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 storeys. The height was for protection against Class 5 hurricane floods; Mission Control 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 defence 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 labelled “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 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 grey light, a greyness 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 was really 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.