It was deliciously pleasant to drift, restrained by the buckles and pads, and spin soft coils of illusion. Zero-g did that. Below, the random splotchings of craters wheeled, each slipping below the arched horizon before he had memorized it. An old friend lost without a farewell handshake; memory of a million such. When shaking hands, remember your manners, Nigel, take off your glove first (cold snatching at your fingers)…

His mind wandered.

Which wasn’t right, he told himself. He should stay alert. He was not here for the view. Nor did segmented tanks of high-energy fuel ride to the side of him, above, below, aft, for his own amusement. They waited for their signal, the soft percussion of a button, to apply the bootheel and send him straight into history.

Or into the abyss beyond Earth’s web, he thought. Hipparchus Control—awesome name for six sheet-metal huts buried in twenty feet of dust—had been a touch vague about the margin of error they had allowed for getting him back. Maybe there wasn’t any.

Off to his right the northmost rim of Mare Orientale slid into view, slate-gray sheets of lava cooled in their convulsions. The crater’s center lay a good fifteen degrees south of his near-equatorial orbit, but even at this low altitude he could see the marching mountain ranges that curved away from him, inward, toward the focus. He wondered how big the rock had been that caused that eerie effect: crests of ancient waves that froze into mountains. An enormous bull’s-eye in the moon’s ribs. Assassin’s knife. Death from an asteroid, a brother of Icarus—

“Hipparchus here,” a voice rattled and squeaked in his ear. “Everything’s okay?”

Nigel hesitated a moment and then said, “Shut up.” “No, it’s okay. We’ve calculated it out. We’re both of us in the moon’s radio shadow, as far as the Snark is concerned. It can’t pick up any of this.”

“I thought we weren’t taking any chances.”

“Well, this isn’t exactly a chance.” The voice sounded a bit peevish. “We just wanted to see how things’re going up there. We don’t get any telemetry. You could be dead for all we know.”

He couldn’t think of anything to say to that, so he let it go. The radio man—who was it, that short fellow, Lewis?—seemed to think he was just making a neighborly call. The phones crackled and sputtered in his ears for a moment while he waited out the other man. Finally the voice came, a little stronger.

“Well, we have a good fix on the time, anyway. About five hours away. Squirting the scoop to your LogEx now.”

There was a hum from the electronics beside him as the computer absorbed the orbital data. He was sure it was Lewis now; the man was addicted to jargon.

“Have you rechecked your missiles?” Lewis said. “Yes. Uh, roger.”

“We just had a squirt from Houston to remind you about priorities. Any piece of it is better than nothing, so hold off on the nuke if you can.”

“Roger.”

“Feeling okay? You’ve been up there over a day now, it must be getting cramped.”

Nigel studied the scattering of stars outside. “Nothing compared to the Icarus thing though, huh? Say, I never did ask you about that. I mean, with the drugs and that long a meditation to keep your oxy use down. I never did ask you.”

“No, you never did.”

There was another silence.

“Well, it must feel different, this one being almost a combat mission, you might say. Not the same.”

“Sweating like a pig.”

“Yeah, really?” The voice brightened at this evidence of human failing. “We’ll get you back okay, don’t worry, fella.”

“Say hello to the crew down there.” Nigel felt he ought to say something friendly. Lewis wasn’t a bad sort, only too chummy.

“We’re all rooting for you. Zap that thing if it does anything funny. The whole gig sounds flippo, if you ask me.”

“I’d better go over that flight plan. Give me a fix on a translunar.”

“Oh, okay.” A blurred squeal from the electronics. “There she is. Uh, signing off.”

“Roger.”

Combat mission, Lewis had said. Sweet Christ. Marines wading ashore. Somebody always wondering where the medic is. Crawl along a clay ditch, rifle bullets zipping overhead like hornets. Hug the earth, align with the groin of the world. Images: a brown-skinned woman wrapped around a pudgy white man, he in spattered uniform, idly cleaning a rifle barrel, peering absently down the shiny bore as she rocks and humps and kisses him with her universal rhythm, her knotted hands feeling in his pockets…

Somewhere, a musical phrase of hunger.

He found one of the clear plastic tubes, squeezed it and ate. Carrot juice. NASA issue, lifegiving vegetables and hearty roots, no evil meat. Those who would meet God in his firmament shall be pure of intestine, live not from the flesh of dead animals. Rear your children on beans and berries; they too may ride to the stars. When they come home from a date, smell their breath for the aberrant trace of a hot dog. Unclean, unclean. And anyway, nobody had yet learned how to grow a chicken or cow on the moon, so soybeans it was.

For that matter, they couldn’t do much else on the moon, either. It was all well and good to balance tomatoes with barley, coaxing forth from the lunar gravel enough protein and oxygen to support a small base, and yet another to regulate amino acids and plant sap, keep mildew from forming in the access pipes, conserve the thin, mealy loam. The optimistic biologists frowned at their soybeans: with the daily cycle of sun and tides removed, the beans grew gnarled roots and gray leaves, became miserly with their proteins. It was no simple trick to be an adversary of entropy in a land with black skies and winds that slept.

Somehow the cylinder cities worked, grew their food and prospered. But the moon, truly alien, didn’t. Still, the crew at Hipparchus carried on, searched the moon for water and ice, experimented. They had a burning optimism. Precisely what he lacked, Nigel thought. He shrugged, with no one to see. The loss did not seem to matter now.

To pass the time he meditated and read novels from the cabin’s erasable slate. The module was well designed, considering the short time allowed for converting the blueprint into hardware. Nigel had brought a pack of four memorex crystals, each book length, and in the first day of waiting had devoured two of them, taking an hour apiece.

A phrase caught his eye:

at an attitude toward Ataturk

Later, musing down at the flinty plain of Mare Smythii, it came back to him. He treated the words like an algebraic expression; he factored out all the a’s, then the t’s. Rearranged, the words could yield ambiguity, incoherence, passable poetry.

He wondered if this was a neurotic habit.

Memories from reading: women who never passed a lamppost without touching it; men who balanced always on the ball of the left foot while urinating; outfielders who had to take a skip before throwing the ball into home plate. Fellow neurotics all; nerves skittering on a fine high wire.

He divided the phrase into thirds, quarters, eighths, thought of an anagram, fiddled. Alexandria. The desert, now a fading memory. He wondered what Ichino would think of this.

The moon’s crumpled gray horizon swallowed a blue-white ice cream earth.

“Your projected ignition time is holding firm.” Lewis again, seven orbits later.

“What does Houston say?”

“Snark is holding to its promised course. Decelerating as our trajectory specified.”

“What’s it saying to Houston?”

“Nothing unusual, they said. The scenario calls for beaming a lot of hot stuff, things the Snark’s been asking about, during the last stages of its approach. Distract it so’s you can get in close.”

“I know, but what is the new information?”

“What’s it matter? It’s all false anyway.”

“What?”