And so the Shuttle-Zs launched almost daily, from Canaveral and Kourou and Baikonur, crude Saturn V-class boosters assembled from Space Shuttle technology, people crammed into sardine-can spaceships, fleeing to the Moon. He knew that Geena had emerged from her voluntary exile in the Russian heartland to work at Baikonur, trying to maintain some kind of standard of excellence among the fragmented, ill-trained and badly frightened work force there.

Or maybe it was a Chinese ship, or one of the Indian fleet, based on old Soviet-era Energia technology, built with such haste and crammed even more full than the Shuttle-Zs, with even less precaution and safety checks than in the western sites. The Indian failure rate was a whopping forty per cent, and the toll in lost lives, on those crowded space trucks, was immense. Frank Turtle, the strange little guy from the bowels of NASA who had done so much to return humans to the Moon, had lost his life when one of those big old Energia clones had dropped back to the launch pad on Sri Lanka and blown apart, taking half the island with it.

The rumours were that the failure statistics in China weren’t much better.

It wasn’t going to stop the launches, though, nor the desperate press of people to get themselves or their children on those ramshackle ships. And Henry knew that any government that tried to scale down its launch program would suffer massive civil unrest. The launches were a safety valve, he supposed, the promise of one route, at least, out of the trap Earth had become.

There was a lot of bitter conflict among the nations sending people to the Moon — the violation of international agreements on quotas and priorities went on daily — and it looked to Henry as if humanity was just going to transport all its old prejudices and inner conflicts intact to the new world, and presumably beyond. Depressing, but entirely predictable.

The evacuation was gigantic, but it could never be complete.

It would be possible to save only a fraction of the billions of people with which Earth had once teemed. Hence the Bottleneck laws. If the population was reduced to the minimum, by savage birth control measures, then, simply, there would be less people to be abandoned, to die, when the end came.

Most people accepted that. About the only thing humans could control about this catastrophe was their own numbers: the human souls who would be spared a birth that would doom them only to the flame.

Most people, it seemed to Henry, were doing their best, in this changing world. Behaving honourably, remarkably so in the circumstances. Surveys showed most populations around the planet were restricting their child birth rates voluntarily, accepting the Bottleneck laws.

And, it was estimated, millions could be saved, before the final destruction.

Remarkable, he thought. I bootstrapped a world. In the end, perhaps I really did save mankind. A fraction of it, anyhow.