There was an elusive quality to the Moon’s features, an uncertainty about the shading. Sometimes the craters looked like domes, the mountains like pits. The dead surface of the Moon was like a mask, reversing itself in his vision.

In Earth orbit Dana had been able to see the curve of the horizon, but the Earth was so huge that most of it was out of his view. But the Moon was a small world. The curvature was so tight he could extrapolate the rest of the sphere; he could see that he really was flying around a ball of rock, suspended in space, with darkness stretching to infinity in all directions.

It looks so alien This isn’t our world And yet three Stars and Stripes and three abandoned LM descent stages already stood on those silent hills.

“Thirty seconds to LOS,” Jones said.

“Enterprise, Houston.” Ralph Gershon was the rookie astronaut serving as capcom today. “Coming up on LOS. All your systems are looking good. We’ll see you on the other side.”

“Roger, Ralph, thank you. Everything looks okay up here.”

The hiss of static from the comms units faded suddenly, to be replaced by a low-volume hiss.

“Going around the corner,” Phil Stone said quietly. “Loss of signal.”

Dana stared at the little loudspeaker grille closest to his position. He was startled by his own reaction: he felt abandoned, bewildered. Apollo was out of the line of sight of Earth for the first time since launch; for the first time, Mission Control couldn’t get in touch with the crew, and it was as if a rope had been cut.

Dana quietly suspected that a kind of dependency culture had grown up among the astronauts over the years. Whether it was healthy or not, the knowledge that Mission Control was always there, always staffed with the best and the brightest, took a lot of the responsibility away from the pilots. It was as if Houston was flying your ship for you. By contrast, those few moments when you and your bird would have to function entirely independently of the ground — well, those times brought fear. Not of the inherent danger, but of failure. Don’t let me be the one who screws up.

The stack was barreling toward the Moon. They were falling steeply into the satellite’s gravity well, and the Moon was growing — getting visibly larger by the minute, its features sliding past the windows.

“Look at that old Moon,” Jones said. “Rougher than the surface of my butt. Well, I guess I’m never going to get to land down there, but I’m glad I came along after all. That smart-ass kid Gershon should be here now. Make him feel right at home. It’s just like Cambodia.” He cackled.

Dana tried to grin along with his commander, but he failed. To his left, Phil Stone looked uncomfortable, too.