When she’d turned him upside down, everything fell into place. There was Antarctica, and above it there was South America, Chile to Brazil, from forest to desert swathed in clouds. The whole of North America was drowned by grey, unseasonal cloud, although he could see Florida peeking out through a rift. There was a cyclone over the mid-Atlantic, like some immense pinwheel. In the Caribbean, he could see the Bahamas, the shallow ocean there shining green-blue as if lit from within.

Monica Beus had e-mailed him with extracts from newscasts, some still uncensored.

—French government have announced that their nuclear strike against a deliberately engineered Moonseed patch in the South Pacific has not been—

—hard to believe that these hollow-eyed, malnourished children are English—

—the Internet shutdown may indeed be purely from technical issues. But civil liberties groups are saying this is too convenient an excuse for a Government which is demonstrating increasingly illiberal instincts in this time of crisis—

—relocation of crucial high-tech companies from the Washington coast has been complicated by the grounding of many aircraft by volcanic ash—

—we should talk to it. It’s a living thing. This is first contact, for God’s sake. What does it want?—

—so this thing chews rocks. Well, so does my ex-wife, and I lived with her for three years before—

He deleted the mail before he got to the end. It was hard to reconcile the geometric calm and silence of space travel with the clamour of voices on Earth, crying for help. He couldn’t help a guilty feeling that — despite the unknown dangers he faced ahead — he had already escaped.

He wanted to be able to pick up the Earth and turn it around, view it from the other side, witness an African night. But he would have to wait for that; the Earth would turn in its own sweet time, as it always had, and by the time Africa was brought to face him, he would be too far away to be able to see.

Arkady showed Henry the food store.

The Russian-cuisine food was kept in boxes in the lockers of the orbital module. There seemed to be a lot of soup. Some of it was freeze-dried — kharcho, for instance, spicy lamb and rice — and some was natural liquid, such as borscht, which seemed to be cabbage and beet. There was cottage cheese, pork with potato, canned fish, coffee, tea, milk. There were eight different kinds of bread, cut up into little chunks, and then candied fruits, plums, chocolate, cookies. To drink there was fruit juice, in tubes, and coffee and tea. It was a regular snack bar up there.

It took Henry a day to get his appetite back — he still didn’t feel too hungry even so — and he took to taking what he wanted, when he wanted, and stuffing his pockets with snacks for later.