And so the old astronaut sat in the ruins of the observatory dome, trying to ignore the mounting pain from his smashed eye socket, listening as his friend described the waves of light travelling across the Moon, until the fires from the city filled the air with smoke, hiding the Moon, and began to close in on them for the last time, and the next shock hit them, even more violent than the last—

They woke up Monica to see it.

You’ve got to watch the Moon.

Not live, of course; she couldn’t be moved. But they gave her a little TV, set up on a table over her bed, tipped so she could see it.

Circles closing in.

In the end it was the liver disease that was getting her. Nausea, loss of appetite, drastic weight loss; her skin had turned yellow and itched like all hell. She had turned into a giant, misshapen, irritable cantaloupe. But at that it was preferable to going crazy first, which had been another option.

…There had come a day when she could not get herself out of her chair unaided, and a day when she knew she would never see another spring, and at last, maybe soon, there would be a day which would be the final day of all for her, a day without a sunset, or a night without a dawn. The circles would close in, walling her off from this world of books and music and mathematics and sunlight, everything she knew and cherished. And on the other side of the wall was nothing she could understand or anticipate, perhaps — probably — not even her identity. Even now her universe was reduced to this poky little hospital room, the last flowers Alfred Synge had sent her before he got himself killed in the Seattle event… Now, I won’t even get to see the outside air again.

Watch the Moon…

A disc, floating in the screen, obscured somewhat by the volcanic ash in the air: it was recognizably the Moon, still, the familiar layout of seas and highlands easy to make out. But now there was cloud pooling in the lowlands. What looked like auroras, lightning.

Henry Meacher, she thought. So he did it. Hot damn.

She felt a surge of satisfaction, banishing for a few minutes the coldness that seemed to cluster around her the whole day now. I knew I was right to back him. I knew he had something.

She watched the clouds, swirling across the face of the Moon. Damn, damn, I wish I could see it for real. Just for a moment.

But she knew that was impossible.

…And now it came crowding over the horizon, as suddenly as that, a thick, crawling layer of fog, spreading towards him like, he thought irrelevantly, a dry ice layer at a 1980s rock concert. It spread right around the curving horizon, and stretched to a wispy thinness above.