“Yo, dudes, how’s it hanging? You need any help there?” The question was followed by a snigger, the same one he’d heard earlier.

Wilson knew the voice of everybody on the mission. Spend that long together with thirty-eight people in such a confined space as the Ulysses and vocal recognition became perfect. Whoever spoke wasn’t on the crew. Yet somehow he knew it was real-time, not some pirate hack from Earth.

Commander Lewis had frozen, the flagpole tripod still not fully deployed. “Who said that?”

“That’d be me, my man. Nigel Sheldon, at your service. Specially if you need to get home in like a hurry.” That snigger again. Then someone else saying: “Oh, man, don’t do that, you’re going to so piss them off.”

“Who is this?” Lewis demanded.

Wilson was already moving, glide walking as fast as was safe in the low gravity, making for the rear of the Eagle II. He knew they were close, and he could see everything on this side of the spaceplane. As soon as he was past the bell-shaped rocket nozzles he forced himself to a halt. Someone else was standing there, arm held high in an almost apologetic wave. Someone in what looked like a homemade space suit. Which was an insane interpretation, but it was definitely a pressure garment of some type, possibly modified from deep-sea gear. The outer fabric was made up from flat ridges of dull brown rubber, in pronounced contrast to Wilson’s snow-white ten-million-dollar Martian Environment Excursion suit. The helmet was the nineteen fifties classic goldfish bowl, a clear glass bubble showing the head of a young man with a scraggly beard and long oily blond hair tied back into a pigtail. No radiation protection, Wilson thought inanely. There was no backpack either, no portable life-support module. Instead, a bundle of pressure hoses snaked away from the youth’s waist to a…

“Son of a bitch,” Wilson grunted.

Behind the interloper was a two-meter circle of another place.