They spoke very little. They thought they were in love but that was irrelevant. Yefremova was one of fourteen women in the Space Shock Troops program. Her femaleness kept her even busier than the men. She had trained as a pilot in the Air Defense Forces before that, flying Tu 22M training bombers and old Sukhoi fighters. He had come into the military after graduating from an aerospace engineering school. His deferment had been most fortunate; instead of being inducted into the army at eighteen, he had qualified for a New Reindustrialization scholarship.

In the engineering school, he had gained excellent marks in political science and leadership, and they had earmarked him immediately for the difficult position of Zampolit in a fighter squadron in East Germany, but then had transferred him to Space Defense Forces, which had only been in existence for four years. He had never heard of it before the transfer, but such a stroke of luck. . . He had always wanted to be a cosmonaut.

Yefremova's father was a high-ranking Moscow bureaucrat. He had put her into what he thought would be a safe military training program rather than let her run wild with Moscow's infamous Young Hooligans. She had turned out to be very capable and very bright; her future was promising, though not what her father had expected.

Their backgrounds were worlds apart, and chances were they would never even have a chance to date, much less conduct an affair or get married.

"Look," Yefremova said. "You can see it clearly tonight."

"Yes?" He knew immediately what she meant.

"There." She leaned her head close to his and pointed above the summer's long blue twilight to a tiny spot of light just beside the full moon.

"They will get there before we do," Yefremova said sadly. "They always do, now."

"So pessimistic," Mirsky said.

"I wonder what they call it," she said. "What they will name it when they land."

"Not 'the Potato,' surely!" Mirsky chuckled.

"No," Yefremova agreed.

"Someday," Mirsky said, squinting to make the spot out more clearly.

"Someday what?"

"Perhaps the time will come when we will take it away from them."

"Dreamer," Yefremova said.

The next week, a two-man vacuum chamber imploded on the outskirts of the airfield. Yefremova was testing a new suit design in one half of the chamber. She was killed instantly. There was great concern about the political repercussions of the accident, but as it turned out, her father was not unreasonable. Better to have a martyr in the family than a hooligan.

Mirsky took an unscheduled day's absence with a bottle of brandy smuggled in from Yugoslavia. He spent the day alone in a Moscow park and did not even open the bottle.

After a year, he finished his training and was promoted. He left Podlipki and spent two weeks in Starry Town, where he visited Yuri Gagarin's room, now a kind of shrine for spacefarers. From there, he was flown to a secret facility in Mongolia, and then. . . to the Moon.