He tried to clean himself and put everything back where it belonged, but that was also something he’d never done in zero gravity, nor in a skintight Superman suit, and as he fumbled, slowly rotating, she had another giggling fit when he mooned her, upside down.

Finally he sat half-perched on the bed, with a semblance of dignity, though he was sure he could never be completely dignified with her again. Which was probably a good thing.

“How often does that happen?” she asked, when she was able to catch her breath again.

“Um . . . as often as possible?”

“But it can’t be pressure, like having to pee? Fathers go all their lives without doing it.”

That confused him for a moment. She meant priests. “It’s hard to explain. It hasn’t happened to me since the day we met.” Well, once. “It’s not at all like peeing. It’s more or less, well, voluntary. Sort of.”

She gave him an odd look, floating in midair with a tissue in her hand. “It’s something you want to talk about but don’t want to talk about.”

“Yes . . . I do, but I suppose . . . yes.”

“This part I think I understand: You want to put your thing in me and do like the men in the pictures. Don’t you?”

He tried to think of some answer other than an emphatic affirmative. “Of course I do, but . . . we haven’t really known each other very long.”

“And then there’s the getting married first part. There don’t seem to be any Fathers around.” She picked up the box and studied the gymnastics taking place. “Of course, these people can’t be married—you didn’t have marriages with two men and a woman back then?”

“No. In fact, I doubt that any of the people in those pictures are married to each other.”

She nodded. “They don’t seem to know one another very well. They’re actors?”

“Or just people off the street, friends of the guy with the camera. I don’t think they have to pay the men very much.”

“Even though they’re sinning, and probably going to Hell.”

“I doubt that any of them believe that.”

“You don’t.” She looked straight into his eyes. “You actually don’t believe in God at all, do you?”

He paused. “No. No, not really. The universe—”

“I’m not sure I do anymore, either. It’s like all my life they’ve told me what to believe and only let me see and read things that agreed with them. Until I met you. This really ordinary thing, they didn’t even hint about it. It makes me, it makes me so angry!

“And now we’re headed for the Moon in this machine, run by a godlike apparition that claims to be a machine as well. A Moon that looks like a little Earth—except that Earth itself doesn’t look much like Earth anymore!” She sobbed suddenly and pulled herself down to bury her face in his shoulder.

He put his arm awkwardly around her back, trying to think of anything he could say that would be a comfort. “We have each other, Martha. I trust you, and you can trust me.”

“I do trust you.” She looked up with a weird grimace that became a laugh. “You can’t even cry in this stupid world. The tears don’t run off.”

He wiped her eyes with the side of his hand. A few tears sparkled away in midair.

“You’ve been kind,” she said. “I’m so ignorant, and you could have taken advantage of me.” His face felt hot; he’d been trying to figure out a way of apologizing for just that. With the wrong judge and jury, what he’d just done could get him jail time for indecent exposure. Or, with another, be shrugged off as humorous sex education.

She worked her way around to his other side and wiggled herself between the sheets, which did seem to be designed as a kind of restraint against nocturnal zero-gee floating. Wouldn’t do to bump into the wrong OFF switch.

“I’m going to take La’s advice and rest for a bit, maybe pray.” She looked at him intensely. “Maybe see Jesus in my dreams.”

“It could happen,” he said, and slipped in next to her. She took his hand, under the cover, and squeezed it once.

“If we do find the backward time machine,” she whispered,“I don’t think I want to go back to my own time. Can I go back with you?”

“I would love that,” he said, and lay awake for some time.

After he did finally fall asleep, Jesus and the others appeared. This time there were six or seven, most of them indistinct. Some apparently not human.

“We think we can help you. But listen carefully.

“This stop or the next, she is going to force you to keep pushing the button. Do it as slowly as possible. Stall for time. We will try to catch up with you.”

“We must.” A compressed face, like an upside-down pear, appeared next to him. “If you die up here, we cease to be.”

Jesus was nodding as they faded back into the sleeping darkness.

20

La’s amplified voice woke them. “We’re approaching the Moon. Better come strap in.”

The Moon loomed ahead, looking curiously “wrong,” like Earth viewed through a distorting lens. Matt’s science knowledge sorted most of it out: The horizon was too close; the sky looked odd because the air was so dry, and the atmospheric gradient was less steep, which also explained the absence of large cloud masses. There were perfectly round lakes everywhere, craters filled with water, but no large seas.

“It’s funny,” he said to La. “If you took an old map of the Moon and distributed water evenly around it, there would be oceans. At least as much sea surface as land.”

“It must be artificially maintained,” La said. “They keep the water in small lakes because there’s not enough to fill an ocean bed. Oceanus Procellarum and Mare Imbrium would make huge mud puddles. Maybe quicksand. Then dry out.”

“It’s still beautiful,” Martha said. Velvet green, ochre desert, pure white snowcap. The mountaintops a sparkling chain of frost.

Highly magnified pictures of the surface appeared and faded on the screen. “No sign of human habitation,” La said. “Or talking bears or flocks of carnivorous lizards. But the atmosphere is breathable, like a high mountain on Earth. There could be surprises. Better be armed away from the ship.”

Matt thought about what the Jesus apparition had said. If La, rather than the Moon, had a surprise in store for him, his old pistol and a few rounds of ammunition weren’t going to do much.

Landing with atmospheric braking took longer than for Earth, and wasn’t as violent. Out of curiosity, La took them to the last place she had visited on the Moon, Aitken City, but there weren’t even any ruins left after so long, just grassland and a wide lake.

“They were making plans for that back in the twenty-first, ” Matt said. “Did they build underground?”

“They did at first. By the time I got there, they had a force-field dome over everything, so radiation wasn’t a problem.

“Not that I was ‘there’ in the sense that you would be. I’d given up my body long before.” They eased down by the shore of the lake. “Over a quarter of a million years, and it seems like yesterday.” Matt couldn’t tell if she was kidding.

Their ears popped as the ramp went down. “Why don’t you lovers take a stroll? You haven’t been actually alone in a long time. Take the pistol, though. I’ll have the ship go into danger mode if it hears a shot.”

“Thanks.” He felt uneasy, leaving the time machine behind. But she wasn’t going to leave them stranded as long as she needed his thumb . . . which gave him a macabre thought he didn’t want to linger on. In his home time, people had been murdered for their door-opening thumbs.

They walked down the ramp, bouncing in the lunar gravity. It was cold, barely freezing. The grass crunched under their feet.

“I wonder why it isn’t colder,” Martha said. “It looked like we were pretty close to that ice cap.”

“I think it’s the smallness of the world, along with the slow rotation, mild weather. Long time since I studied it.”