It was possible that any small crack in the heat shield would heal itself as the heat shield ablated in the heat of reentry. Possible. But it was another unknown. If, alternatively, the shield was damaged and failed, they would lose the bird anyway.

Priest, suffused by pain, lay on his back, buffeted, compressed, while the cabin rattled around him and fire lapped up from the base of the Command Module behind him.

The glowing chunks of heat shield falling upward past his window were big. Maybe something was wrong. Maybe the shield was failing.

If we’re really reentering. If I’m not hallucinating; if we’re not dead already.

Anyway, he couldn’t do a damn thing about it.

Ben Priest, falling to Earth butt-first, waited for sun heat to sear through the base of Apollo-N and engulf him. It would be a relief.

“Network, no instrumentation aircraft contact yet?”

“Not at this time, Flight.”

Four minutes passed. Five. That should have been enough time to reacquire after the blackout.

On the loops there was nothing but a hiss of static -

“ARIA 4 has acquisition of signal, Flight.”

“Rog,” Donnelly said, barely recognizing his own voice.

There was a stir around the MOCR, a shifting of tired shoulders, weary, tentative grins.

It was an odd feeling, a kind of half relief. Acquisition didn’t mean the crew was alive — and it was still possible that the electronics of the parachute system might be shot — but at least the Command Module wasn’t a cinder.

He heard York calling the crew, over and over, patient and plaintive.

The glow had died, fading out to an ordinary sky blue, and the G meter read 1.0, and he was falling toward the ocean at a thousand feet per second. The events of the splashdown ticked by, clear in his sharp, fragile thoughts.

There was a crack: that was the parachute cover coming off from the tip of the conical Command Module. And another sharp snap, as the three small drogue chutes were released. He saw bright streams of fabric beyond the window.

He took a kick in the back as the drogues plucked at the air, stabilizing the fall of the Command Module.

There was a loud hiss; that would be the vent opening to let the cabin’s pressure equalize with the air outside. Any second and -

There. Another bang. That had to be the mains, the three eighty-footers which would lower Apollo-N gently to the ocean’s surface.

As the mains filled with air, the cabin was jolted. Priest was rocked in his couch, and the pain climbed off the scale.

Through his window he could see a slab of blue sky, wisps of cloud.

There was a distant voice in his head, brisk, friendly, competent. “Apollo-N, Apollo-N, Air Boss 1, you have been reported on radar as southeast of your recovery ship at thirty miles. Apollo-N, Apollo-N. Welcome home, gentlemen; we’ll have you aboard in no time.”