When he’d first arrived on Mir, he remembered, he could barely move a metre without catching his feet on side panels and banging his legs on anything fixed there: documents, cameras, lenses, control panels. Now he could fly through hatches and compartments, wriggling like some lanky fish, neatly avoiding the equipment and obstructions. If he had to cross some space without handholds, he had learned how hard he had to push. When he had to maintain a position at some work station, he had learned to find a post around which to wrap his legs, or else he would find somewhere to lodge his elbows, feet, knees or even his head, thus holding himself steady; sometimes he would use his legs as clamps, to hold maps or other documentation.

He had come to depend heavily on the advice and experience of other cosmonauts who, for nearly thirty years now, had been learning to survive long-duration assignments in space.

There had been that time, for instance, when the Progress resupply ship was late and he and his crewmates had been reduced to burning lithium perchlorate candles to sustain their oxygen. And then the recycling plant that connected to the toilet had failed, and the sewage tanks had filled up. The crew had been forced to open up the tanks and simply stir the sewage, to reduce the volume. That had worked, but the stench had been awful and did not seem to dissipate, as the days wore on; after all, they could not open a window up there to let in fresh air.

Still, there had been some comedy as their American guest, brought up there in air-conditioned comfort on Shuttle, had tried to cope with all this; she had looked on with horror as the sewage tank was opened, antiseptic wipes over her face to protect her from week-old Russian shit — or, as she had comically put it, “human post-nutritive substance’…

There were two e-mails for him today, transferred up via Houston to the IBM laptop fixed to one wall by Velcro patches. The first mail was relayed from Korolyov. It seemed his coefficient of errors was up to point three five, an unacceptably high level by historic standards.

Arkady sighed and discarded the mail. It was a peculiarity of the Russian system — seen by Geena’s American eyes at least — that every error he made, on this or any other mission, was recorded by his controllers on the ground. Basically, after a mission, he was evaluated not by what he did or how much he accomplished, but by how many mistakes he made.

If he saved the world, he thought wryly, maybe they would overlook his unsatisfactory error ratio.

The second mail was more pleasing. It was from workers at the Krasnoyarsk Hydroelectric Power Station in Siberia. One summer, as a student of the Moscow Institute of Aviation, Arkady had worked at Krasnoyarsk on a dam construction project.