Udet said, “Events unfolded rapidly. The power output began to rise exponentially, doubling in a fraction of a second. The fuel pellets — which are uranium carbide coated with pyrolytic carbon — shattered from the thermal shock of the sudden power rise. The flow passages within the core melted. The moderator systems became inoperative. There was a hydrogen explosion, which ruptured the pressure shell and the biological shield—”

“All right.” Michaels found himself shuddering. “We know the rest.” Jesus. What a mess. “So the whole damn thing was caused by faulty hydrogen pipelines.”

Bert Seger nodded, and then he startled Michaels by saying: “It’s actually not as bad a scenario as you might have feared.”

“Not as bad? What the hell are you talking about, Bert?”

“The glitches in the hydrogen flow came from a simple component failure. What you had was ruptures in a six-foot length of stainless-steel fuel line, five-eighths of an inch in diameter, carrying liquid hydrogen from the tank into the nuclear engine. That’s all. So it’s easy to fix.”

“Why did the damn pipe rupture?”

“Well, we were flying with a new innovation,” Seger said, “that was supposed to guard against the effects of vibration. Each length of the pipeline had two vibration-absorbing ‘bellows’ sections in it, with wire-braid shielding on the outside. When the new line was put through vibration tests on the ground, it worked perfectly.”

“So how come—”

Udet said, “It turned out that in the atmosphere, the liquid hydrogen running through the pipe caused ice to gather on the braided shield. And that altered the characteristics of the pipe, enough to enable it to dampen out the most severe vibrations in the bellows during our testing.”

“Oh,” Michaels said. “But in the vacuum, no ice could form.”

“And those little bellows sang like a rattlesnake,” Joe Muldoon said. “When the Saturn first stage started its pogoing, the bellows couldn’t handle it. They just fell apart.”

Michaels asked Udet, “But how come you didn’t pick up the ice thing when you ran vacuum ground tests on the bellows?”

Udet faced Michaels squarely; he looked calm, somehow confident. “We did not run vacuum tests on this component. We did not anticipate the necessity.”

Michaels held his gaze for long seconds, but nothing more was forthcoming: no more data, no justification, no apology. “Well, I will be dipped in shit. Joe?”

Muldoon leaned over the desk and tapped the report. “This is where we show ourselves as culpable, Fred. Those goddamn bellows were Criticality One components: that is, their failure was liable to cause the loss of the spacecraft. But we didn’t test them out under true flight conditions. And, what’s worse, we’ve now dug out evidence of bellows problems on the S-NB’s previous unmanned test flight, although in that case we didn’t lose the mission.”

I’m dead meat, Michaels thought.