There were small white squares painted on the ground, like cue marks in a TV game show. Geena took one mark and pointed to the other, where Henry went to stand. There were people all around, pad rats and suited managers and technicians. Geena’s square was marked “KK’, and Henry’s “KI” — acronyms for mission commander and researcher, as it turned out.

Henry looked down at himself. His white spacesuit gleamed like snow in the sunshine.

A military man walked forward, decorated with ribbons and medals. Evidently an Air Force general. Geena saluted, spoke in Russian, and repeated in English. “My crew and I have been made ready, and now we are reporting that we are ready to fly.”

The general nodded, and spoke in thickly accented English. “I give you permission to fly.” He glanced at Henry, but seemed to look through him.

Geena nodded to Henry, and led him towards another bus, this one silver and blue. He had to walk past ranks of silent workers. Close to, many of them looked gaunt, underfed, dressed shabbily. Maybe they would normally cheer, he thought. Maybe they somehow resent me being here.

Or maybe they’re as scared as I am.

It was difficult to sit down on the bus in his stiff suit, but he made it. The bus pulled away with a lurch.

It wasn’t long before the rocket came into view.

The booster was a pillar, squat and solid: coal grey, save for an orange band at its mid-section, and a bulge at the top, a white-painted faring which hid the Soyuz capsule he would ride to orbit. At the base the booster flared gracefully, where four liquid-fuel rockets were strapped to the pencil-slim core stage.

It was a hundred and fifty feet tall. White vapour slid down its flanks, as if the booster were already rehearsing the great leap upwards it would take in just a few hours.

Its three big supporting gantries had already been tipped back, resting close to the ground, so that it was as if the rocket stood at the heart of a metal flower. He could see a slim tower with an elevator to carry the crew to their capsule. The whole stack stood on a sky-blue platform — it looked like some kind of mobile launcher — and a flame pit, a channel cut in the Earth and lined with concrete, stretched away around it.

This was fifty-year-old technology. The booster was a derivative of an old ICBM design. The first Sputnik had been flown aboard a booster basically the same model as this. So had Yuri Gagarin. He couldn’t work out whether that was reassuring or terrifying.

The bus lurched to a stop at the base of the booster. Henry followed Geena out. People stood around, watching them: technicians, managers, generals, politicians, wives, even a couple of kids running around between the legs of the adults. Henry clutched his microscope box to his chest. He couldn’t believe they let so many people get so close to what was basically a liquid-fuel bomb.

Geena led him to a short flight of metal steps, which were set right against one of the fat first-stage boosters.

Henry looked up at the booster. Foreshortened, it was like a busted-off piece of the Kremlin. But the booster was uncompromisingly real, dominating its flat surroundings. There seemed no doubt, at last, that these guys were serious: they really were going to lock him into that little capsule at the top of this thing and fire him off into space.

He took his first step on the metal stair. One foot in the dust of Earth, one on metal. This is the moment, he thought, when I leave the Earth. All the rest is detail.

He wondered where Jane was, right now, what she was thinking.

He lifted his other, spacesuited foot, and climbed the stair.

Geena led him to the elevator cage at the base of its tower. A single pad rat stood in here. When Henry and Geena had crowded in, their pressure suits billowing, there was barely room to stand without touching.

“Penthouse, please,” Henry said. Nobody laughed.

The elevator lifted up with a clatter. Henry looked out through the bars of his cage. A few pad rats remained, their faces turned up to his. The bus was already pulling away.

So here he was, rising past the flank of an ICBM.

It was like climbing the spire of some huge metal cathedral. White mist billowed around him — the cryogenic fumes smelled, oddly, like wet dust — and he could see ice, great sheets of it, condensed and moulded against the smoothly curved flanks of the rocket. The ice shone in the sunlight, but beneath the surface sheen, the metal of the booster was cold and dark. He could have touched the damn booster, run his gloved hand over that metal flank.

The elevator clanked to a halt alongside the heavy faring that shielded the Soyuz. More pad rats were waiting on a small platform that led to a round hatch cut in the side of the faring. Geena strode forward, and climbed in first.

Henry looked down. The booster flared gracefully under him, two cone-shaped strap-on boosters clearly visible. The flame pit was a concrete scar in the ground, but it was dwarfed by the immense flatness of the steppe, the land coated with a dull green, flattened by a heavy blue sky.

He heard the wind moan, and the booster swayed, creaking.

Following the pad rats” mimed instructions, he turned and sat down on the lip of the hatch. The pad rats pulled a protective cover off his helmet, and hauled outer boots off his feet.

The last pad rat, a heavy-set older man, looked him in the eyes. “Ni pukha, ni pera.”

“Huh?”

“May nothing be left of you, neither down nor feather.” He grinned. “I am wishing you luck. Now you must tell me to go to hell.”

When in Rome… “Go to hell.”

The pad rat took his hand, and receded slowly, over the metal platform; Henry, unexpectedly, found himself clinging to this last human contact, his last hold on Earth.

The fatherly pad rat let go.

Henry swung his legs inside. He had to climb through the faring to get to the spacecraft, which was completely enclosed inside its protective cover.

And so he entered the Soyuz.

He was in the orbital module. It was a cramped cabin, like a small box-room, its walls lined with storage compartments and handholds. It was just about big enough for one person to stretch out. The hatch behind him was a circle of bright daylight. Another hatch, open, was set in the floor, leading to another compartment called the descent module.

He lowered his feet through the floor hatch and twisted down into the space below. It was cramped in here, with three upturned frame seats in a fan shape, side by side. The inner walls were lined with yellow insulation blankets, and there were bundles of equipment: a life raft, parachutes, survival clothes.

Geena was already in the left-hand seat, working through a checklist. Stiff in his suit, Henry wriggled until he had lowered himself into the right-most seat.

And so here he was, lying on his back, tucked up inside an antique Russian spacecraft that had been assembled by guys who probably hadn’t even been paid for half a year…