Geena swam into place beside him, in the left-hand frame, and locked herself in. There they stood, side by side. There was a small control console in front of her, with a couple of simple hand-controllers.

She turned a switch, and there was a gentle shove beneath his feet. Latches had opened, releasing the platform, and some kind of spring-loading pushed it away from Soyuz.

Henry was suspended in space: just him, Geena, and a dining-room table with a rocket mounted beneath it.

“Oh, my God.”

“Don’t bend the handrail,” Geena said.

“You have got to be kidding. This is all there is. Isn’t it?”

“It’s called the open-cockpit design concept.”

“Jesus Christ, Geena.” The whole craft, Henry thought, would probably have fit inside the ascent stage of the old Apollo LM, which was, in Henry’s memory, starting to look luxurious. “What idiot designed this thing?”

“The idiot who was trying to show how he could bring your samples back from the Moon for under a billion bucks.”

“By leaving out the spaceship?”

“Look, the bright guys at JSC studied the open-lander concept. In fact the Shoemaker design was based on the concepts they dreamed up then. It’s feasible. It’s all about saving weight. There’s hardly anything of this craft but the rocket and its fuel…”

Henry looked down, at the pocked face of the Moon sliding beneath his feet. He was naked, he thought, about to fall to another world, utterly defenceless.

Geena tested her reaction control thrusters. She closed her hand over her little controller, and the engines banged, rattling the platform and swivelling it this way and that. Henry could see little streams of exhaust crystals, gushing out in perfect straight lines, glittering briefly in the sunlight.

The old LM ascent stage cabin had just been a bubble of aluminum, he reminded himself. But right now, even a canvas tent around him would have been better than nothing.

With no warning, Geena worked the thrusters again to tip the Shoemaker up. Now its engine bell faced the way they were travelling, and suddenly Henry was flying over the mountains of the Moon, face down, feet first.

“God damn it, my sphincter just clenched. I never felt that before.”

“Take it easy,” Geena said tightly.

They sailed into the shadow of the Moon.

Sunset was sudden, like a light turning off. His bubble helmet cooled, and started to get a little damper; as the temperature dropped, the environmental control system was having trouble removing all the moisture from the air.

Shoemaker, Houston, you are go for DOI, over.

“Roger, go for DOI. Do you have AOS and LOS times?”

Roger, LOS at 103:16 and AOS at 103:59, over…