Jays Malone turned out to be a big man, still muscular, slim and supple for his age, which was — Geena knew from the biographies — about 70. He was crisply tanned, right to the crown of his head, which was totally free of hair, polished to a billiard-ball shine. He looked a little dwarfed by the giant show cards his fiction publisher had sent over — Rocky Worlds — A Vision of the Future by a Man Who’s Been There…

Geena had never met Jays before. He had retired before she had even joined NASA. She’d seen him on Apollo retrospectives and the like, but he was a few generations too remote from her astronaut class to have made any difference to her career here.

Jays stood up to speak. He propped his leg up on a chair, leaned on his knee, held a mike with one hand, and when he spoke, his free hand fluttered around his head like a bird, as if out of conscious control.

So, Colonel Malone, why “Jays’?

“It was my sister. When she was a kid she couldn’t say ‘James’ right. It came out ‘Jays’. It stuck as a nickname.”

Is it true you changed your name by deed poll to Jays?

“No. And it’s not true I trademarked it, either…”

Laughter. The journos were friendly enough, Geena realized, rows of faces turned to Jays like miniature moons.

Why the title?

“Something that occurred to me on the Moon,” he said. “Maybe Earth is unique. But the Moon isn’t, even in our Solar System. The Galaxy has got to be full of small, rocky, airless worlds like the Moon, Mercury. Right? I was only a quarter million miles from Earth, but if I looked away from Tom and the LM, away from the Earth, if I shielded my eyes so I could see some stars, I could have been anywhere in the Galaxy — hell, anywhere in the universe…”

The audience shifted, subtly, showing he had hit the wonder nerve. With the younger ones anyhow.

But Geena knew he was cheating a little. There could have been no time for such reflection during those busy three days on the Moon; such insights had come from polishing those memories in his head, over thirty years, like jewels, until he probably couldn’t tell any more what was raw observation on the Moon, or the maundering of an old man.

Your books are full of geology. But you weren’t trained in geology for your Apollo flight…

“That’s not quite true,” Jays said, and he expanded.