“Maybe I should be envying you.”

“You know, the thing of it is, you get tired of watching the Earth, from orbit. After two or three months up here, you want to go some place.”

“And now we are.”

“You, anyhow. I just hope there’s somewhere for you to come back to.”

Geena drifted past, beckoned Henry, and he followed.

Bonnie pushed past them, hauling equipment. She barged into Henry’s back, knocking him aside.

He took a moment to recover. “What’s eating her? Jealousy?”

“No,” Geena said. “Well, maybe a little. Mostly she resents your being here. The interruption to her routine.”

“Wow.”

“You get a little cabin fever up here.”

They came to another tunnel, set in the floor, with an open hatch.

He said, “And what’s down this rabbit hole?”

She said softly, “The Moon…” And she pushed him through the hatch.

It was just another Soyuz capsule, another crude ball of earthy Russian metal. Geena pushed him through the orbital module to the descent module, pointed at the right-hand seat and told him to buckle up.

For a few minutes longer the hatch above his head stayed open, and he could hear the crew frantically jamming last-minute cargo into the orbital module above him.

The Soyuz was basically the same design as the one in which he’d ridden to orbit. But there were some differences in the instrumentation: a small laptop computer, duct-taped to a wall, English labels hand-printed and stuck over some of the Russian gear. He got the sense of improvisation, of beat-the-clock preparation, of this simple little craft being hastily upgraded to be capable of taking three humans to the Moon, and back again.

The sense of hurry was not reassuring, right now.

Geena came swimming down. She wriggled over to the left-hand seat and pulled a checklist from a plastic pouch stuck on the wall.

Arkady followed, muscular limbs in a blue jumpsuit, crowding into the centre seat.

So the crew was complete, thought Henry. Geena was trained to fly the lander; Arkady would handle the Soyuz; and he was Mister Moon. Given the circumstances they were a well-matched crew. Complementary.

So why, then, was the atmosphere so stiff?

“Fifteen minutes to TLI.”

Radio voices responded to Geena, from the mission controls in Korolyov and Houston, English and Russian voices ticking through checklist items. Geena responded in kind, her Russian tinged with California.

“Shouldn’t we be wearing spacesuits?”

She turned to him, distracted. “The launch window is kind of tight here.”

“So, shut up, Henry.”

“Shut up, Henry.”

Arkady’s knees were jammed up against Henry’s. Try as he might, Henry just couldn’t get away from that gouging physical contact. The Soyuz seemed much more crowded with three than with two.

And now Sixt’s Moon-like face loomed briefly in the open hatch, and he nodded gravely, before he slammed the hatch shut.

Once more, Henry was sealed in.