The assignment was going to be as hard a mission as he’d performed in his life.

He began to dial.

Venting gas.

Donnelly understood the implications of that observation as well as anyone.

On the loop he said, “Okay, now, Indigo Team, let’s everyone keep cool. We’re going to stick to the mission rules, and remember the priorities.

“Let’s go back to basics. EECOM tells me that right now we still have a sealed can.” An airtight ship, a place to keep the astronauts alive. “We’ve faced situations like this many times in the sims” — but never for real, damn it — “and you know that having a sealed can is always the number one requirement; as long as we have that, at least, we have time to figure things out. We’re going to solve this problem, but we’ll take our time over it, because we have the time; we don’t need to make things worse by guessing. Now, let’s get to it.”

It seemed to do some good; the atmosphere in the MOCR, the angle of hunch of the white-shirted shoulders, seemed to ease a little. Donnelly nodded to himself, pleased; maybe he’d lanced the boil of panic that had been building up.

Donnelly knew he had to work systematically. He was going to “down-mode,” in the jargon, move from one set of options to another, more restricted set. He had to preserve as much of the mission objectives as he could without further endangering the lives of the astronauts. If you can’t land on the Moon, can you at least orbit it? And he didn’t want to close out any options he didn’t have to, because he didn’t know what else was likely to be thrown at him, and he needed to keep contingencies open. For example, it was conceivable they might have to use the S-NB engine to direct a reentry, if the problems turned out to be with the Service Module after all.

Tread lightly, lest ye step in shit. That was the motto. The trouble was, Donnelly was quickly running out of options altogether.

In the background, he heard Natalie York talking to the crew. “Apollo-N, we’ve got everyone working on this. We’ll get you some dope as soon as we have it, and you’ll be the first to know.”

Good girl.

Chuck Jones replied. “Thank you, Houston.” On the air-to-ground, Jones’s voice sounded dry, weak.

In response to the sound of Jones’s voice there was a brief, distressed silence in the MOCR, despite the array of amber lights before Donnelly.

He scanned the MOCR. Each of his controllers was staring into his own screen, digging deeper and deeper into the problems he saw in his own area. As if his own problems were somehow separate from the rest.