There were small white squares painted on the ground, like cue marks in a TV game show. Geena took one mark and pointed to the other, where Henry went to stand. There were people all around, pad rats and suited managers and technicians. Geena’s square was marked “KK’, and Henry’s “KI” — acronyms for mission commander and researcher, as it turned out.

Henry looked down at himself. His white spacesuit gleamed like snow in the sunshine.

A military man walked forward, decorated with ribbons and medals. Evidently an Air Force general. Geena saluted, spoke in Russian, and repeated in English. “My crew and I have been made ready, and now we are reporting that we are ready to fly.”

The general nodded, and spoke in thickly accented English. “I give you permission to fly.” He glanced at Henry, but seemed to look through him.

Geena nodded to Henry, and led him towards another bus, this one silver and blue. He had to walk past ranks of silent workers. Close to, many of them looked gaunt, underfed, dressed shabbily. Maybe they would normally cheer, he thought. Maybe they somehow resent me being here.

Or maybe they’re as scared as I am.

It was difficult to sit down on the bus in his stiff suit, but he made it. The bus pulled away with a lurch.

It wasn’t long before the rocket came into view.

The booster was a pillar, squat and solid: coal grey, save for an orange band at its mid-section, and a bulge at the top, a white-painted faring which hid the Soyuz capsule he would ride to orbit. At the base the booster flared gracefully, where four liquid-fuel rockets were strapped to the pencil-slim core stage.

It was a hundred and fifty feet tall. White vapour slid down its flanks, as if the booster were already rehearsing the great leap upwards it would take in just a few hours.

Its three big supporting gantries had already been tipped back, resting close to the ground, so that it was as if the rocket stood at the heart of a metal flower. He could see a slim tower with an elevator to carry the crew to their capsule. The whole stack stood on a sky-blue platform — it looked like some kind of mobile launcher — and a flame pit, a channel cut in the Earth and lined with concrete, stretched away around it.

This was fifty-year-old technology. The booster was a derivative of an old ICBM design. The first Sputnik had been flown aboard a booster basically the same model as this. So had Yuri Gagarin. He couldn’t work out whether that was reassuring or terrifying.