He got in trouble with Geena, for scattering crumbs around the capsule. The Soyuz, it seemed, didn’t have a decent air filter system, and he had to go around the cabin, scooping the drifting crumbs out of the air with a handheld vacuum cleaner.

Geena showed him how to wash, Russian-style. You just had to wipe yourself down with wet napkins. You could even wash your hair that way: Geena wrapped a brush in another napkin, and scrubbed over his head for him. It was a soothing, relaxing feeling. Grooming rituals, he thought, a hundred and forty thousand miles from the nearest chimpanzee colony.

Shaving was just an electric razor; he had a little vacuum cleaner standing by to collect his spare whiskers. He cleaned his teeth with a napkin wrapped around his finger. It was loaded with mint-flavoured toothpaste; it got rid, at last, of the taste of vomit from his mouth. Geena said it was actually good for him because it meant his gums got a massage too.

Besides, toothbrushes would be impractical up here. After all, where would you spit?

Ultimately, he had to face it, he needed a dump.

Once again he faced a 1960s Soviet-era privy, mounted on the wall. He stripped off his longjohns, switched on the fan, held himself in place and pushed.

He had to strain harder than he’d expected; it seemed that Earth gravity even helped with this simple act.

It wasn’t so bad. One little floater escaped the air flow, and he was able to chase it down with a wet wipe.

At that, Geena told him, it wasn’t as bad a system as what the first Moon voyagers had to endure on Apollo, which was after all the same era as this Soyuz design. On Apollo, a crap involved stripping stark naked, and climbing into the storage bay under the three metal-frame couches. Then you took one of a collection of plastic bags, with adhesive coatings on the brim, and finger-shaped tubes built into the side. You had to dig into the bag with your, finger — nothing would fall, after all — and hook your turds down into the bag. And afterwards you had to break open a capsule of germicide, drop it into the bag, and knead it all together.

Things, Henry realized as he chased down his turds, could be a lot worse.

He drifted down into the descent module. Arkady was working through a checklist at the control panel. There were crackly voices singing in lusty Russian on the ground-to-air loop, and Arkady was singing along, his voice booming in the confined cabin, working as he sang.

They finished up with a ripple of applause. Henry realized dimly that Arkady’s voice, time-delayed, would have been out of synch on the ground; they must have compensated for that somehow, a small act of interplanetary kindness.

Arkady said to him, “Vam panravilas? You liked it?”