“Just remember,” Ted said. “Edinburgh is all fur coat and no knickers.”

The kid giggled, and Jane said, “For God’s sake, Dad.”

“Well, it’s true.”

Mike leaned to Henry. “He’s from Glasgow.”

Now the kid spoke to Henry. “So you’re a geologist too, like Uncle Mike.”

“Yeah. You want to be a geologist when you grow up?”

The kid gave him a pitying look. Jane looked amused.

Henry ploughed on.

“When I was a kid I wanted to be an astronomer. I used to hang out at weekends at the Griffiths Observatory, above Los Angeles, when my buddies were down on the beach. I even made a map of the Moon, when I was fifteen or so. But real-world astronomy wasn’t for me. I think it was because nobody looks through a telescope any more. I missed the tactile stuff.” He hesitated. “I liked the feel of starlight, light that was a thousand years old, tickling my eye.”

Jane cocked an eyebrow.

“And if that’s too poetic for you—”

“Poetry’s fine,” she said. “Just don’t make a habit of it.”

“Anyhow, I turned to geology. The world is full of rocks you can touch, after all. I majored in geology at Pomona, in Southern California, and UCLA at Berkeley and LA. At UCLA I learned to live like a geologist, which is to say,” he said to Jack, “in the middle of messy oil fields and mines and heat, or cold, and rattlesnakes and poison oak and cow pies…”

The kid’s eyes were pleasingly round. “Do you get to see volcanoes?”

Henry said, “Not much. I have friends who do that. What I mostly study is the Moon. Do you know about the Moon?”

“Some.”

“During the grind at UCLA I visited JPL — the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where they run the space probes out of, and I saw the pictures of the Moon they had there, and it was like being a kid again. So there I was. I wanted to be a geologist, working with Moon rocks. But only one geologist ever flew to the Moon, and that was thirty years ago, and there was no prospect of anybody going back soon.

“Anyhow after that I was a little stuck. I wasn’t interested in the oil companies which hire most geologists. I decided I had to bite the bullet. I had to go work for the only place specializing in Moon rocks, thirty-year-old collection or not, and that is the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston. NASA.”

“NASA,” breathed Jack.

“It’s not as cool as you might think. What I found when I got there was they were throwing out half their collection of Lunar Orbiter and Apollo photographs, maps and mission documents. You wouldn’t believe it. I had to pull them out of the dumpster, literally, forty billion dollars” worth of trash. NASA is much better at gathering data than storing it…”

Jack looked baffled.