For a moment they stood there like that, in the milky gloom of the shelter. Geena’s face was only a few inches from his, outlined by the subdued stand-by lighting. Her eyes were pools of darkness, her mouth a shadow. But her breath was warm on his face, the heat of her flesh in his hands tangible; for the first time he realized how deeply, utterly cold he had felt, how much he needed to be held by another human being.

They were, after all, alone on the Moon, the only living creatures on a planet.

She said, “You feel horny, don’t you?”

He grunted. “I haven’t felt so horny since my father’s funeral. But—”

“But it wouldn’t be wise,” she said.

“Damn right it wouldn’t,” he said; and when he looked into her eyes, he saw they both meant it.

They stepped apart. She began to cast around, in the piles of equipment loosely stacked on the floor.

“What are you looking for?”

“A weight.”

“What for?”

“A plumb line. If we can’t tell which way is up we need an attitude reference. We don’t have an eight-ball in here.”

She dug out one of Henry’s smaller geology hammers, and tied a piece of string to it. When she hung it up from a loop in the roof of the shelter, it hung straight down.

“So we aren’t tipping,” Henry said.

“No. That damn thing knows which way is up, even if we can’t tell.”

“Yeah.”

She reached up and, with an easy low-G bound, pulled herself up into her hammock once more. “Good night, Henry.”

“Yeah.” He clambered back into his own hammock, and pulled his sleeping bag up around his neck.

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.