She knew enough geology to understand him. The geologists had been complaining about the astronauts” performance on the Moon since 1969. Without its context — knowing exactly where a sample had come from, how it was positioned, all the rest — a rock’s value was hugely diminished, for a geologist. Maybe that was why they fobbed off Henry with it.

He was still talking.

“…And I have to go to Edinburgh to work on it. The only place that would have me.”

“Come on, Henry.”

“Where the hell is Scotland anyhow?” He waved an arm vaguely. “Some Scandinavian country, thataway somewhere.”

“You need a change, Henry. A career break. Face it. All this bitterness—”

“The thing of it is, we’ll never know. Don’t you get it yet, Geena? We’ll never know, about the South Pole ice. Not in my working lifetime. That’s what is killing me.”

She tried to focus, to stay sympathetic, but her attention drifted.

She’d heard this before, too.

Was this the definition of the end of a relationship? When you’ve heard everything the other person has to say — not once, but many times?

She started to think ahead to her appointments later in the day.

Henry had, she realized guiltily, stopped talking.

He turned, and walked back to his work.

The Shoemaker had been Henry’s project, the centrepiece of his career. It had actually got further than most. Two prototype landers had been built for real, by the Jet Propulsion laboratory out in Pasadena. Now, as far as she knew, they were being put in storage, or maybe cannibalised for other missions…

For the Shoemaker program had been canned. The manned program — delays to the Space Station, cancellations by the cash-strapped Russians — had taken too much out of NASA’s budget.

It had always been thus, Geena knew. A single Shuttle launch, of whatever value, cost as much as both Henry’s unmanned science missions put together.

The project on 86047 was no sop, though. The mother rock was being broken up and sent around the world to top geophysics labs for independent analysis. Edinburgh was just such a lab. They’d done the same, for instance, with the famous meteorite from Mars which had looked as if it held life traces; Edinburgh had got a piece of that too.

And Henry was being sent along with the rock. There was valuable work to be done here, genuine research. But…

But she’d been with him long enough to understand how he felt.

The cancellation of Shoemaker was like the cancellation of his whole career; it meant he wasn’t likely to meet the long-term objectives he had set himself, like all scientists, objectives which underlay his choice of particular projects.

Digging aimlessly into 86047 was, by comparison, no consolation.