“No.” He placed one bare foot into the mud, then another. He wriggled his toes, and felt the mud ooze between his toes. “Feels like river bottom mud. When I used to go fishing with my brother as a kid—”

“Spare me the cornball reminiscences.”

He eyed her. “Back off, Geena. I’m in no danger. What do you think is going to happen to me? I’ll step on a stinging nettle? The Moon might be wet, but it’s still dead.”

“Except for the Moonseed.”

“Except for the Moonseed, and that doesn’t count right now…”

The light changed, subtly; it became a little brighter, and for the first time Henry made out shadows, around the steeper of the muddy mounds.

Geena was looking up at the sky. “Wow.”

He turned and looked. The clouds had parted: through shreds of cumulus, Henry made out a lacing of higher, streaming cirrus, and there was the Earth, a thin crescent, huge and pale — and there, directly above, was a patch of blue sky.

Blue sky, on the Moon.

Well, of course it’s blue, he thought. The Moon gets the same strength sunlight as Earth. The light is scattered by the same sized particles as on Earth…

“All we need is a rainbow,” Geena said.

“Yeah.”

On impulse, he lifted his facemask. His ears popped, as his oxygen rushed out; he took a single, deep sniff of the air.

Geena rushed up to him. “Are you crazy?”

He dropped his mask back into place. “Probably.” He took deep breaths. “But I’m okay.”

“What did you do that for?”

“I wanted to smell it. To smell the Moon.”

“And?”

He stared around, at the subsiding mud. “Wood smoke,” he said. “It smelled of wood smoke.”

The regolith was oxidizing, even as comet water soaked into it. All around him, all over its surface, the Moon was slowly burning.

They walked further, across the blank, muddy plain.

Henry looked at the empty sky, which was closing over once more. “How long do you figure before they come to get us?”

“It depends how long it takes to assemble another mission,” she said. “At least a month, I’d think; we used up both the prototype Shoemaker landers. They’d have to build more, and—”

He shook his head. “You’re not thinking. Those landers won’t work any more. The air, remember? You don’t need to bring rocket fuel for the descent; you could just glide down. There are going to be strong winds for a while, though. And we’ll need a new design, a way to get back off the surface through this thick air…”

She nodded. “Months, then.”

“At least. Still, resupply will be easy. They can drop stuff by aerobrake and parachute. I don’t think they will let us starve.”

“Or X-38s,” she said. “Space Station escape gliders.”

“Yeah…”