Jeff glanced up at the towering slope of Vault Four, at the moment before they passed into its interior. He could hear Eliza talking to Dan and Lucy over the general comms circuit, trying to keep them calm, assuring them that help was almost at hand. He found himself wondering what they’d have to say once they discovered Eliza had been all for abandoning them.

Farad came abreast of him and tapped the side of his helmet: a request for a private link. At least Eliza had let him leave his cart of goodies back at Vault One, rather than wheel them all this distance.

‘I have come to believe,’ Farad told him, his eyes wide and fervent, ‘that God must have abandoned the universe long before this time-period.’

Jeff regarded him in silence, but with a sinking feeling.

‘Do you know what occurred to me when we heard about Stone and Vogel?’ Farad continued, an edge of desperation in his voice. ‘I could not help but wonder what, in the absence of God, happens to their souls.’

This wasn’t a conversation Jeff wanted to be having right now. His feet ached, and the interior of his suit stank from the long hours he’d spent inside it. Stress knotted his muscles into thick ropes of fatigue.

‘Their souls?’

‘This far beyond .

‘I know all this, Farad. They covered it in the orientations.’

‘Yes but, if God is no longer here, what happens if you die here?’ he demanded, his voice full of anguish. ‘Where do you go? There is only one conclusion.’

‘Farad—’

‘Hell is, by its very nature, the absence of God, is it not?’ the other man persisted.

Jeff stopped and put one hand on Farad’s shoulder, finally bringing him to a halt. Farad stared back at him, his nostrils faring.

‘Listen, you need to calm down a little, okay?’ Jeff told him. ‘You’re letting your imagination run away with you.’

Jeff glanced to one side. Eliza and Lou had moved ahead, apparently unaware that the pair had stopped. Up ahead lay a wide atrium, containing electric carts they could use for zipping about the ‘designated safe’ parts of the vaults.

Farad was a large, bluff man with a thick dark moustache, and he sometimes compared his attempts at picking apart the self-adjusting routines controlling the Vaults to a pygmy poking at electronic circuitry with a spear. He was intelligent and sharp, an excellent poker player – as some back at the Tau Ceti station had discovered to their cost – and also in possession of a keen sense of humour. But something about the black, unforgiving void that hung over the vaults, like a funeral shroud, could get to even the best of people.