Some vapour hung away from the Moon, in a thin cloud, trails of it hovering over the South Pole. The Moon floated within its wreath of air, like a huge lantern. And he thought he could see structure in that escaped cloud: shadows cast upward by the new, brighter Moonlight. Maybe those escaped volatiles would ultimately form some kind of ring—

The ground lurched. The telescope seemed to come alive, and the eyepiece ground into his eye socket, and he fell.

He was on his back, in the ruins of Hubble’s chair.

He’d heard a cracking sound. Maybe it was the dome. Or maybe it was the bones of his skull.

He couldn’t see too well. That eye, poked by the eyepiece, didn’t seem to be functioning at all. There was no pain, though.

Here was Sixt, hovering over him, his face a blurry Moon shape.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” Sixt said. “My God. Your eye.”

Sixt tried to lift him to his feet. Jays had never felt so old.

“Can you see?”

“Not so well,” he said. But he didn’t think it would matter, very much longer.

The ground quivered again, and he heard a metallic crash, as some piece of equipment or other came shearing off its mount.

“What do you think?” he asked. “Richter seven? Eight?”

“It’s the fucking San Andreas,” Sixt said. “Half of Los Angeles is on fire. A hell of a view…”

“The San Andreas,” Jays said. “It took its own sweet time to join the party.”

“We have to get out of here.”

“And,” said Jays calmly, “go where, exactly?”

“Jays—”

“Can you still see the Moon?”

“Yes. Yes, Jays, I see the Moon.”

“Then tell me,” he whispered. “Tell me what’s happening up there.”

At least, he thought, I got to see this. This and Aristarchus: maybe that’s enough, for one lifetime.

But he wished he’d had a chance to say goodbye to Tracy and the boys.

And so the old astronaut sat in the ruins of the observatory dome, trying to ignore the mounting pain from his smashed eye socket, listening as his friend described the waves of light travelling across the Moon, until the fires from the city filled the air with smoke, hiding the Moon, and began to close in on them for the last time, and the next shock hit them, even more violent than the last—

They woke up Monica to see it.

You’ve got to watch the Moon.

Not live, of course; she couldn’t be moved. But they gave her a little TV, set up on a table over her bed, tipped so she could see it.

Circles closing in.

In the end it was the liver disease that was getting her. Nausea, loss of appetite, drastic weight loss; her skin had turned yellow and itched like all hell. She had turned into a giant, misshapen, irritable cantaloupe. But at that it was preferable to going crazy first, which had been another option.

…There had come a day when she could not get herself out of her chair unaided, and a day when she knew she would never see another spring, and at last, maybe soon, there would be a day which would be the final day of all for her, a day without a sunset, or a night without a dawn. The circles would close in, walling her off from this world of books and music and mathematics and sunlight, everything she knew and cherished. And on the other side of the wall was nothing she could understand or anticipate, perhaps — probably — not even her identity. Even now her universe was reduced to this poky little hospital room, the last flowers Alfred Synge had sent her before he got himself killed in the Seattle event… Now, I won’t even get to see the outside air again.

Watch the Moon…

A disc, floating in the screen, obscured somewhat by the volcanic ash in the air: it was recognizably the Moon, still, the familiar layout of seas and highlands easy to make out. But now there was cloud pooling in the lowlands. What looked like auroras, lightning.

Henry Meacher, she thought. So he did it. Hot damn.

She felt a surge of satisfaction, banishing for a few minutes the coldness that seemed to cluster around her the whole day now. I knew I was right to back him. I knew he had something.

She watched the clouds, swirling across the face of the Moon. Damn, damn, I wish I could see it for real. Just for a moment.

But she knew that was impossible.

…And now it came crowding over the horizon, as suddenly as that, a thick, crawling layer of fog, spreading towards him like, he thought irrelevantly, a dry ice layer at a 1980s rock concert. It spread right around the curving horizon, and stretched to a wispy thinness above.

Incredible, he thought; he was still standing in vacuum, but he was looking at a layer of atmosphere, from the outside. He could see how turbulent it was: wherever it touched the ground, two hundred degrees hot, it was soaking up rock heat and boiling afresh.

On the Moon’s dark side — in shadow — it would be different. There, the ground was two hundred below freezing; there, over the high cratered plains of farside, good God, it must already be snowing.

The turbulent gas was picking up dust. That stuff could be a problem if it scoured at the seams of his suit.

But it advanced towards him ferociously, turning into a towering tsunami of gas and steam and dust, coming at him at a thousand miles an hour — more than the speed of sound, back on Earth.

He had time to look down, once more, at the ancient, complex surface of the regolith, his own boot print there, as sharp as Armstrong’s.

Geena is going to kill me for not being in the shelter, he thought. But he couldn’t have missed this.

The new air was white, and as tall as the sky.

Then it was on him, a wall of vapour sweeping over him.

It hit him harder than he’d expected, like a fire hose battering him from head to foot, a wall of rushing steam… Sound, on the Moon: he could hear the howling of this primordial wind across the plain, around his suit, the first sound in four billion years. The dust at his feet fled towards the vacuum, tiny dunes piling up over his blue Moon boots. There was a continual patter, almost like rain; it was probably pebble-sized fragments of regolith, trying to smash through his helmet. He tried to lift his arms, to protect his face, but he couldn’t.

He fell backwards.

He bounced on Geena’s backpack and rolled sideways, and skidded a few feet over the surface. He tried to shield the control panel of his suit, protect the backpack itself; but he was just scrabbling in the dirt like an animal, helpless before this planetary violence. And it was hot, Jesus, but after all he was in a jet of live steam.

He looked up. There was structure to the air already, he saw: the thick, ground-level fog, clearer air above, and, masking the vanishing remnants of black sky, some high, racing cirrus clouds: not billowing, just banner-like streamers. Perhaps they were ice crystals.

The air closed over him, like fog.

There were waves in the still-tenuous gas encasing him — huge density waves pulsing past him — and his vision periodically cleared, affording him glimpses of the sky.

The sun seemed shrunken and remote, reduced to a pale disc in a milky sky. There was the old Earth. The disc of shadowed world cradled within the arms of the crescent was clearly visible, illuminated more brightly by the Moonlight than he had seen it before. He thought, in fact, he could make out the shape of continents, Africa and west Asia and Europe, and the soft bowling-ball glow, where the Moonlight shone over the Indian Ocean.

It wasn’t such a surprise; the Earth was entitled to be lit up like a Christmas bauble on a tree. For it had a brand new Moon, a Moon that had never been so bright before…

But now clouds closed over the sky.

Earth was gone. He was encased in a glowing fog, sealed under a lid of cloud.