He tried to settle his mind.

He listened to Geena’s soft, even breath. When he thought he was tipping, he looked up, and he could see the hammer dangling there, calm and rational, a link to a world where the laws of physics continued to work.

He closed his eyes, determined to sleep.

To his surprise, he succeeded.

2

Alone in lunar orbit, Arkady set his alarm to wake him during a period when he was on the far side of the Moon: invisible to all mankind, to remote blue Earth, even to the two humans scrambling through the Moon dirt near Aristarchus, here he could enjoy the ultimate privacy.

He lay for a moment in his sleeping bag. He was surrounded by equipment, bags and containers and documents, fixed to every square centimetre of wall surface. It was like being in the middle of a busy railroad station, he mused, luggage scattered everywhere.

The craft’s noise was a miniature orchestra: the whirring of different electrical devices, fans, regenerators, carbon dioxide absorbers and dust filters, gadgets which were never switched off. The noise rattled around him, echoing in this compact metal barrel. It was, he supposed, about as noisy as a busy apartment — with one difference: these were only mechanical sounds; there were no human voices here, save his own.

Once, for an experiment, on the far side of the Moon, he’d turned everything off. Just for a moment. The silence was oppressive: in his ears there was only the susurrus of his own breath, his rushing blood, and beyond that a stillness that stretched a quarter-million miles. It gave him an unwelcome sense of perspective: noise seemed to make the universe more friendly.

Loose objects — pens, paper, food wrappers — swam through the air past his head. They moved languidly in the gentle air currents from the fans, sometimes darting this way and that in the random flow of the air, like improbable fish.

Here, everything floated: dust, pieces of trash, food crumbs, juice drops, coffee, tea. None of it would settle out, and all of it ended up suspended in the air. This enhanced Soyuz was fitted with a jury-rigged air circulation system, and a lot of stuff would end up collected on the intake grille of fan ducts, which he kept covered with cheese cloth. Once a day, he would wrap up the cheese cloth with its assorted trash and replace it with a fresh one.

Most things, if he lost them, ended up on the grille. If he needed something in a hurry he had a little rubber balloon that he kept in his coverall pocket. If he blew this up and released it, it would drift with the prevailing air currents and he could just follow where it went.

If he was thinking about chores, it was time to get up.

He clambered out of his sleeping bag. He started his day with bread, salt and water.

He spent some time cleaning up the Soyuz.