› To celebrate the first Russian lunar flight, by the joint decision of the workers and the MIA student construction workers in Sayany, Arkady Berezovoy is nominated as an Honorary Concrete Worker in Dmitri Syroyezkho’s work team. His salary will be transferred to the Russian Peace Foundation. We wish you Siberian health, happiness, successful completion of your mission, and a safe return to Earth. We embrace you as a friend. Come and visit us in Sayany…

Arkady was moved. He was sorry Geena was not here to see this — though he was glad her American ex-husband Henry was not here to mock. Americans would never understand such a gesture as this, and would deride it.

But to Arkady, it was like an echo of the past. It seemed to Arkady that since the implosion of the Soviet Union — whatever the rights or wrongs of that “liberation” — the Russian people had had precious few heroes to celebrate. This message from the power workers wasn’t the first such he had received. It warmed him, here orbiting the cold wastes of the Moon, to think that his countrymen, even in these dark times, were following his mission. Arkady had always believed that the true value of a hero was not to himself or herself, but to others, as an example of the heights to which humanity can aspire.

He drifted before the laptop keyboard, and composed a reply.

› Dear friends, I thank you for your mail, and for the great honour you do me… I can assure you that by my hard work on the Soyuz I will represent the hydroconstruction workers with honour…

That done, the Honorary Concrete Worker continued with his duties, in lunar orbit.

When he passed over Aristarchus, he looked for Geena and Henry. If Arkady told the computer where to look, it was able to point the navigation sextant, with its low-power telescope, right at the rille; and when he looked in the eyepiece, just within the rim of the crater, there was the lander: a point of metallic light trailing a needlelike shadow.

He peered into the eyepiece, willing himself to pick out more details. Maybe he could make out the four landing legs of the old Apollo Lunar Module… Perhaps that fuzzy oblong was Geena’s inflatable shelter.

But the “scope wasn’t powerful enough for that, and he was starting to see what he wanted to see, not what was there; and so, he knew, he must put aside the telescope.

No Russian had ever visited the surface of the Moon. Perhaps no Russian ever would. It was an exercise in futility, therefore, to gaze on its surface like Moses at the Promised Land.

It might have been different, though.

Arkady would, he admitted to himself, relish the chance to be a hero, to be another Gagarin to inspire future generations, to help his country climb its long ladder to a better future.

But he would do nothing to jeopardize the mission.