After they’d cleaned up, they did some work on their suits. They turned away from each other, seeking a little privacy.

…The cabin was still full of Moon dust. Henry could actually see it in the air, hanging like a fine grey mist. If he breathed in deep it scratched at his throat and hurt his chest.

It was very clingy stuff. It got all over his hands. It stuck to everything: metal, fabric, painted surfaces, clothes and skin. The stuff had low conductivity and dielectric losses, and it had been pounded incessantly by ultraviolet from the sun, and so it had built up a charge. It stuck to him electrostatically, the way he had once, as a kid, made pieces of paper stick to his comb.

But knowing the process didn’t make it any less of a pest.

He worked on his suit. He tried a pocket-sized whisk broom to scrub the dust off of his suit. But it only seemed to work the dust deeper into the fabric.

The dust itself was very fine. It was basically ground-up lava bedrock, which made it abrasive as all hell. There were probably shards of pure iron, and perhaps glassy spheres and dumbbells in here, produced by major impacts, droplets which had been thrown into space and fallen back. And he could see the soil contained larger fragments: agglutinates, particles welded together by the glass produced by the much smaller impacts of micrometeorites.

Out on the surface, the regolith matured, subtly, the rain of micrometeorites welding it into such agglutinates, the solar wind implanting volatiles — hydrogen, for example — into the surface. Maybe recoverable, by future colonists.

He could feel the glass pricking at his fingers. And, as he rubbed it between thumb and forefinger, it was working his way into his skin, he saw. It seemed to be smoothing out his fingertips, taking away his individuality under a surface of lunar debris. He suspected it would take a long time, a lot of washing, before he could get himself clean of this stuff.

He started greasing his suit’s zippers and neck and wrist ring seals.

The toilet was waste tubes and plastic bags. Embarrassing intimacy.

When it was time to sleep, they slung fire-proof Beta-cloth hammocks across the shelter, one over the other. Henry elected for the bottom bunk.

Geena gave him a sleeping bag, and a length of hose.

“What am I supposed to do with this?”

“Pump your bag full of water.”

“Are you crazy?… Oh. So this is NASA’s plan for protecting us from radiation.”

“You got it.” She dumped her own sleeping bag onto her bunk, and ran a tube from the water tank. When her bag lining was full she hung a blanket over the sun’s blurred image, darkening the hab, and clambered into her bunk.

Henry climbed inside his own bag and tried to lie down. It was like settling into a wraparound water bed. Every time Geena moved, she gurgled; and, he supposed, so did he.