Like the black algae that had finally put paid to the shower.

Even the toilets never seemed to vent properly. And the old bird was a chorus of bangs, wheezes, and rattles when they tried to sleep at night. Some long-duration Moonlab crews had gone home with permanent hearing loss, he’d been told.

It was much worse than his first flight out there. It was all a kind of hideous, long-drawn-out consequence of Bert Seger’s original decision to redirect this ’Lab from Earth orbit, back in 1973.

Maybe I shouldn’t be so sniffy about that big tractor out there, the Soyuz. At least the Soviets must feel at home, here, ’Lab’s no worse than a Moscow hotel.

Still, you could see Moonlab as a kind of huge experiment in space endurance. Moonlab was a Type II spacecraft. Type I you’d never repair; you’d use it once and bring it home to discard, or fix on the ground, like Apollo Type II, like the ’Labs, were supposed to be repairable, but with logistic support from nearby Earth. Type III, the ultimate goal, would be able to survive for years without logistic support. Any Mars mission would have to be aboard a Type III spacecraft, a level of maturity beyond Moonlab.

Without the long-duration experience of Moonlab and Skylab, the Mars mission would not be conceivable.

They reached the wardroom, where the plastic table was fixed to the mesh floor, and the crew had rigged up five T-cross seats. They sat at the table, hooking their legs under the bars of the seats, and Stone fixed the TV camera to a strut. Then the performance really began.

There were flags to swap, including a U.N. flag, which had been carried up by Soyuz and would be returned home by Apollo. Each crew had brought along halves of commemorative aluminum and steel medallions, which Muldoon and Viktorenko joined together. They traded boxes of seeds from their countries: the Americans handed over a hybrid white spruce, and the Soviets Scotch pine, Siberian larch, and Nordmann’s fir.

It was time for the ritual meal. The Americans were hosts today, so, from the customary plastic bags, the cosmonauts were treated to potato soup, bread, strawberries, and grilled steak. There was much forced bonhomie and laughter in all this. Tomorrow it would be the Russians’ turn, and — as Stone knew, because they’d practiced even this — the menu would be tins containing fish, meat, and potatoes, tubes of soft cheese, dried soup, vegetable puree, and oats; there would be nuts, black bread, dried fruit.

As he ate, Stone looked dubiously at the TV camera staring at him from above. As space PR stunts went, this one was turning out to be a stinker. Jesus, he thought. I hope nobody I know is tuned in to this.