Geena seemed to be trying to come up with something to say, to fill the silence. “You know, the Chinese have a Moon legend. They say a beautiful girl called Chango has been living up here for four thousand years. She was sent up here because she stole the pill of immortality from her husband. And she has a companion, a big Chinese rabbit which—”

“What if we get punctured by a meteorite?”

“You know that’s not likely.”

He punched the walls with his fist, making the fabric wobble around them. “Okay. But what about cosmic radiation?”

“Actually, the biggest risk on a six-day stay is a solar flare.”

“So where is the six-inch shell of lead plate to protect us?”

“You can’t design out all the risk, Henry. And the risk of dying because of some act of God up here is low compared to some of the other risks we have to take.”

“Such as?”

“Principally, launch from Earth. Reentry is no Disneyland ride, either.”

“So tell me how you handle this low risk.”

“Management waivers. A NASA speciality. You want some dried strawberries?”

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.