The Apollo guys had some training from geologists attached to the project — they’d be taken to Meteor Crater, Arizona, or some such place, and taught to look — they had to try to be geologists, at least by proxy, in a wilderness no true scientist had ever trodden before them. But in the end Jays had spent three days bouncing across the Moon, wisecracking and whistling and cussing; for the point of the journey was not the science of the Moon, of course, nor even the political stuff that pushed them so far, but simply to get through the flight with a completed checklist and without a screw-up, so you were in line for another.

But for Jays, there never had been another. After returning home he was caught up in the PR hoopla, stuff he’d evidently hated, stuff that led him to drink a lot more than he should. And by the time he’d come out of that he found himself without a wife and out of NASA, and too old to go back to the Air Force.

Jays talked about all this now. “It was a time,” he said with a smile, “I still think of as my Dark Age.”

The audience was silent.

“But I kept in touch with the studies of the Moon rocks we brought back I showed up at lunar and planetary science conferences. And that got me interested in geology I took a couple of night classes, even made a few field trips, over the years. For a while it was just a way to fill up time between Amex commercials and daytime talk shows. But I soon came to know a lot more about the Earth than I ever did about the Moon.”

And, he said, gradually, the geology stuff had hooked his imagination.

Death Valley, for instance: one of the most famous geological showpieces in America. But if you managed to look beyond the tourist stuff about bauxite miners and mule trains, what you had there was a freshwater lake, teeming with wildlife and flora, that had gotten cut off from the sea. Over twenty thousand years the lake had dwindled and become more and more saline; the trees and bushes died off and the topsoil washed away, exposing the bedrock, and the lake’s inhabitants were forced to adapt to the salt or die…

His first piece of fiction, a short story, was slight, a tale of a human tribe struggling to survive on the edge of such a lake.

Nods, from the sf enthusiasts in the audience. The Drying. It had won a prize.