“No,” he said. “Not a bridge. This is Geena waving farewell from the far side of the ravine. Good luck with your life.”

“Sad,” Jane said.

“History.”

“I think I’m starting to understand you,” she said, studying him.

He felt uncomfortable under the scrutiny. “You are?”

“You really are a true scientist. You like figuring out how the world works. You like the fact that it works logically at all. You find that comforting.”

He rubbed his cheek. “I guess that’s true. Take the Moon. The Moon is very different from the Earth, but the basic principles still apply. Like stratigraphy—”

“Like what?”

“On Earth, in general, younger formations lie on top of older formations. Think about the Grand Canyon. A big slice down through millions of years of sedimentary layers, older under younger, older under younger. And it’s the same on the Moon. The big impact that created the Mare Imbrium, for instance, pretty much blanketed the Moon with debris — all of about the same age. So you can tell almost at a glance, anywhere on the Moon, whether a given unit is younger or older than Imbrium. When I learned for the first time that on the Moon, the logic of geology works just the same as in Arizona… well. Isn’t it something?”

“It is to you anyhow. And you’re talking too much again.”

“I have the feeling,” he said slowly, “you are diagnosing me as an anal retentive.”

“I’m not diagnosing. I’m just trying to understand.”

He ran his spoon around the crusted rim of his cup. “I guess we don’t have much in common.”

“I think you’re wrong.”

“You do?”

“I seem to be tuned in to patterns in the universe too. Trends and laws. The difference is,” she said, “I don’t take much comfort out of what the patterns tell me about the future.”

They were silent for a while.

She leaned forward. “Do you have to go back to work?”

“Yes.” He thought about it. “No, not necessarily.”

“Maybe we could skip dinner.”

He looked into her eyes. “Oh.”

She said nothing.

He thought it over. “Let me pick up the tab.”

“No. My shout.”

They stood up.

They went back to Henry’s hotel room, in the Balmoral.

It was… memorable.

She was tender, loving, funny. Whereas Geena had always had that chilling air of assessing his athletic prowess the whole time.

But it wasn’t as if they were obvious soul mates. Jane was smart, and logical, but she was obviously coming to quite different conclusions about the world from his own.

Maybe they were complementary, somehow.

He remembered a story, he thought by Plato. How, at the beginning of time, human beings were split in two, by a malevolent god, into halves — male and female. They ran around the Earth thereafter, searching blindly, never happy.