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a curse that becomes an instant chuckle: in his eighth decade, he can freely admit that he’s never been particularly good around buttons and switches. (He’ll never forget the dirty look Frank shot him in Apollo Eight, the time he accidentally inflated his life jacket.)
    Beyond the immediate splash of illumination cast by his head-lamps, the world is a ghostly grey, no colour anywhere. But Jim Lovell is a professional. With a set smile and eyes tuned to the colours of the world, the greens and the reds, the instruments and signs, Jim Lovell, bubbled in steel, steers his way home as he has steered his way home before, across unimaginable distances, across oceans of night, through the deep black calm of death.

THE GIFT

1
    Summer 1939.
    The British government believes that an air war will destroy civilization.
    It has forecast the number of casualties likely to be sustained following a Luftwaffe attack on London. The numbers are apocalyptic. Bleaker still is Whitehall’s estimate of the city’s psychological resilience. Analysts believe the experience of bombardment will send the survivors mad.
    Hospitals surrounding the capital have sent home their non-urgent cases. They are making up beds ready for tens of thousands of ‘nervous cases’.
    The government believes that following an air attack, survivors who make it into the city’s tunnels will refuse to emerge; that they will turn their backs on the devastated Overground, preferring to live and breed beneath the earth, a Morlock terror to the Eloi above. In London, the Underground is locked at night against those who would seek shelter, come the raids.
    Nineteen-year-old former abattoir clerk Kathleen Hosken knows better. She has inside information. With halting fingers, Kathleen has typed up data which even the government has yet to read. She has worked with the government’s own specialist on a project to assess the physiological effects of ground shock waves and blast, a man of such luminous intelligence and charm his associates have nicknamed him ‘Sage’.
    From Sage, she has learned that if you look into the eye of the thing you most fear, and replace your passion with a rational curiosity, then the horror – he calls it ‘funk’ – goes away. So Kathleen Hosken has leftthe rain-swept border country of Darlington, and has boarded a train for London, the soon-to-be-devastated metropolis. This journey to the epicentre of the coming war is not just a journey of necessity – a search for employment and a place to live. It is also a test she has set herself. She believes that if she approaches her life there rationally, carefully interrogating her every assumption, then she can protect herself, even from bombs and fire storms.
    The men sharing her train carriage – the crooked teeth their smiles reveal, the Players and Capstan cigarettes they offer her – are objects for observation. From Sage, she has learned something about the scientific method. This novel way of thinking requires her to suppress her emotions and to put herself at a distance from things. Besides, she does not smoke.
    Some of the men on the train are in uniform. Most are not: volunteers, they have yet to be received into the service. There is a camaraderie between the two groups which marks them out from the handful of young, scrape-faced commercial travellers who also share the carriage.
    â€˜The air’s sweeter over here, love.’
    â€˜There’s room to stretch your feet by me.’
    â€˜I’m a Darlington man meself, dearie, come and have a chat.’
    They are teasing her. She is being offish with them and she isn’t pretty enough, and not nearly well dressed enough, to get away with it.
    â€˜Cat got your tongue?’
    â€˜He joined up already then, love?’
    â€˜Tore himself away, he did, from the sparkling ray-pah-tee.’
    They laugh.
    Kathleen takes a steadying breath. She thinks up an experiment