Lunney grunted softly, as if someone had just hit him in the stomach—which is how he described that moment years later. It was like a blow, and then like a hole into which his stomach and the rest of him were starting to slide. It was the one time during the entire night, he recalled, when for a moment he backed away from the rush of events and “had a sense of ‘Holy Christ, it’s this bad. It has really happened this way.’” The surge tank was the last reserve of oxygen. It had to be protected for the entry, and now Burton wanted him to use part of it, lest the crew asphyxiate.
