Priest wanted to reply. But he was too far away, too sunk into the shell of his body.

The big screen at right front of the MOCR lit up with a TV picture of Apollo-N. Its three ringsail mains were safely deployed, three great, perfect canopies of red and white.

The cheering was so loud it drowned out Donnelly’s headset, and he had to call for quiet.

There was a lot of radio traffic, chattering remotely in his headset. “This is Recovery 2. I see the chutes. Level with me at precisely four thousand feet.” “Affirmative, we do have a capsule in sight…”

There was a checklist the crew was supposed to follow, Priest recalled vaguely. They should be closing that pressure relief valve, for instance, and setting the floodlights to postlanding, and getting set to cast off the mains after splashdown, so that the Command Module didn’t get dragged through the water.

But there was nobody to do it.

Priest tried to relax, to submit to the pain.

Then there was a huge impact, an astonishing eruption of agony throughout his battered body.

Water poured in through an open vent above him, showering Priest, so much of it that he thought the Command Module’s hull must have cracked open.

And the Command Module tipped. He could feel the roll, see the ocean wheel past his window.

When the windows dipped into the seawater, the cabin went dark. Priest found himself hanging there in his straps, with cabin trash raining down around him: bits of paper, urine bags, discarded washcloths. Stable 2, he thought. Upside down. Chuck will be furious. We screwed up. Nobody cut loose the mains.

He hung there like a bat in the inverted cabin, and the darkness, broken by just the Christmas-tree lights of the instrument panel, was kind of peaceful. In a moment the flotation bags would flip the Command Module upright, to the Stable 1 position.

He closed his eyes.

Sunday, December 7, 1980

NASA HEADQUARTERS, WASHINGTON, DC

The first image showed the five members of the crew in their Snoopy flight helmets, sitting on their T-cross chairs around the small table in Moonlab’s wardroom. Joe Muldoon sat at the center of the group, holding a piece of onionskin paper.

This is the crew of Moonlab, coming to you live from lunar orbit. The five of us — our guests Vladimir Viktorenko and Aleksandr Solovyov, and Phil Stone, Adam Bleeker, and myself — have spent the day following our flight program, and taking pictures, and maintaining the systems of our spacecraft…

Tim Josephson, sitting in his Washington office and watching the small TV on his desk, found he needed a conscious effort to keep breathing. Keep it bland, calm, unexceptionable. This will do, Muldoon.

In turn, the five astronauts spoke briefly about the work of the day — in the Telescope Mount, on the biomed machines, working on troublesome Moonlab equipment.