“Again, we don’t have the delta-vee,” Arkady said. And he drifted away, and began a conference, in Russian, with the ground controllers.

“There is no way,” Geena said, irritated. “Henry, this is your fault. This is your damn plan, isn’t it? If you told us up front what was on your mind we could have prepared for it.”

He laughed. “That’s impossible. They wouldn’t have let me out of Edinburgh if I had. I guess I thought there would be more — flexibility. More options.”

“Well,” she said heavily, “you guessed wrong.”

He backed off, troubled.

When Geena tried to sleep, she wasn’t disturbed by the noises of the ship’s equipment, the sensations of zero G. She was used to all that. What got to her now were the flashes inside her closed eyelids: loops and meteorite streaks and starbursts, some of them so bright she felt dazzled. The flashes were caused by cosmic rays, heavy particles which had emanated from some ancient supernova, and had crossed light years to pass through her head.

Even in low Earth orbit you were protected from this shit by the Earth’s arching magnetic field. Not out here. And every time one of those ancient little wasps passed through her, it caused a little more damage to her body’s structure.

Slowly but surely, space was killing her…

“I see the Moon, / The Moon sees me, / God bless the priest / That christened me…”

Henry was whispering, but even so it woke her up. She turned in her sleeping bag, and cold air pushed in at the neck.

Henry was hovering by the wall, holding loosely to a stanchion. He was staring out the window, looking at the Moon.

Arkady was curled into a ball, snoring softly.

The Man in the Moon had changed. It looked as if he had turned a little to the right, bringing his left side forward, obscuring Imbrium, his big, dark right eye…

She had come so far, already, that she was looking at a new part of the Moon.

Its light flooded over Henry’s face, shadowless and stark.

“I see the Moon, / The Moon sees me, / God bless the Moon, / God bless me.”

“Henry, what are you doing?”

“Something I learned in Scotland,” he said. “I’m protecting you.” He turned to the Moon; half his face entered shadow, so that there was a terminator down his profile, picking out the shape of his eye ridges, nose and lips.

“What’s she like?”

“Who?”

“Whoever taught you the poem.”

“Is it that obvious?”

“Yes.”

“She’s called Jane. She has a kid. A boy.”

Geena grunted. “Different from me.”

He thought about that, studying her. “No. I don’t think so. Not fundamentally. She’s strong, like you. She’s no astronaut, though.”

“Will you go back to her?”

“If there’s somewhere back to go to. What about you and Leonid Brezhnev over there?”

“Yes. I think so.”