“I should have guessed. He’s your type.”

“What do you mean?”

He shrugged. “A straight arrow. No complications. Everything I’m not.”

She didn’t reply.

“Well,” he said. “I’m happy for you. I just wish this thing had a garage I could go sleep in to give you privacy… Look at the Moon. You can see it’s covered in dust, even from here.”

She stared at the smoky plains of the Moon. “How so?”

“Think about it. Suppose it was made of bare rock. From here, mountains and craters or not, it would look pretty smooth. A big, fat bowling ball in space. And you’d get a specular reflection at the subsolar point.”

“A what?”

“A bright spot of light, right under the sun.”

“Oh.” She looked again at the Moon’s diffuse glare. “No spot. So, dust everywhere.”

“Yeah…”

A hail of dust-sized motes hit the airless Moon constantly. The motes were tiny, but they were moving at interplanetary velocities — greater than ten miles a second — and they packed a lot of energy. The micrometeorite flux was an eternal sandblaster, grinding the Moon’s surface to dust and smashed-up rock.

“Dust, everywhere. Even on the highlands?”

“Even on the highlands,” he said. “It’s why, from the Earth, the Moon looks like a disc, rather than a ball. It’s too dusty to reflect the sun.” He studied her. “You mean that never occurred to you? To wonder why the Moon doesn’t give off highlights?”

“I guess it never did.”

“Well, there you go,” he said drily. “You learned something new already.”

She snuggled down into her bag. “Go to sleep, Henry.”

“Yes, ma’am. I see the Moon, / The Moon sees me…”

Thus, bathed in Moonlight, they sailed between worlds.

25

Suspended in cislunar space, Henry followed the news from Earth. None of it good. All of it in line with his predictions.

Around Ayr on Scotland’s west coast — near the airport at Prestwick — about fifty old volcanic vents opened up, in an area bounded by West Kilbride in the north, Muirkirk to the east and Dalmellington in the south. Further east many of the Earth’s folds and faults were giving way, from the Pentland fault to the south of Edinburgh to the Tay north of the Forth, and the Campsie Dusk Water faults around Glasgow…

Gradually, the weaknesses in the crust spread through the Midland Valley, towards Glasgow itself. An immense event was approaching.

Henry knew Jane was out of it, safely in the US. He felt ashamed how much that mattered to him, how much it diminished his sense of the tragedy to come. It made his efforts here seem small, absurd. And yet, trapped in the clockwork of the mission, he had to continue.