She sipped her own tea. Even freshly made, it didn’t seem hot enough. One of the old clichés of lunar travel, she thought: water boils at lower temperature in low pressure. Well, it was a fact of physics, and here she was living it out.

Still, the tea was a comfort.

Afterwards, she pulled on her sleeping bag and lay down. She ought to try to get some sleep, she knew; God alone knew what the next day was going to bring. She considered filling her bag with water from the tank. In the circumstances, though, the drizzle of radiation seemed the least of her worries.

She closed her eyes, and listened to the tapping of Henry’s fingers on the keypad of his laptop, his characteristic, soft, under-the-breath mutterings — frustration, surprise, satisfaction. Just like old times, she thought. As she drifted, the drizzle of key taps seemed to stretch out, as if Henry was some scientifically-minded robot, slowly running down.

Maybe she slept.

Henry tapped her on the shoulder. He was hollow-eyed, but he seemed healthy enough. He was chewing on a rice cake.

“You okay?”

“Yeah,” she said.

“But you’re wide awake.”

“I am now.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“You aren’t working.”

He shrugged. “I think I’m done for now. Monica Beus sent me another e-mail. Smuggled it past the NASA smiley-face censors.”

“And?”

“And what? The world is coming to an end. Where do you want me to start?”

The event in Scotland, its scale unprecedented in the lifetime of the human species, had shaken the world on every level — physical, political, economic. Governments were collapsing all over. Someone had taken out the UN building in New York with a backpack nuke. Britain had invaded the Republic of Ireland, seeking living space.

The NASA satellite pictures were scary. White infra-red blurs that were whole populations, running. Black scars showed where thousands, millions, had died. People were fleeing in herds, seeking safety where none existed anywhere on Earth, all dignity gone.

After the collapse of the international order, wars had flared all over, in every troublespot you could think of, nuclear, chemical, biological, conventional. But it hadn’t taken long for the collapse and general chaos to reach a point where large-scale warfare was impossible, and the conflicts descended into low-level, low-tech — but nonetheless bloody — local brushfire.

“Good news,” Henry said humourlessly. “Famine is killing more people than war. Oh, and NASA centers have been coming under attack.”

“Why, for Christ’s sake?”

He shrugged. “You got to blame somebody.”

He was talking too fast, his mood strange.

She pushed her way out of her sleeping bag. “Show me what you have.”

He brought over his laptop. The screen showed a sphere in false colours, yellow, orange and red, slowly rotating, semi-transparent so she could see to its core.

He asked, “What does this look like?”