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the Loop you would sometimes get a fine view of the Port of Houston, refineries draped in feathers of steam, lights on the stacks glowing yellow—but then she’d never had an ambition to live in a Blade Runner diorama.
    And this area, Clear Lake/NASA, was really pretty seedy. It was a long way out of downtown Houston, off the Galveston Freeway, I–75. The Johnson Space Center was the home of the nation’s space program, but at heart it was just an old-fashioned government facility, fading 1960s buildings stranded in an area full of desolate mini-malls and little else.
    But even so, she thought, maybe it wasn’t Houston’s fault she felt so sour about life here.
    It would be better when Henry had gone: Henry, ex-husband of three days, the living, breathing embodiment of everything that had gone wrong with her life.
    As she approached the JSC entrance, she realized she wasn’t up to facing the press, or Henry. Not just yet.
    She pulled into a parking lot close to the Days Inn NASA, a chalet-style motel almost directly opposite the JSC entrance. She used to stay here when she was an impoverished ascan, an astronaut candidate, in happier days a hundred years ago. Near the Days Inn was the Puddruckers hamburger restaurant where she used to eat, and a Chinese restaurant. She bought a Houston Chronicle, fifty cents from a vending machine, and walked into the Chinese. It was full of old folks watching TV, and she bought herself soup and a sandwich for $2.95.
    The Chronicle was stuffed full of ad sections and bewilderingly dull local news. But it had reasonable coverage of the space program, especially when a mission was in progress, with two or three features a day. A lot more informative than NASA TV, she thought.
    Her soup arrived. When she looked up, past the middle-aged waitress, she could see spacecraft, the superannuated inhabitants of JSC’s rocket garden, poking above the trees like minarets from some ruined temple. And there was the white-and-black flank of the Saturn V, an operational Moon rocket, lying in the grass.
    In the Chronicle there was a series of ads for stomach stapling, aimed at those more than a hundred pounds overweight. Americans always eat too much, Arkady often told her. Maybe she’d clip this out to show him.
    She ate her soup, trying to make it last.
     
    Through the JSC security gate she parked her car. It was a late February day, unusually cold. She walked to where Henry would be working, at the Lunar Curatorial Facility in Building 31N. This was the building where, for thirty years, they had stored the Moon rocks.
    She had to climb two and a half stories. The height was for protection against Class 5 hurricane floods; MissionControl was raised to this level for a similar reason. The weather was thought to be the most likely danger to the rocks, in these post–Cold War days. But just in case of a nuclear attack or similar catastrophe, a proportion of the irreplaceable samples were stored in Brooks Air Force Base at San Antonio, separation being the only defense in case of such a disaster.
    To be destroyed in such an attack would have been a strange fate for the battered old rocks which had seen so much, she thought.
    She found a friendly technician who would take her in. The woman had worked here for twenty years. The tech was pregnant. That struck Geena as odd: what a start to life, here in the Moon rock lab, halfway off the Earth.
    She had to go through the clean room. In an outer changing room she put on a bunny suit: two layers of overshoes, and a button-up white coat and McDonald’s-server hat. The garments were labeled “Lockheed Martin.” There were no gloves, but she had to take off her wedding ring—gold evaporating from its surface could contaminate the samples—and when she slipped it into a pocket she realized, for the first time, she needn’t put it back again.
    Then the two of them crowded into an airlock, a little two-doored glass-walled room little bigger than a phone