The bus lurched to a stop at the base of the booster. Henry followed Geena out. People stood around, watching them: technicians, managers, generals, politicians, wives, even a couple of kids running around between the legs of the adults. Henry clutched his microscope box to his chest. He couldn’t believe they let so many people get so close to what was basically a liquid-fuel bomb.

Geena led him to a short flight of metal steps, which were set right against one of the fat first-stage boosters.

Henry looked up at the booster. Foreshortened, it was like a busted-off piece of the Kremlin. But the booster was uncompromisingly real, dominating its flat surroundings. There seemed no doubt, at last, that these guys were serious: they really were going to lock him into that little capsule at the top of this thing and fire him off into space.

He took his first step on the metal stair. One foot in the dust of Earth, one on metal. This is the moment, he thought, when I leave the Earth. All the rest is detail.

He wondered where Jane was, right now, what she was thinking.

He lifted his other, spacesuited foot, and climbed the stair.

Geena led him to the elevator cage at the base of its tower. A single pad rat stood in here. When Henry and Geena had crowded in, their pressure suits billowing, there was barely room to stand without touching.

“Penthouse, please,” Henry said. Nobody laughed.

The elevator lifted up with a clatter. Henry looked out through the bars of his cage. A few pad rats remained, their faces turned up to his. The bus was already pulling away.

So here he was, rising past the flank of an ICBM.

It was like climbing the spire of some huge metal cathedral. White mist billowed around him — the cryogenic fumes smelled, oddly, like wet dust — and he could see ice, great sheets of it, condensed and moulded against the smoothly curved flanks of the rocket. The ice shone in the sunlight, but beneath the surface sheen, the metal of the booster was cold and dark. He could have touched the damn booster, run his gloved hand over that metal flank.

The elevator clanked to a halt alongside the heavy faring that shielded the Soyuz. More pad rats were waiting on a small platform that led to a round hatch cut in the side of the faring. Geena strode forward, and climbed in first.

Henry looked down. The booster flared gracefully under him, two cone-shaped strap-on boosters clearly visible. The flame pit was a concrete scar in the ground, but it was dwarfed by the immense flatness of the steppe, the land coated with a dull green, flattened by a heavy blue sky.

He heard the wind moan, and the booster swayed, creaking.