They have to get the crew away from that damn booster. Dana couldn’t understand why that hadn’t been done already.

He glanced around. He couldn’t tell if any of this was being broadcast on the public networks. What if Mary, and Jake and Maria, were seeing this on TV? What about Sylvia?

Silently, his lips moving, Gregory Dana began to pray.

The NERVA has blown. That’s got to be it.

Jim Dana, lying in his couch, thought he could feel the tingle of radioactive particles within his body. It was a thin wind, working its way into his bones. His face and chest felt as if they were on fire. He felt a burning sensation and a tightness about his temples, and his eyelids were smarting, as if they had been doused with acid.

With every breath, he must be filling his lungs with radionuclides.

His throat hurt, and he began to cough.

Wednesday, December 3, 1980

INTERNATIONAL CLUB, WASHINGTON, DC

The Executives Group were about to take dinner at the International Club on Nineteenth Street. Vice President-elect Bush attended, along with members of the Senate and House who held key positions on the Space and Appropriations Committees; they were standing around with drinks in their hands.

Under the surface of talk and networking, Fred Michaels was running over the events of the day.

Michaels had inherited the idea of the Executives Group from his predecessors at NASA. The Group consisted of the space program’s top people: Michaels and his NASA senior managers, and the prime contractors’ senior executives, from Rockwell, Grumman, Boeing, McDonnell Douglas, IBM. It was an elite club that Michaels liked to bring together four or five times a year.

Today had been a good day, he decided. The Executives Group session had gone well, and Bush’s closing address had been encouraging. Michaels had worried about losing outgoing veep Ted Kennedy, who, with his brother, continued to support the space program. Today, though, Bush seemed to be positioning himself as — if not an advocate — then at least as an ally.

Yes, a good day. But Michaels was tensed up, his big stomach growling. He always found it impossible to relax in the middle of a mission. Any one of a hundred thousand malfunctions could, he knew, spell the end of the flight, and maybe cost the crew members their lives, and conceivably put a bullet to the head of the whole Mars initiative — and, incidentally, Michaels’s own career. How the hell could anyone relax through that? And tonight there were not one but two American crews beyond the atmosphere, one floating around the Earth with a nuke on its tail, and the other bouncing off the Moon with those Russians. What a situation.