Jim Dana, in the center couch, seemed to have lost consciousness. His face, under his helmet, was severely blistered; in some places strips of flesh were hanging loose, drifting in the air. He looked as if he had vomited; globs of thin, brownish liquid clung to the inside of his faceplate.

Priest reached across to Dana’s station. Separating Apollo-N from the S-NB booster stage was a routine maneuver, something any of them could handle. But Priest’s thinking seemed to be cloudy, and he was having trouble seeing the panel before him. He couldn’t feel the switches through his pressure-suit glove. He fumbled at the glove, but his hand seemed to have swollen up, and the glove was tight. Finally he got the glove off, and let it drift away.

He looked at his bare hand, puzzled. The skin had turned a deep, uniform brown. A nuclear tan. How about that.

He snapped switches.

There was a series of sharp bangs, a shudder.

“Houston, we’ve got separation,” Jones said.

The Earth slid more rapidly past the windows, as the freed Apollo-N tumbled away from the S-NB. With separation, the tumbling seemed to ease; maybe, Priest thought, gas venting from the S-NB had been causing some of the pitching.

Jones worked at hand controllers which should have operated the RCS clusters on the Service Module. He was trying to kill the residual rates, the unwanted tumbling. “Zippo,” he said. “Still nothing, Houston; we don’t have any attitude control.”

“Acknowledged, Apollo-N,” Natalie York said. “We’re working on it. Watch out for gimbal lock.”

Priest could see the red warning disk painted on the eight-ball, drifting into the ball’s little window, the warning for incipient gimbal lock.

“Well, hell,” Jones groused, “I don’t see I can do much about that, Natalie.”

The tumble brought the discarded nuclear booster into Priest’s view. The slim black-and-white cylinder looked almost beautiful as it drifted away from him, silhouetted against the Earth’s shining skin, highlighted by sunlight. But he could see that a panel had blown out of the pressure shell surrounding the reactor core, at the base of the hydrogen tank. Inside the shell, Priest could see a tangle of pipes and Mylar insulation. And the hydrogen tank itself had been ripped open; a thin wisp of gas still vented from the tank.

Priest wondered vaguely if they ought to be focusing a TV camera on the booster.

Jones began to describe the S-NB to Houston. “There’s one whole side of the damn thing missing. I can see wires dangling, and the base of that hydrogen tank is just a mass of ripped metal. It’s really a mess…”