“Different? Not so threatening in this male scientist disguise?” She wandered around the lab, passing between the stainless steel NASA glove boxes, the low fluorescent lights catching the wisps of hair that protruded from her hat. “I got Mike to sign me in for an hour. I wanted to see your world. I promise I won’t touch anything.”

“If you do, you’ll be zapped by NASA laser beams.”

“So these are Moon rocks.”

“Yeah. Come see this.” He led her to the centre of the room, where the largest single isolation tank stood, on four fat steel legs. She followed him, and they stood side by side, peering into the tank.

Standing this close to Geena, he remembered, there had always been the faint smell of deodorants, shampoo, perfume. The chemicals industry of the late twentieth century. But with Jane there was only the autumn-ash scent of her hair. Like Moon dust, he thought absently.

They’d been seeing each other, on and off, for a month now. Dinners. Walks, drives. A lot of gentle sparring as they picked at each other’s old wounds. Goodnight kisses like he used to get from his aunt.

Maybe he could detect the stirring of some kind of attraction in her, on a subconscious level. The way volcano junkies could sometimes sense the stirring of magma pockets far underground, before the most sensitive of seismometers showed a trace.

After all, she was here.

Or maybe that was all self-deluding bull. He had been disastrously and persistently wrong about Geena. After a month he still wasn’t sure.

The box contained a big, battered case made of aluminum. It was open. Inside the box was a series of dirty Teflon bags, some of them slit open.

Jane said, “What’s this?”

“An Apollo Sample Return Container, in NASA-ese. A rock box, to you and me. This is one of the boxes Jays Malone and his buddy filled up on the lunar surface, with Moon rocks they put in those numbered Teflon bags. And it was left unopened in twenty-five years.”

“You’re kidding.”

“More than half the Moon rocks have never been touched. We had to sterilize the box, with ultraviolet light and acid, dried it with nitrogen, punctured it to let out whatever trace of lunar atmosphere was in there—”

“Why? You can’t think there is any danger of contamination.”

“Of us, by the rocks? Hell, no. But they planned for it back in the “60s. They even sterilized the films the astronauts brought back from the Moon’s surface. No, now we’re more concerned with protecting the Moon rocks from us.”

Jane leaned forward and inspected the Moon samples, where they nestled in the slit-open bags. “I’m not sure what I was expecting,” she said. “Something — primordial. More glamorous. This looks like—”

“What?”

“Like jacket potatoes that got left too long on the barbecue.”