It was true that the Moon was a quiet world. There wasn’t even the brush of wind, the crash of a remote wave. It was a quiet that had persisted for billions of years, since the end of the heavy bombardment that had shaped the landscape. Even the light here was old, the light of the stars that had taken centuries or millennia to reach here.

But there was change here. There was even weather.

There was frost, on the Moon.

The Moon had an atmosphere, of hydrogen, helium, neon and argon. It was so thin it was probably replenished by the solar wind. At night, the argon would freeze out. It sublimated quickly at dawn.

Now, walking in shadows disturbed only by milky blue Earth-light, here and there, he convinced himself he could see a sparkle, a glint of lunar ice…

He was encased in stars, surfing on rocky blue waves.

He could feel the regolith crunch beneath his feet, his weight crushing the floury structure constructed by a billion years of micrometeorite gardening. All that information, lost as soon as he touched it.

And now, there was no time left to decode it.

If Henry had got his math right, soon this place — like every site on the Moon — would be overwhelmed by weather.

Henry knew he should be anticipating the great events to come. If it worked — if — he would be giving humanity, perhaps, a whole new world.

If the Moon was the only safe world in the Solar System, because of the Moonseed hive at its core, humans were going to have to come here to live. Henry’s plan would — might — make that possible.

But Henry was a geologist. He might be creating a new Earth, but he was going to have to wreck the Moon to do it. For instance, the structure of the ice at the Pole, strata laid down over billions of years, was a record of the impact history of the inner Solar System — a unique record that was probably already lost, thanks to the nuke.

He would destroy the Moon, to save humanity. Grandiose bullshit.

Somehow, he had manoeuvred himself into a situation where the history of two worlds was resting on his shoulders. As if he was Jesus Christ himself.

But he had no pretensions; this was no part of the deal as far as his life plan was concerned.

Especially as Christ died for his mission, as he might have to now.

He checked the watch clumsily strapped to his dust-grimed sleeve.

Watch the Moon…

Jays Malone climbed up Mount Wilson to do just that. He came with Sixt Guth, who was not much younger than him, now grounded from the Space Station. Everybody was grounded now, it seemed.