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booth. Air blowers blasted at them from the ceiling.
    The tech opened an inner door, and there she was, in the same room as the most famous rocks in the world.
    And Henry.
    The lab was a place of rectangles, of big stainless steel glove boxes and staff in white clean-room coats and hats and overboots. The roof was crowded with fluorescent tubes which filled the room with a sickly gray light, a grayness emphasized by the polished steel of the glove boxes and the nondescript floor tiles. At the back of the room, a heavy door led to a vault where the bulk of the lunar samples were stored.
    This lab didn’t do much original science, in fact. It wasreally just a service lab, providing sample processing for external researchers. The cleanness standard was tighter than an operating room, though not so tight as, for example, a microelectronics lab.
    There was a tour going on, bigwigs garbed out in their white coats, having their photographs taken with the rocks, enduring a running commentary from some flack in a white coat and a trilby.
    … Eight hundred pounds of Moon rock is stored here, as two and a half thousand samples, split into eighty thousand subsamples. Something like a thousand samples a year are taken, mostly less than one gram. The subsamples are stored in nitrogen, in triple-shelled containers. Efforts are made to reuse the samples, even ones which have been driven to destruction in some way—it is possible that other unrelated tests could be performed even on the detritus. There is a computer database on all eighty thousand subsamples, and handwritten notes and photographs on each one are stored in a fireproof vault. Even today, sixty percent of the samples have remained unopened since they were locked up on the dusty surface of the Moon…
    The receiving lab had been built at the height of the Cold War Apollo era, when funds flowed relatively freely, and everyone worried that there might be bugs in the Moon rocks that would devastate the world. But the Moon rocks had turned out to be the deadest things ever seen.
    She could see Henry at the far end of the room.
    He was obviously busy, organizing the packaging of some precious rock or other. He was clustered around a stainless steel workbench with three or four techs, all of them in their white bunny suits, like a conference of surgeons.
    She drifted to the front of the lab, and waited until Henry came free.
    At the front of the room was a glass wall, beyond which was a viewing gallery, dimly lit.
    And here there were three big rocks on display. Each of them was maybe the size of a grapefruit, sawn in half.
    These were Moon rocks, she knew.
    She’d been with Henry long enough to pick up, however reluctantly, a little geology. The rock on the left was obviously a basalt—a kind of lava—a dark gray structure shot through with vesicles. The rock on the right was a breccia, its structure compound like a granite, big shapeless blobs of different materials. Breccias were the result of violent events, which smashed up rocks and welded them back together again. On Earth they usually formed in river environments. But these lunar rocks had been shoved together by an ancient meteorite impact which pulverized some part of the Moon. Even that impact was more than three billion years ago, older than almost all rocks on Earth. And the center rock, perhaps the most nondescript, was all of four and a half billion years old.
    “…Treat that with respect, Geena; it cost forty billion bucks.”
    It was Henry, of course, his fleshy nose like a bird’s beak, his black hair an unruly tangle that wouldn’t stay put under his NASA-regulation trilby.
    Geena said, “I thought I ought to—”
    He talked fast. “What? Come say good-bye? Gee, thanks. You want to see 86047? That’s the rock I’m taking to Edinburgh. Or rather, it is taking me. The only piece of lunar bedrock you’re likely to see. What an honor. And the centerpiece of what’s left of my career.” He eyed her.