And the cabin was full of noises — the clatter and whir of pumps and fans and extractors — and every so often some mechanical gadget would change its tone, startling him awake once more. It was like trying to sleep inside some huge refrigerator, with the added frisson of knowing that on these rattling Russian machines depended his life.

He wasn’t aware of drifting off.

…He came to when Geena reached into the bag, grabbed him under the chin and hauled his head out by main force. He found himself coughing, gulping at cool air.

“Are you okay?”

“I think so.” His head felt stuffy, as if he had been standing on his hands. But he was the same way up as when he’d gone to sleep. He shook his head, and that was a mistake; the cabin started to move around him. “Oh, wow.”

Geena stood before him, looking into his face. “Think about it. No convection, right? So if the carbon dioxide builds up in your sleeping bag you choke yourself.”

“Much you care.”

“A corpse in a Soyuz is about as welcome as a fart in a spacesuit, as we say.” She was looking into his eyes. “How do you feel?”

He took an inventory.

The left side of his head hurt. For some reason, he found that if he pressed the back of his head it helped a little. His feet felt numb, as if there was no blood at all down there. His nose was stuffy.

He reported all this to Geena. She laughed.

“Your eyes are red as shit, too. It’s just the blood pooling in your head; your fluid balance hasn’t adapted yet.”

Gingerly, he started to push himself out of the sleeping bag. Strangely, the experience of zero G seemed still more bizarre than it had yesterday.

“Where are we?”

“Eleven hours since TLI. Seventy thousand miles from home.”

The light was shifting. He looked out the porthole.

Earth and sun swung gently around the craft, as if the Soyuz was creating its own tiny sunrise and sunset. Geena had put the craft into barbecue mode, a slow hour-long roll in the sunlight to even up the heat load.

Everything was rolling.

“Oh, shit.”

Suddenly he was retching.

It was just a spasm, barely painful. But suddenly here was a greenish sphere, the size of a tennis ball, floating in space in front of him. It was oscillating slowly, thick and languid, pea-green and quite beautiful.

Geena was scrabbling in a locker. “Christ, Henry.” She handed him a plastic bag, and he held it before his face, catching most of the rest.

Under some complex combination of surface tension and air currents, the loose sphere of puke split in two. One half headed for the wall, the other for Geena.

Henry ventured, “Kind of pretty, isn’t it? And look at the way they are moving. Equal and opposite. Conservation of momentum, I guess. And—”