Of course she has no memory of the Moon before the modification. It seems perfectly natural to her to lope around the mare with nothing more than cold weather clothing, sunglasses and an oxygen pack! I’ve shown her recordings of the old Apollo Moonwalks, but she doesn’t say much.

I suspect among the young people born here there is already a conspiracy theory circulating: that the Moon has always been this way — that maybe the old airless Moon never existed — that maybe our “terraforming” is a clumsy attempt to rectify some eco screw-up on a previously pristine Moon. God, if only that was true!

I do know that the images the young ones see of Earth are affecting them in ways we didn’t anticipate.

For sure, the kids are evolving away from us, Henry. Already. Oh, Nadezhda doesn’t look much different from me at her age, when I was nagging mum to take me to the McDonald’s on Princes Street; it’s going to take generations even to work through the obvious physiological changes — the low G adaptations, for instance; Nadezhda will have to spend her life on courses of treatment against bone calcium loss and body fluid imbalances.

But her children will be a little taller, and a little more resistant; and her grandchildren a little more so… and so on.

Humans will survive here. I’m sure of that now. What I’m not convinced about is how much they will care about old Earth.

The young ones already have their own agenda. It’s hard for them to have any loyalty for the home planet when they see that now you need spacesuits just to survive down there…

There has already been some trouble at the drop points in Procellarum. Resistance to new immigrants, even to accepting more loads of rocks and frozen bugs from Earth.

I just hope it all holds together long enough to get the best of it away, before the end.

Well, maybe it’s inevitable. We’ve done all we can to equip the kids and educate them. Now, the future is theirs…

As the tectonic events accelerated, predictions were being revised, and it seemed they were approaching the Bottleneck itself, the great, final die-back from which nothing on the surface of Earth, nothing, was going to escape. The laws had gotten harsher. No more children to be born on Earth. Anybody who refused to comply would be refused boarding, for themselves or their children, to the Arks to the Moon.

It was harsh, and not universally accepted by the governments, and had caused revolution, and more than one war. In South America, where the Pope had mounted his last stand against the managed decline of the population, the fallout of thermonuclear destruction had added to Earth’s final woes.