The display could show decimal numbers, angles, octal numbers, time… He could only tell which was which by context, following his checklist.

The flight load had dozens of programs. Rosenberg would have to learn which was which, learn to select them without thinking. There wouldn’t be much help for him, if he had to run this stuff in anger. But then, nobody said it would be easy.

And besides, he was kind of enjoying this. It was like solving a series of little logical puzzles.

They nearly didn’t have computers in the old Apollos at all, he’d learned. Not everyone had agreed they needed them for navigation and rendezvous; ground control could cover all of that. Two arguments got computers in here. The first was the Russians. What if those Soviets tried to disrupt communications with Houston? The astronauts needed some way to get around the jamming by doing their own calculations. And the second was that NASA wanted to prepare for longer-duration missions, such as the flights to Mars that had never been funded: far enough away, you can’t afford to wait out the minutes, or hours, it might take for some number to come up from the ground; you needed a local processing ability.

Fear and dreams, he thought, that’s what had driven the computer technology, and everything else about Apollo, and maybe now the Titan mission as well. Fear and dreams.

The DSKY system was so counter-intuitive it was going to be tough to learn. But he had six years to study it, en route to Titan; if he ever needed to fly this ship he’d be able to play the crummy little gadget like a piano.

And anyhow he enjoyed the work. He enjoyed being tucked away, alone, in this humming little cabin with all its gadgets, occupying his mind with creaky old computer codes. It was a break from the complexities of life support, and his ambiguous and increasingly unwelcome role as ship’s doctor, and the sour relationships that prevailed in the hab module.

And besides, Rosenberg found himself being slowly seduced by the Apollo.

He loved the endless lockers, the compact equipment, the careful design and storage, the way everything was tucked away.

When he was a kid, he’d built himself a den cum spaceship something like this. It was just a plastic tent hung up inside a climbing frame. He had little food boxes in there, and stocks of soda, and a rolled-up Army-surplus sleeping bag in one corner, and a couple of boxes of cold lights. He’d landed on a hundred planets in that little ship, all of them contiguous with his mother’s back yard; He would peer through muddy plastic portholes, then creep out of his ship with his torch and his walkie-talkie and explore; but the main joy was to huddle back in the safety of his den, cocooned by his materiel and equipment, the stuff of his portable world, and write up his log.

Sad little bastard, he thought bleakly.

Anyhow, what was Apollo but the apotheosis of all dens?

And what did that say about Isaac Rosenberg? By launching himself off on this endless spaceflight, was he braving a new frontier, or retreating to some cozy fantasy of his lonely childhood?

It was best, he had learned much earlier in this mission, to avoid self-analysis.

Sitting alone inside the quiet Apollo, he worked his way through his manuals, learning how the old spaceship was flown.

Benacerraf had instituted a weekly crew meeting.

They were facing so many problems now, she figured they couldn’t afford to indulge in their habitual acrimonious isolation from each other. They had to discuss their problems, come up with solutions, parcel out pieces of work.

Much as she hated the idea herself.

And so, now, the four of them hooked legs or arms around stanchions and struts, their postures taking on the stooping crouch of the neutral-G position.

They looked, Benacerraf thought, like four birds of prey, perched on some metal branch.

“…We traced the root cause of the heart arrhythmia problems,” Rosenberg was saying, reading from a softscreen which was suspended in the air before him. The computer folded softly like a bird’s wing, the letters and numbers shimmering across its surface. “It was a trace element deficiency.”

Benacerraf said, “What trace element?”

“Potassium. You find it in sea water and in various salts, like carnallite and sytvine. Potassium is essential in the biocycles. Its salts are used as fertilizers in the farm’s nutrient solution, which—”

“Cut to the chase, asshole,” Angel said mildly, his eyes closed.

Rosenberg said, “In the potable water we have a limit of three hundred forty milligrams per liter. We’ve actually been recording a level of a tenth that.” He scratched his face. The problem is partly the excess peeing we all do. Potassium, along with other stuff, gets flushed out of the system. So it has to be replaced. Now I’m spiking the potable water with electrolytes, specifically potassium, to restore the balance.”

“So will we have long-term heart problems because of this?” Mott asked.

“Probably.” Rosenberg shrugged. “But this is not a regime in which we’re aiming for a long and healthy old age anyhow. I wouldn’t worry; it’s just another bogeyman to bite us, in a long line with all the others.”

Benacerraf found Rosenberg’s thin voice fantastically irritating, as he droned through his lists of facts. “So tell me what caused the deficiency in the biocycles.”

“It has to be the SCWO,” Rosenberg said, his eyes studiously on Benacerraf’s face.

Angel showed no reaction, his face hidden by his beard.

Rosenberg doesn’t want to take him on. So, Benacerraf thought wearily, it’s up to me to confront this asshole again, to take on the burden of responsibility for us all.

“Bill, the SCWO is your baby. We’ve been having problems with it for years. And now this potassium crap.”

Angel shrugged, his body moving minutely in the air as his center of mass shifted. “What do you want me to tell you? Look, we knew when we launched that the SCWO was immature technology, a risky piece of equipment to haul along. Basically the damn thing works. Hell,” he said, leering casually at Mott, who looked away, “you know that, or we’d all be knee-deep in Rosenberg’s pale shit, right? But we still get a lot of corrosion of the surfaces in there — it’s a hostile environment, and there are a shit-load of toxic gases which—”

“Bill, I’ve been relying on you to fix it. And now I hear this.”

“I’ve nursemaided the damn thing half way to Saturn already,” Angel snapped. “I’m a pilot, not a plumber.”

“You have to get it right, Bill. Right to the last decimal place, of the last trace element. That’s what it takes.” She felt herself slipping into peevish anger. “Don’t you see that? Why should I have to tell you what to do, how to do it? Why can’t I trust you to do your job…?”

She noticed Mott folding her arms over herself, and rolling her eyes, escaping inward.

Damn it, she thought. We set ourselves the trap again. And I fell into it.

Angel was still blustering, justifying his negligent work on the SCWO. And Rosenberg, unfortunately, was going into lecture mode. He put his hands to his temples, his own long hair and wispy beard drifting around his face, and he started telling Angel stuff he already knew: about the instability of their miniature biosphere, the lack of buffering reservoirs of essential elements like potassium, the way the balance had to be monitored and adjusted constantly by the crew…

Angel started yelling back at Rosenberg, who just closed his eyes and droned on. Their voices seemed amplified in the dingy metal tube of the hab module.

Benacerraf knew she needed to find some way of defusing the situation. But, she thought wearily, why me? Why is it always me who has to be the peacemaker, to eat shit, to make Bill calm down and force Rosenberg to look up from his softscreen and dry Nicola’s eyes over her girlfriend — why me?