He looked at her sideways. It was hard to read her behind her mask. She still seemed brittle, to him.

Fear and grief, he thought, the loss of Arkady, the pummelling of the terraforming. But it barely showed, at her surface.

Maybe she was in shock. Or maybe it just showed how little he knew her, he thought gloomily.

“We’ll get through this, you know,” he told her.

“I know. But I’d rather be home.”

“Umm.” He thought that over. “Where is home now, for you? Houston? Or—”

“Russia,” she said firmly. “With Arkady’s family. They always made me welcome.”

“Shows where we went wrong, huh.”

“Frankly, yes.”

“I’m sorry. About Arkady.”

She nodded. “I know. But it was unavoidable.”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I think it was. But I can see you loved him.”

After a time, she said, “What about you? Scotland?”

He shrugged. “Hell, no. Scotland is Olympus Mons now. Nobody will be going back there… I need to find Jane, and her kid, and we’ll find some place that will last a little longer than Britain.”

“I wish you well,” she said seriously. “I wish you happiness.”

“Thanks.”

“I mean it.”

“I know you do,” he said. “What about Rocky?”

“My mother still has him.” She added, “Much you care.” But he could tell it was a reflex jab.

He looked around. “Maybe one day this will be home, for somebody. That’s the idea, anyhow.”

“You think they’ll let us come back?”

“No,” he said sadly.

“Why not?”

“Because we’ll be too old to breed,” he said bluntly. “Our time is gone, Geena. Gone with Earth. It’s up to the children now… Hats.”

“What?”

“Hats. When the sun breaks through, we’ll fry. No ozone layer up there, remember. And I don’t suppose you packed any sun-cream. Maybe we can take the S-band antenna off the Rover, use it as a parasol.”

“You have a strange sense of priority, Henry.”

“I have a strange mind.”

“What else?”

“It wouldn’t hurt to find a source of water.” He dug a bare toe into the ground; the little pit he excavated slumped back immediately, like wet sand. “The rain is just going to soak away into this stuff. We ought to find the basin of a young crater. Maybe Aristarchus. The regolith is only a few inches thick there, and we should find liquid water pooling. Then we have to keep moving.”

“Moving? Where?”

“East, of course. We ought to go east.”

“Why?”

“Because night will come.” He looked at the sky, seeking the sun. “It isn’t lunar noon yet; we have some time. But the terminator, the line between night and day, moves across the landscape at around ten miles an hour. We can’t outrun it. We have to give ourselves as much time as we can, hope they get the resupply to us before night falls—”

“And what happens then?”