Torness wasn’t the only nuclear installation to have suffered a catastrophic failure, as the quakes and fissures and volcanism and floods hit, all around the world. Nuke stations going up like firecrackers. All we need.

It was the peculiar fortune of the human race, he thought, to have encountered this problem just when it was smart enough to build such things as nuclear reactors but not smart enough to shut them down safely.

He had to do something for Jane.

He contacted Geena, and called in some more favours.

By the time he was done he had a guarantee. If Jane made it out of Scotland, if she was found, she’d be flown out of Britain, to the relative safety of the States.

It was all he could do for her, as it turned out, because the latest blocking moves, in House and the Senate, were overcome, and the authorization came for them to be shipped to Russia.

On his last day in America, Henry received two packages. One was a cancellation of his life insurance policy. The other was an olivine necklace, a string of bottle-green beads.

He tucked the necklace into the little pouch of personal effects he was being allowed to take, all the way to the Moon.

A USAF transport plane took them into Moscow. Henry tried to sleep, during the long haul over the North Pole.

He woke up during the descent into Moscow. He glimpsed green-clad hills below, an ancient landscape where Nazi and Soviet soldiers had fought to the death: humans sacrificed in waves in the cause of nations which no longer existed, offerings to vanished gods.

He didn’t know what was in the minds of the Administration that had made them progress their decision this stage further. Some of the attempts to disrupt the Moonseed had worked, like the cataclysmic flooding of the Grand Canyon. Elsewhere, they had failed.

Like the backpack nuke that had, against his advice, been dropped on a Moonseed patch that had been set up in Nevada.

The nuke had made a predictable mess, but basically the flood of gammas and X-rays had accelerated Moonseed propagation. Monica Beus led a study that showed, taking into account the energy returned by the accelerated activity of the Moonseed in those Nevada rocks, that the gamma-fired Moonseed had delivered an energy return in a feedback factor measured in the billions.

As Henry had suspected. In fact he was counting on that, for his secret plan to save mankind, although when he put it like that he found himself staring in the mirror and wondering exactly how crazy he was.

Anyhow he contacted Monica, asking for more specific measurements.

He suspected it was the failure of the nukes that had triggered the Administration, finally, into acting. Henry had never expected a nuclear attack to succeed — quite the opposite — but he supposed it had to be tried. And its failure resonated like the failure of a god, like the death of Superman, confirming their worst fears.

After the Nevada failure, in fact, there had been questions asked about the need to carry a nuke on the Moon trip. Henry had insisted; and everybody seemed too busy to argue with him.

Still, though, the Administration’s step-by-step commitment to the project wasn’t complete; it wasn’t yet confirmed that they would actually be allowed to launch. As if, Henry thought bleakly, they still expected things to somehow get better.

He managed to sleep through most of the bus journey out of Moscow to Star City.

Star City, more formally known as the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre, was the place the cosmonauts lived, along with the instructors, administrators and mission planners. It was a purpose-built town of four or five thousand people; its atmosphere, to Henry, was somewhere between a university campus and a military barracks.

They were greeted with a lunch banquet in a building called the recreation centre — and it was literally a banquet, Henry found to his amazement, with cognac and champagne; the Russians were treating their contribution to this mission as a cause for celebration. Henry joined in enthusiastically, despite frosty glares from Geena. He figured that if he got stoked enough there would be no more training today, at any rate.

He was introduced to Arkady Berezovoy, a tall, dour, strong-looking cosmonaut who, it seemed, would be riding to orbit with them, and so would be joining in the training from now on. It turned out that Geena and Arkady knew each other already; they had worked on Station assignments.

When Henry was introduced, Arkady grasped his hand firmly and looked into his face, searchingly, Henry was left puzzled.

After lunch they were taken for a tour of Star City.

Everything seemed built on an immense, heroic scale, a legacy of the Soviet days. He was shown a giant mock-up of the old Mir station, a spacesuit display, and a hydro pool where the Russians planned their spacewalks. There was a culture centre, and a giant memorial to Gagarin. The first cosmonaut of them all stood heroically, one hand behind his back, looking up at the stars.

There was even a planetarium, intended, Arkady told him seriously, for the cosmonauts to learn interplanetary navigation for the Soviet mission to Mars which had never come. In the planetarium foyer was a mockup of the spacecraft which could have achieved the mission, perhaps in the early 1990s, assembled from hauntingly familiar components: Energia heavy-lift boosters, a Mir-based habitat module, a Mars lander built around Proton booster rocket stages.

But those dreams were long gone.

He was taken to gladhand the staff at TsUP, Russia’s mission control at the unremarkable little town of Korolyov, outside Moscow. The control room looked like a small cinema, with a big screen to show the Station’s trajectory curving over Earth’s surface, and four rows of consoles dating from the 1980s. Under the screens there were two big sponsors” banners, one from a US computer firm which had supplied the latest set of pcs that supplemented the older equipment, and one, bizarrely, from the Red October chocolate factory, with a slogan about celebrating “shared Russian traditions of quality’. The most useful piece of equipment looked to be a plastic model of the Space Station, which got more attention from the controllers than the screen images.

The cosmonauts still earned a decent wage, but even that was mostly funded by American money funnelled through the Station project, and many of the engineers and controllers, bringing home less than a couple of hundred bucks a month, worked as cab drivers and cleaners in Moscow to cover their bills.

It seemed to Henry the disparity between space dream and reality was even harsher here than in the US.

Most of the training forced on him here, it turned out, was in emergency procedures.

Henry was heavily briefed on what to do if a Station module was slow-punctured by a micrometeorite, and what would happen if there were a failure of the booster in the early stages of launch (an escape rocket would haul the manned capsule clear — a lot of noise and shaking, high Gs, probable unconsciousness, a spell in hospital). It wasn’t that there was anything for him to do in such an eventuality, but it was thought better for him to know what would hit him.

Henry, exhausted, disoriented, overtrained and bewildered, didn’t agree.

He was trained for emergency landing. The Soyuz was designed to come down on land, somewhere in the Soviet Union, and there would be choppers to pick him up. In theory. But he was taken to the bush in Kazakhstan, a place the capsule might come down where helicopters wouldn’t be able to land, and he practised getting into a recovery chair lowered from a helicopter.

And he underwent what the American managers called water egress training. With Arkady and Geena, he was dropped in a mocked-up Soyuz entry module into the Black Sea. It was a July day and it was hot — around thirty Centigrade — and the three of them, stiffly non-communicative, struggled in the hot, cramped capsule, bobbing in the sea, to change out of their spacesuits and into survival gear. It took three hours to get ready, and when Arkady finally opened the hatch, steam gushed out, and briny sea air replaced the stink of vomit that had come to dominate in the capsule.