He noticed Amy watching him. ‘It looks basic, but only on the surface,’ she said, tapping at a check-list floating in the air before her. ‘Ito;s like Lester said, a lot of what you see here is just for show.’

Saul nodded in appreciation, working hard not to let her see just how scared he really was. His mouth felt paper-dry, his heart hammering so hard in his chest he wondered if he was in danger of having a stroke.

Frank finished strapping Lester into the co-pilot’s seat, then performed the same task for Amy before finally exiting the capsule and securing the hatch behind him. A moment later Saul heard Ginny speaking to Lester over a shared A/V link.

‘All electrical systems look fine,’ he heard her say, ‘but we should have run a proper pre-launch check on the engines. Shit like that can get you killed.’

Amy cackled. ‘Any problems with those and I’ll be too busy decorating the desert to worry about them. Just set us a countdown, and we’ll be on our way.’

‘Yeah, roger that,’ said Ginny, her voice tense. ‘You’re go for launch in one hour. And . . . good luck. We’ll see you there in a couple of day’s time.’

‘That we will, sweetheart,’ Saul heard Lester say with undisguised fondness. ‘Good luck to all of you as well.’

Amy and Lester spent the better part of the next hour going over a series of interminable system checks. They talked about heat exchangers, fuel mixes, control valves and power assemblies. If Saul had really wanted to know what they were referring to, he could have checked with the how-to, but instead he stared up at the capsule’s ceiling, waiting for it to all be over.

Once the countdown fell below ten minutes, Saul’s helmet began showing him the last seconds ticking away prior to liftoff. Thirty seconds before the display indicated zero, the capsule lurched very softly, while a crescendo-ing roar grew to such a volume that further thought became almost impossible. The countdown passed zero and they began to climb and, before very long, an invisible block of iron began to press down on Saul. Powerful vibrations shook his couch with such force that his vision blurred.

‘Hey, Dumont,’ Amy called over the shared comms, ‘any history of heart problems? Anything like that?’

Saul struggled to form a coherent answer in the face of what he felt certain was his imminent death. ‘No,’ he finally managed. ‘Not that I know of.’

‘Good answer,’ she replied. ‘Because, under normal circumstances, no way in hell we’d have let you get on this boat without six months of medical check-ups and a daily work-out in the gym.’

‘He got checked out just fine before we went on our jump,’ Saul heard Mitchell announce.

That was ten years ago, Saul wanted to say, but his throat refused to form any words.