Since the 1950s, if not earlier, the Solar System had been assumed to be an empty, barren place, a wilderness of gas and rock and ice, a stage on which man’s drama could be played out. A place to take a camera, not a gun. Now, suddenly, it looked as if that assumption was not true.

And they were scared…

That was when Henry got the message about some kind of problem at Torness.

He ran back to his quarters. There were several messages waiting for him, from academic contacts, the Scottish authorities, Blue Ishiguro.

Torness. He remembered the map he’d inspected with the Prime Minister. Twenty miles from Edinburgh, to the east; exactly along the route Jane said she was going to follow.

Since he told her to get out of Musselburgh he’d tried a slew of ways to get in touch with her, and had failed every time.

Torness wasn’t the only nuclear installation to have suffered a catastrophic failure, as the quakes and fissures and volcanism and floods hit, all around the world. Nuke stations going up like firecrackers. All we need.

It was the peculiar fortune of the human race, he thought, to have encountered this problem just when it was smart enough to build such things as nuclear reactors but not smart enough to shut them down safely.

He had to do something for Jane.

He contacted Geena, and called in some more favours.

By the time he was done he had a guarantee. If Jane made it out of Scotland, if she was found, she’d be flown out of Britain, to the relative safety of the States.

It was all he could do for her, as it turned out, because the latest blocking moves, in House and the Senate, were overcome, and the authorization came for them to be shipped to Russia.

On his last day in America, Henry received two packages. One was a cancellation of his life insurance policy. The other was an olivine necklace, a string of bottle-green beads.

He tucked the necklace into the little pouch of personal effects he was being allowed to take, all the way to the Moon.

A USAF transport plane took them into Moscow. Henry tried to sleep, during the long haul over the North Pole.

He woke up during the descent into Moscow. He glimpsed green-clad hills below, an ancient landscape where Nazi and Soviet soldiers had fought to the death: humans sacrificed in waves in the cause of nations which no longer existed, offerings to vanished gods.

He didn’t know what was in the minds of the Administration that had made them progress their decision this stage further. Some of the attempts to disrupt the Moonseed had worked, like the cataclysmic flooding of the Grand Canyon. Elsewhere, they had failed.

Like the backpack nuke that had, against his advice, been dropped on a Moonseed patch that had been set up in Nevada.