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Clint Howard & Sy Liebergot pose with Apollo 13 CM "Odyssey" at the Kansas Cosmosphere
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The difference between EECOM's situation and everyone else's was that the other guys' problems were fairly minor. EECOM's problems were either trivial (if it was bad instrumentation) or life threatening (if the electrical and life-support systems of the C.S.M. were going dead). Like Bales on Eleven and Aaron on Twelve, Liebergot was the man sitting out in the open, the man with the best opportunity to make the mistake that would, in another MOCR euphemism, "blow the whole mission." The difference between Liebergot's situation and Bales's in Eleven or Aaron's in Twelve was that Bales and Aaron had had the option of stopping everything immediately and coming home - Armstrong could have called off the landing, Conrad could have fired the escape tower. Liebergot was stuck. If it wasn't an instrumentation problem, this crisis had no easy way out. There might be no way out at all.

Kranz inquired of Liebergot how things were going. Liebergot replied that the crew were "flipping their fuel cells around"- trying to reconfigure them. Kranz was impatient: "Well, let's get some recommendation here, Sy, if you got any better ideas."

Just then Swigert reported the inexplicable and disconcerting news that they were getting an undervolt on Main Bus A, the one that until now had still been working. "Sy," Kranz said, the exasperation in his voice now unmistakable, "what do you want to do? Hold your own and - " Kranz broke off to listen to the spacecraft, which was adding that Main B was "reading zip," distributing no power at all. Still nothing from Liebergot. "Sy," Kranz said, "have you got a sick-sensor type problem there or what?"

Liebergot had been busy talking to his back room. He now came onto Flight's loop and recommended that the crew try to reconnect the fuel cells that, Liebergot hoped, had been thrown off line by the mysterious jolt. CapCom passed the instruction up to the crew while Liebergot returned to the EECOM loop that connected him to his back room. Remembering that O2 pressure reading, Liebergot called to Sheaks. "Larry, you don't believe that O2 Tank 1 [sic] pressure, do you?" Sheaks came back confidently. "No, no. Surge tank's good. Manifold's good, E.C.S. is good." Reassured, Liebergot went back to the screens and to a discussion of the electrical problem with Dick Brown.

Odyssey came back on the line. "Okay, Houston, I tried to reset and Fuel Cell 1 and 3 are both showing gray flags. But they are both showing zip on the flows."

"I copy, Flight," Liebergot said unhappily, indicating that he had heard the crew's transmission. This had to be an instrumentation problem. They couldn't possibly be having a simultaneous failure in two independent fuel cells - especially since, he had just been reassured, the oxygen was doing fine. And yet every time he got a new reading on the fuel cells, their condition seemed to be deteriorating.

"Okay, what do you want to do?" Kranz asked.

Liebergot suppressed an impulse to reply, "I want to go home." He passed along a new configuration of linkups between fuel cells and buses that would reveal this problem for what he hoped it was: some blown circuitry that they could work around.

From Murray & Cox "Apollo"

Apollo 13 Splashdown "Roast" Song

Astronaut John Young, the backup Apollo 13 CDR, showed up at the splashdown celebration that was hosted by the Apollo 13 flight crew. He announced that he had an audio tape that he wanted everyone to hear. It was a hastily prepared tape produced by editing music and lyrics with clips of things that were said on the Control Center intercom loops and by the crew in space. The result was a "roasting" of Gene Kranz and Sy Liebergot with clips like, "We've got an instrumentation problem, Flight," followed by (and completely out of context), "I don't understand that, Sy." Those two phrases were repeated over and over interspersed with other funny stuff.