He had difficulty moving his jaw. Perhaps it was broken.

Now he pulled his hands towards him, and he felt the moist grass rustling beneath his palms. With his hands beneath his shoulders, he pushed, as if attempting a press-up.

He couldn’t lift his chest off the ground. And when he tried, a pain in his legs and knees, extraordinary in its intensity, came flooding over him.

He slumped back to the ground. As he did so, he felt something grind inside his chest, a new source of astounding pain.

Probably he was trapped under debris from the press stand. Maybe his legs were broken too. And it felt as if there was a bust rib or two in there…

His orderly catalogue broke down, as his thinking was overwhelmed by a new wave of agony.

He was thirsty.

He managed to turn his head to look across at the VAB. The big cube of a building had cracked, from the lip of one of the huge Saturn-V-size doorways all the way to the roof. Gigantic blocks and sheets of concrete were falling away from the walls of the building, exposing fresh, unweathered material beneath, which gleamed briefly in what was left of the sunlight; for a moment Hadamard had a brief vision of how this magnificent folly must have looked in the 1960s, when it was fresh and new and unweathered, the embodiment of a gigantic technocratic dream.

But then the cracks widened, and the interior of the structure, its skeletal framework within, was exposed.

At the foot of the crumbling building he saw a splash of red metal, splayed out beneath a fifty-feet slab of concrete. It was his car, crushed like a bug.

He twisted his neck and looked across the Banana River.

It looked as if 39-B had gone altogether. 39-A was tilted at a crazy angle. Next to that defiant, rusting skeleton, the Saturn mockup had been snapped in two. The first stage was still standing, like a stump of broken bone, but the upper stages and the fake Apollo spacecraft lay, indistinctly visible, scattered on the ground at the foot of the gantry.

No more Moon flights for a while, he thought.

At least the Moon rocks ought to be safe, those unopened samples in their vaults in JSC. Maybe archaeologists of the future would find that huge, twenty-billion-dollar cache, the unopened cores and sealed boxes, and wonder how so much of this alien rock had found its way to the planet Earth.

The water in the Banana River was draining, as if a plug had been drawn.

The shocks returned.

The overgrown meadow in front of him lifted up. He could actually see the pressure wave traversing the surface of the ground, as if the Earth itself had been shocked into some new fluid form.

There was an immense groan, a rumble deeper than the roar of any rocket engine.

And then the ground lifted up beneath him. He was thrown into the air, his limbs dangling like a doll’s. The pain in his legs was excruciating.

But the experience was oddly exhilarating, as if he were a child, thrown up by his father, with safe, strong arms waiting to catch him.

He caught a last, wheeling glimpse of Florida sunlight.

She showered, scrubbing herself in as much hot water as Discovery could feed her. She was bruised, on her breast and her stomach, where Angel had grabbed at her. Her neck was burned from the Beta-cloth. Her lips were a mess, and she knew she would have to ask Rosenberg to treat them.

But not today. She couldn’t stand the thought of being touched again. Not today.

When she was done she dumped her soiled clothes outside her quarters. She got back in and closed the door. She straightened out her sleeping bag, which had been kicked around during the struggle.

She got inside, and wrapped her arms around herself, trying to stop shivering, unable to sleep.

Outside she could hear Rosenberg moving around the hab module, hauling at heavy loads.

When she got too thirsty, she dressed, and pushed her way out of her quarters.

Her little pile of clothes had gone. And so had Angel’s body. The place looked clean, as if nothing had happened.

She went to the galley and dug out the coffee. There were only a few ounces of freeze-dried grains left, and they were hoarding them for rainy days. But, she thought, her days weren’t going to come much rainier than this.

She drank the coffee, thick and black. The hot liquid burned at her broken lips, but the pain was somehow welcome, cleansing. The Titan water in the tanks was as fresh as run-off from a Colorado mountain.

Rosenberg came in from the airlock.

“I saved you some coffee,” she said.

His smile was thin. “Thanks.”

“Where is he?”

“Buried in the gumbo. But he ain’t going to stay there.”

“You’re going to feed him to the water oxidizer.”

“Damn right. Now he’s frozen out there, he will be easier to, uh, dismantle. I’m no wet butcher, Paula.”

“My God,” she said. “Sometimes I think you’re as crazy as he is.”

“Was.”

“Won’t it give you any qualms, to feed off life support loops containing the corpse of a human?”

“Why should it? We’ve been eating each other’s waste products for two billion miles anyhow. Look, if it bothers you, I’ll just pass him through the SCWO and vent the products, discard the residue.”

“The main thing is to get him burned, right?”

“Do you object?”

She pictured Bill Angel coming at her, and shuddered. “It was my fault,” she said slowly. “I handled him wrong, from the beginning.”

“What the hell could you have done?”

“He seemed so competent,” she said.

“This helps us out with our life support equations. But the logic of our situation hasn’t changed, Paula. In fact—”

“What?”

“We had news from home.” He looked at her, searching her face. “They raised the stakes on us again, Paula. It’s even more important we survive.”

She felt chill. Bill had said something… She’d thought he was raving. “What do you mean?”

He smiled. “I ought to fix up that lip of yours,” he said.

“Later, Rosenberg.”

“Sure… You know, there’s always work to be done in the farm.”

The farm. That was what she was supposed to be doing today.

The thought of entering the tight walls of the old Apollo, with the racks of green, growing things under their sunlight lamps, was suddenly powerfully appealing to her.

“Yes,” she said. “The farm.” She sipped the coffee from Earth, trying to make it last.

Rosenberg went to the comms panel, and tried to find a signal from Houston.

BOOK FIVE

Extravehicular Activity

A.D. 2015 — A.D. 2016

In 1990 its controllers had had Voyager One look back and take one last picture sequence before shutting down its camera.

Voyager swivelled its instrument platform and shot a panoramic view of sixty images, encompassing in a single sweep every planet from Neptune, past Jupiter, past Earth, in to the sun. It was already so far from home that it took more than five hours for each pixel, travelling at the speed of light, to reach Earth.

The sun was still striking, a brilliant point object millions of times brighter than the brightest star. But the planets, even the gas giants, were mere points of light.

Even so, had Voyager repeated the experiment now, it would have been able to observe the changes that swept over Earth, in the year 2015.

As the clouds rolled across the face of Earth’s oceans, the planet became a brilliant point source of reflected sunlight, its color lightening from blue to white, a twin of scorched Venus.

Patiently, conserving its attitude fuel, the blocky spacecraft sailed further from the sun, pointing its antenna home, obeying its iterated software instructions, calling steadily to Earth.