They had nothing but a little water and basic survival gear. They made a tent of parachute fabric, and waited out the heat of the day. At night they had to hunt lizards and snakes. Here was one situation where Henry, veteran of hundreds of days in the field, was able to fare a little better than the rest. The astronauts looked enviously at his knife, for instance, inside the hollow handle of which he had stored matches and fish hooks, held in place with candle wax, and he showed them how to make frying pans from pieces of aluminum foil, and so forth.

On the second night he spotted Geena hoarding her water. He came to sit with her.

“Rationing the water doesn’t help,” he said.

“Huh?”

“Try that and you’ll pass out. This is the desert. You need a certain amount of water to keep from dehydration. You should drink the water you have until it’s gone, and if you have not been picked up by then, well, you die of thirst.”

She glowered at him, but made no move to comply. “Some people are blaming you,” she said.

“What?”

“For the Moonseed. The way it got out, at Edinburgh.”

The truth was, nobody knew how it had got out, save himself and Jane — and Mike, who couldn’t atone any more. He eyed her. “Do you blame me?”

“I don’t know. You’re Henry. I knew you were an asshole long before any of this stuff.” She glanced at him, then away. “No. I guess not. You aren’t cast for the role of cosmic villain. Or hero. You aren’t big enough.”

“I don’t think anybody is.”

They sat in silence.

“How’s Rocky?” he asked at last.

“With my mother, in San Francisco,” she said. She stood up. “As if you care.”

She stalked away to her sleeping bag.

“Drink your water,” he said softly.

On his last day in the US, he was taken to the Cape to see a Shuttle launch, probably one of the last there would ever be, its payload bay crammed with final pieces of equipment and fuel pods, a half-billion dollars” worth of firepower aimed at getting him to the Moon.

He stood on a beach with Geena, to the south of the launch complex. To the west, towards inland, the sunset was volcanic, tall and colourful. And in the south-east there was a blue-black sea, a bruised purple sky. And the Shuttle was picked out by floodlights, the orbiter a graceful white moth against the rusted brown of its gantry.

The Cape was crowded. It seemed a million people had turned out here to watch the spaceships that symbolized the nation’s fight-back against the creeping geologic menace. It was like Apollo, said the old-timers.

Geena stood with him. She said, “Do you know what has gone into this launch?”

“What?”