And when she looked along the cylindrical length of the Soyuz, she could see at one extreme the big, soft-looking contour of the strapped-on heatshield that was supposed to aerobrake them back to Earth orbit, and at the other, strapped to the hull, the angular, spidery form of the little lunar lander.

She began to make her way towards the lander, hand over gloved hand, following holds built into the hull of the Soyuz. A tether trailed behind her. She felt her legs dangle behind her, inert and useless in the pressurized suit; the exertion sent a familiar warmth spreading through her arms and hands as she pulled herself along.

It was just like the three EVAs she had made from Station in Earth orbit, she told herself. Or just like the sims she had done in the Vomit Comet, or the big weightless training facility, the pool at Ellington AFB…

Except it wasn’t.

There was no Earth looming alongside the craft like a blue wall of ocean and cloud, huge and enclosing; nor was there the feel of water around her, the murky forms of swimmers to assist her.

When she raised her head from the metal surface before her, when she looked around, there was nothing. And if she let go, she felt, she was going to fall, all the way back down to that blue floor far below, like a trick diver aiming for a bathtub from a telegraph pole.

“Hey.”

She looked down. The upper half of Henry’s pressure suit, sharply lit, was protruding from the hatch; with his gloved hands he was paying out her tether.

Henry said, “You look as if you’re going to leave fingerprints in that handrail.”

When she looked to the hull before her, she could see how her hands had wrapped themselves around a rail.

With an effort of will, she released the tension in her hands. The stiff gloves made her fingers pop open, as if spring-loaded.

She turned to the blackness. It was just so damn dark out there.

There had been no real training for this mission. None of the endless hours in the sims she’d endured during her Shuttle and Station training, so much simulation that the real thing had seemed somehow a disappointment by comparison.

But she’d always understood the real purpose of all those sims. It wasn’t to train her. It was to beat the unfamiliarity out of her, to destroy her fear.

For this mission, there hadn’t been the time for that. And here she was, exposed. More alone than she had ever been.

She raised her right hand and, just for an instant, raised her gold visor.

The sunlight was dazzling, glaring directly into her helmet and bouncing off the module’s sheer hull, and she screwed up her eyes. But the stars were still there: the sky crowded, the constellations immediately familiar.

Somehow she felt reassured, anchored in the universe again.

She closed up her visor and waited for her eyes to clear. Then she turned to her work.

Henry and Geena were loosely tethered to the Soyuz, inspecting the lander.

The Shoemaker was, Henry supposed, about the size of a small car. It was just a platform, with four spindly, open-strut legs protruding beneath it. There was a single rocket nozzle sticking out from under it, surrounded by four fat tanks containing propellant and oxidizer. And at the corners there were four little clusters of smaller rocket nozzles, attitude thruster assemblies, with flaring shields behind them. The whole thing was maybe six feet tall, from pads to the table surface, and on top of the table there were a couple of open metal rectangles, the size and shape of door frames.

And that was all: no more than the prototype unmanned craft he’d inspected at JPL, before his program was canned, minus the elaborate sample-return stage on top.

Henry’s training, which had focused on the hazards of launch and reentry, hadn’t covered this. He looked around. “Where’s the rest of it?”

Geena’s voice was tight. “You’re not helping, Henry.”

“No, I mean it. I see the landing stage, but where’s the cabin? Where are the seats? Where’s the ascent stage?”

“Come here.”

With one hand anchored to a strut, she grabbed his shoulder and spun him around. She guided him backwards, into the right-hand door frame. The metal rectangle neatly encompassed his backpack; Geena snapped latches, and the pack was secured, and so was Henry. He was stuck there, like a turtle glued by its shell, his arms and legs dangling.

“Put your feet down here.” She guided his feet to a little sloping shelf on the top of the platform.

He placed his feet where she showed him. There was a handrail in front of him, and he grabbed onto that, and he felt a little more secure. Not much, though. And in fact, the little foot platform made him feel as if he was tipping forward, about to fall off the damn thing.

Geena swam into place beside him, in the left-hand frame, and locked herself in. There they stood, side by side. There was a small control console in front of her, with a couple of simple hand-controllers.

She turned a switch, and there was a gentle shove beneath his feet. Latches had opened, releasing the platform, and some kind of spring-loading pushed it away from Soyuz.

Henry was suspended in space: just him, Geena, and a dining-room table with a rocket mounted beneath it.

“Oh, my God.”

“Don’t bend the handrail,” Geena said.

“You have got to be kidding. This is all there is. Isn’t it?”

“It’s called the open-cockpit design concept.”

“Jesus Christ, Geena.” The whole craft, Henry thought, would probably have fit inside the ascent stage of the old Apollo LM, which was, in Henry’s memory, starting to look luxurious. “What idiot designed this thing?”

“The idiot who was trying to show how he could bring your samples back from the Moon for under a billion bucks.”

“By leaving out the spaceship?”

“Look, the bright guys at JSC studied the open-lander concept. In fact the Shoemaker design was based on the concepts they dreamed up then. It’s feasible. It’s all about saving weight. There’s hardly anything of this craft but the rocket and its fuel…”

Henry looked down, at the pocked face of the Moon sliding beneath his feet. He was naked, he thought, about to fall to another world, utterly defenceless.

Geena tested her reaction control thrusters. She closed her hand over her little controller, and the engines banged, rattling the platform and swivelling it this way and that. Henry could see little streams of exhaust crystals, gushing out in perfect straight lines, glittering briefly in the sunlight.

The old LM ascent stage cabin had just been a bubble of aluminum, he reminded himself. But right now, even a canvas tent around him would have been better than nothing.

With no warning, Geena worked the thrusters again to tip the Shoemaker up. Now its engine bell faced the way they were travelling, and suddenly Henry was flying over the mountains of the Moon, face down, feet first.

“God damn it, my sphincter just clenched. I never felt that before.”

“Take it easy,” Geena said tightly.

They sailed into the shadow of the Moon.

Sunset was sudden, like a light turning off. His bubble helmet cooled, and started to get a little damper; as the temperature dropped, the environmental control system was having trouble removing all the moisture from the air.

Shoemaker, Houston, you are go for DOI, over.

“Roger, go for DOI. Do you have AOS and LOS times?”

Roger, LOS at 103:16 and AOS at 103:59, over…

DOI, AOS, LOS. More acronyms, Henry thought. Well, DOI must be descent orbit initiation. And LOS and AOS referred to loss and acquisition of signal; for, like so many of this mission’s most crucial moments, the descent burn would take place on the far side of the Moon, out of sight of Earth, and far from assistance.