But he wondered if he’d feel the same way after a couple of days inside it.

He watched Geena. Her motions seemed stiff, a little hurried. But her face was already hidden by her gold visor, and she had become an anonymous snowman in the bulk of the suit, dwarfing Arkady, and Henry couldn’t read her.

Arkady embraced Geena, and then came to Henry. After a moment’s hesitation, he wrapped his long Russian arms around Henry’s chest and squeezed. Henry could feel the hug, strong human muscles compressing the pressurized bubble he was sealed inside; the human contact was oddly reassuring, even considering who it came from.

Then Arkady closed up the lockers, grabbed a few pieces of loose equipment, and swam down into the descent module and sealed the hatch behind him.

Geena turned to a control panel crudely welded to the cabin wall, and twisted a switch. “Pressure to five psi.” Her voice was a flat crackle on the radio loop. He heard a remote hiss, dying rapidly. She turned the switch again. “Press to zero. Put your oxygen switch to EVA.”

He obeyed. “So,” he said into his microphone. “Where’s the airlock?”

She said, “We don’t have one.” And she turned to the wall hatch through which, just days before, he had climbed into the Soyuz down at Baikonur, and she twisted its handle, and opened it, to space.

It was like opening the door of a log cabin on a bright spring day.

The brightness was extraordinary; the sun was like a thousand-watt spotlight glaring into his helmet. For the first time he understood just how poky and dark the Soyuz had been.

Geena fixed a thin tether to a loop at her waist, and swam, without speaking, out of the airlock. Henry watched her feet disappear from his view.

He pushed his head out of the hatch. A spray of metallic, glittering dust swarmed out around him, along with a couple of screws, a sheet of paper, a pencil.

The curved green wall of the Soyuz was beneath him, a comforting anchor. Beyond that he could see the Moon, its cratered surface curving away from him in every direction, its details as sharp in the low sunlight as if it was a model just a few feet away, as if he could reach out and touch it.

Away from that, there was nothing. The sky was utterly black, save only for the tiny blue splash of Earth. He couldn’t look directly at the sun; it was a mere source of light which failed to dispel the blackness beyond, a blackness, he realized, which went on forever. After the enclosure of the Soyuz, the change in scale was profound.