Donnelly sat down. He’d been resting his hands on sheets of his flight plans; when he lifted his hands he found he’d left behind two perfect, wet images of his palms.

Monday, December 1, 1980

Adam Bleeker was the first of the Moonlab crew to eyeball the approaching Soyuz. “Hey, Phil, Joe. Come see.”

Stone drifted down to the wardroom’s big picture window.

Soyuz T-3 was silhouetted sideways-on against the pale brown Moon, which slid liquidly past.

Soyuz was shaped, Stone supposed, something like a green pepper shaker, a cylinder topped by a squat dome. The cylindrical body was the Instrument-Assembly Module, containing electrical, environmental, propulsion systems. Two matte black solar panels jutted from the flanks of the instrument module, like unfolded wings. A parabolic antenna was held away from the ship, on a light gantry. Stone was able to make out the flat base of the craft; there was a toroidal propellant tank fixed there, surrounding small engine bells. The dome at the top of the pepper shaker was the Descent Module: living quarters for the cosmonauts, and the cabin that would carry them through reentry into Earth’s atmosphere. For Earth-orbit missions the Descent Module would have been capped, Stone knew, by a large, egg-shaped Orbital Module, a work and living area.

The body of the ship was a light blue-green, an oddly Earthlike color set against the bleak uniformity of the Moon.

Soyuz looked, frankly, like a piece of shit to Stone. The solar cells were big black squares, crudely tiled onto the panels, and thick wires ran along the edges of the panels; Stone could see fist-sized big blobs of solder where some greasy technician had finished his job crudely.

The engineering was agricultural. The approaching Soyuz was like something out of a parallel universe, he thought.

The crew pulled away from the window; there was still work to do before the Soviets arrived.

Stone went up through the hole in the open mesh floor and climbed the fireman’s pole to the Multiple Docking Adapter at the far end of the hydrogen tank, the main experiment chamber. The adapter had three clusters hanging from its ports. There was the Apollo, which had brought the crew up from Earth, known as Grissom to thousands of schoolkids. Grissom had actually been adapted to carry five men home if need be, with two additional couches stowed in the Command Module’s lower equipment bay. Then there was the Telescope Mount, a small lab module with four wide solar arrays and a battery of science experiments and sensors. The mount had been adapted by Grumman engineers from a leftover LM ascent stage; in a different reality, that LM would have carried the astronauts of Apollo 16 up from the lunar surface.

The third component fixed to the adapter was a short, squat cylinder called the Soyuz Docking Module, an interface between the incompatible atmospheres and docking kits of Soyuz and Apollo. Viktorenko and Solovyov were going to have to dock with this module, and use it as a kind of airlock to get into Moonlab.

Stone began putting the docking module through a final checkout. As such assignments went, it wasn’t too frustrating. At least the module was a new piece of kit. People had lived and worked in the rest of Moonlab for the past five years, and it showed.

When he’d finished, Stone drifted back down to the wardroom. His next job was to run a visual sextant check of the Soviets’ position.

As he made his observations, Soyuz maneuvered away from the backdrop of the Moon and floated against the stars.

“Moonlab, this is Komarov. Moonlab—”

Muldoon replied for Moonlab. “We hear you, Komarov. The VHF link is working fine.” Viktorenko, on Soyuz, had used English; Muldoon replied in halting Russian.

Muldoon went through a four-way conversation between Moonlab, Soyuz, and the two ground control stations at Houston and Kaliningrad, testing out links and confirming system status.

Soyuz wheeled around so that it faced Moonlab. “Moonlab, Komarov. We are ready for the final docking maneuver. I will turn on my beacon.”

A light began to flash on the spine of Soyuz, easily visible through the picture window.

“I see you, Komarov.”

“And I you, Joe. Your elegant Moonlab is difficult to miss. We have our space suits on, all ready for docking. And our bow ties on top, for we are ready for a fine dinner with you.”

Houston and Kaliningrad both called up “go” for the docking. Soyuz spun slowly on its long axis, rolling through sixty degrees to align correctly with the docking module. The solar arrays made Soyuz look almost birdlike, swooping around the Moon like some unlikely metal swallow.

Soyuz came in slowly and hesitantly, with many small attitude and angle corrections. At one point the ship even backed off from Moonlab. The Moonlab crew and Houston kept quiet; Stone listened to the soft, tense, dialogue in Russian between Komarov and Kaliningrad.

Komarov was evidently a pig to fly. Soyuz was a flexible ferry craft, but it was essentially a contemporary of the American Gemini, lacking much of the sophistication and power of Apollo. There was a real lack of precise attitude control and translation instruments, with most of the operations conducted by preprogrammed mission event sequencers.

In fact, the poor maneuverability of Soyuz had caused some friction during the planning stages of this joint flight. Some on the U.S. side had suggested, half-seriously, that Soyuz should be the “passive” partner — that Apollo should haul the bulk of Moonlab into the docking with the tiny Soyuz…

Anyhow it looked as if Soyuz was coming in on its final approach. As it neared, bristling with detail, Komarov arced up and out of Stone’s view, and he heard Muldoon calling out in Russian.

“Five yards… three yards… one…”

There was a soft clang, a rattle of docking latches.

“Well-done, Vlad,” Muldoon called. “Good show, tovarich. You came in at just a foot per second.”

“Indeed. Now Apollo and Soyuz are shaking hands, here in the shadow of the Moon. Yes?”

The cosmonauts moved into the small docking module and sealed it up. They had to sit out there three hours as the pressure was reduced to match Moonlab’s.

Stone pulled himself into the tunnel at the core of the Multiple Docking Adapter, close to the entrance to the Soyuz Docking Module. Muldoon and Bleeker were already there, and the little tunnel, packed with instrument boxes and oxygen bottles, was crowded. Stone’s job was to work the small handheld TV camera and relay handshake pictures back to Earth.

There was a soft tapping. Muldoon opened the hatch.

Vladimir Viktorenko, beaming broadly, reached out and shook Muldoon’s hand. “My friend. I am very happy to see you.” He came tumbling out of the hatch, squat and exuberant, and gave Muldoon a bear hug. He gave Muldoon a little packet of bread and salt, a traditional Russian greeting. Solovyov followed his commander out. And there were the five of them crowded into the docking adapter’s tunnel, grinning and hugging, always with one eye on the camera.

Muldoon led them through the clutter of Moonlab toward the wardroom. Viktorenko and Solovyov made the obligatory polite remarks about the bird, but, Stone thought, they were being kind.

The first task of each new crew up there was to use its Apollo Service Module to tweak Moonlab’s orbit. The Moon’s gravity field was so lumpy that anything left in low lunar orbit would soon fall to the surface. And when he’d first approached ’Lab in Grissom, Stone might have been tempted to let the thing just fall.

After five years Moonlab’s outside hull was pretty much dinged up, with big fist-sized meteorite holes knocked in the shield. The solar cells, also dented by meteorites, had degraded, and so the power was down to half its peak. Inside, the lights were dim, and jerry-built air ducts ran everywhere to make up for the broken fans. Stone was already sick of half-heated meals, lukewarm coffee, and tepid bathing water.