around him the cabin of the Command Module hummed and glowed, gray and green and warm, a small boy’s dream of the perfect den. A loose page from a checklist came drifting over his head, on some random air current; when he blew toward it, the page crumpled a little and drifted away.

He turned to the window. Apollo-N was flying over a mountain range. He could see the wrinkles in the land, as if the world were some huge, sculptured toy beneath him; thick clouds lapped against one side of the range, like a turbulent fluid.

He felt detached from the frustrations and complexities of his life below: the routine, the time-eating training, the press stuff he hated so much, the endless waiting he’d had to endure for this, his first flight. All of the problems seemed flattened, two-dimensional, like the surface of the Earth, and he felt a warm love reach out from him to envelop Mary and the kids, his parents, the whole of the glowing planet of his birth.

Christ, it’s true. I was born to be up here. None of the rest of it — the engineering, the science, even the prospect of going to Mars — none of it counts, compared to this moment.

I never want to go back down.

They’d checked out everything they could, and all the telemetry looked good, and the inertial table was lined up, and the subsystems checked out, and all the backroom guys and the engineers and the contractors with their test rigs were saying, yes, we know what went wrong; and no, we’re confident this mission is going to throw you no more curve balls.

I’ll tell you how we can achieve zero risk, Donnelly thought. We won’t fly.

Donnelly stood up and turned to face Bert Seger, who stood behind him in Management Row.

“Bert, I’m going to recommend we proceed with the mission. All the parameters have fallen into line.”

Seger, hollow-eyed with jet lag, just nodded.

It was 4 A.M. The decision was obvious.

Donnelly sat down. He’d been resting his hands on sheets of his flight plans; when he lifted his hands he found he’d left behind two perfect, wet images of his palms.

Monday, December 1, 1980

MOONLAB

Adam Bleeker was the first of the Moonlab crew to eyeball the approaching Soyuz. “Hey, Phil, Joe. Come see.”

Stone drifted down to the wardroom’s big picture window.