Geena studied Frank Turtle. She realized belatedly that Jays’s description of him as “young” was entirely relative. Frank had to be forty-five at least. But he dressed young, which she thought was a good sign, in a crumpled denim jacket and jeans and open shirt, and with a tangled mop of greying black hair over thick Coke-bottle glasses.

He wore an electronic button-badge showing the Venus explosion, cycling through that startling burst of light every few seconds.

As he talked, she learned Frank Turtle had done a series of jobs at JSC, getting hands-on experience of space operations by working on Shuttle operations as a mission designer and flight controller. In common with a lot of people here, she suspected he had applied for some of the astronaut recruitment rounds, in his early days. But for the last few years — hell, she realized, more than a decade — he had worked for a department called the Solar System Exploration Division; and, with his buddies, Frank’s job was to blue-sky the future. If you had to get to Mars in a decade — how would you do it? NASA had to be positioned to answer questions like that, when the call came, and that was Frank’s job.

Of course NASA had been waiting for that call since 1969, and it hadn’t come yet. But Frank and his like were still prepared, constructively dreaming, ready to respond.

A lot of careers got kind of stuck at NASA. There was a shit-load of recruitment back in the early 1960s, when NASA ramped up for Apollo, and a lot of those guys were still around now. They liked to work for NASA, and there was really nowhere else for them to go anyhow, and even with all the downsizing over the years it was still difficult for the federal government to shed people from a place like JSC. So here they all are, ageing Boomers, getting older and greyer and using up space; and here was Frank’s generation, in the line behind them, no doubt creating their own logjam in the resource pool.

“…So,” Frank said to her now, wiping a spume of Coors from his mouth. “You want to talk about going to the Moon. Why the hell?”

Because my ex-husband thinks the world is going to end.

“I can’t really say right now,” she said.

“It’s something to do with the stuff they’re calling the Moonseed, isn’t it?” Frank smiled. “We ain’t dumb, you know.”

“I’m sorry—”

“That’s okay.” He held up his hands. “Frankly I’m more interested in getting us back there than why the hell we go. If you came up with a reason, good for you. Now. Jays said you’re looking at a fast return.”

“Yes.”

“How fast? Ten years, five?”

“Try five weeks.”

Frank held her gaze for a few seconds, letting that sink in.

“You think it’s impossible,” she said.