“Muldoon’s not available anyway. He’s in lunar orbit.”

“But he’s due to return in a week. That’s time enough…”

They argued around it for a while, but eventually Seger gave in.

He was uneasy about having someone as crass and loud as Muldoon in such a high-profile role. There was bound to be a lot of dirt to be dug out over this incident, particularly from Marshall; he shuddered when he imagined what kind of stuff Muldoon, hero astronaut, might start feeding the press.

He would have to keep a lid on all of that.

When Josephson hung up, it was 3 A.M.

Seger knew he needed sleep. He kept a fold-up bed in a closet for times like this.

He slipped off his shoes and got to his knees and tried to pray. But he couldn’t concentrate; his mind kept on making up lists of things he had to do, sorting them in priority order.

Strangely, the doubts he had felt earlier in the mission — doubts induced by the hostility of the antinuke protesters — had melted away, now that the worst had come to pass. He felt confident about his ability to cope with all of this. NASA’s ability, in fact. It was only some damned hardware fault, after all. A fault they could fix, once it had identified itself.

And NASA had survived problems like this before: he remembered that just two years after the Apollo 1 fire, Armstrong and Muldoon had landed on the Moon. And after Apollo 13 had blown up on the way to the Moon, not only had they gotten the astronauts back, but they’d gone on to fly, on 14, the most successful damned mission of them all.

He touched the gold crucifix at his lapel. He felt oddly light, almost giddy. They’d get through this; he had no doubt about it. With God’s help.

But it was difficult to pray. Somehow, he felt God was far away from him, that night.

Finally, at around 4 A.M., he slept. But he was up again and making his first calls of the day by seven.

Thursday, December 4, 1980

APOLLO-N; LYNDON B. JOHNSON SPACE CENTER, HOUSTON

The pain was everywhere, unbelievably intense, a huge cellular agony that went on and on until he couldn’t bear it, and then went on some more. It felt as if every soft surface of Priest’s body, inside and out, had been coated with acid, as if he was rotting away from the outside in.