The Soyuz carried a small telescope, of sorts. It was a monocular, designed to be used as part of a sextant, for interplanetary navigation by the stars. Now, Henry used it to study the Moon.

He swept his gaze along the terminator, the line between night and day, and the long shadows there; he could see terraces in the collapsed walls of the bigger craters, as if they were cities designed by some intelligence, walls which curved over the close horizon. And littered over the walls and some of the crater floors, he could see boulders, pinpoints of brightness sending long, needle-fine shadows across the dusty ground.

If the dinosaur killer comet had hit the Moon, it would have left a crater like Copernicus or Tycho, with ejecta rays stretching around a hemisphere.

After a time, he abandoned the telescope, and just looked.

In the window, the Moon was still small, no more than the size of a golf ball held at arm’s length. But he could see craters, with his naked eye: a sight denied to every human who ever lived, before Galileo raised his telescope.

He stared into the Moon’s grey light until his eyes blurred with tears.

They passed through one major crisis.

Henry knew almost nothing of the systems that would take him down to the Moon’s surface, and keep him alive there. There hadn’t been time to explain it all, and Geena suspected he didn’t want to know anyhow, until he had to.

But then he started asking how they were going to carry their nuclear weapon down to the surface.

Geena drifted in front of him. “Henry, we can’t do it. We didn’t design the mission that way. We don’t have any spare carrying capacity. The mass estimates—”

“Then we have to leave some mass behind.”

“Like what? The air? The water? We can’t do it, Henry.”

Arguing was difficult in microgravity. They tended to drift around the cabin, colliding with the walls and each other; it screwed up their body language.

“Then,” he said, “how are we supposed to use the nuke anyhow?”

Arkady said gravely, “The nuke has a small rocket pack which can drop it out of orbit, directly to its target. We can bomb Aristarchus, or any middle-latitude site, but—”

“It’s my fault,” Henry said. “I should have been more open.”

“Yes, you should,” Geena said. “The story of your life, Henry. What the hell do you want, anyhow?”

He hesitated. “Suppose I told you I needed to drop the nuke on the South Pole. How could you do it?”

“It’s impossible,” Geena said. “We don’t have the delta-vee for the orbit change. And if you’re talking about delivering it to the surface, rather than dropping it at orbital speeds—”

“Yes. We might have to use the bunker-buster effect.”