And that, Henry realized with an odd stir of anticipation and dread, was what seemed to have happened here.

And not just with the Moon rock, which you might expect with such an exotic sample. There was, Mike said, something different about the Edinburgh sample, too.

They looked at the 86047 results first. Mike had prepared a summary diagram on a pc screen.

Inside the Moon rock’s potato-shaped profile, roughly sketched with graphic software, Mike had marked layers, as if the rock was a misshapen onion.

“I took samples from all the way through the rock,” Mike said. “You can see it has this structure—”

“Structure? What are you talking about? It’s a rock sample. It ought to be a homogenized lump—”

“Nevertheless,” Mike said. He sounded nervous, maybe pissed off, and Henry made a conscious decision to back off. Mike said, “This is predominantly olivine.” He pointed to a band marked in red, just inside a grey band that made up the surface of the rock. “Then, going inward, we have, in order, layers of tourmaline, a pyroxene mix, amphiboles, mica, quartz.” That took his finger to the core of the rock, which he’d left as white.

“So what’s in there? And what’s in the outside layer?”

“I can’t say.”

“You can’t say?”

“Not from the diffraction results. But I know they are silicate forms. I did some chemical analysis to prove that. I can show you the results from the earlier optical emission and X-ray fluorescence tests which—”

“Later. I believe you.”

“The stuff at the centre seems to be hard and dense. Rigid.”

“Some kind of super-quartz, maybe?”

“Maybe. Some very complex structure, anyhow.” Mike hesitated, watching him. “Some of us are speculating it might fold up all the way into the fourth dimension. Ha-ha.”

That didn’t make Henry feel like laughing.

He tried to keep the frustration out of his voice. “Well, we still don’t know what we’ve got here. We need to order more of these runs. Bump up the priority. I’m getting tired of queuing behind asshole grad students.”

Mike made a note. “I’ll call Marge Case.”

“Don’t let her give you any shit. And, Christ, this just isn’t fine enough. We need some scanning tunnelling microscope time.”

Mike sighed. “Well, we don’t have an STM. As you know.”

“All right. What about the surface stuff?”

“It’s a dust,” said Mike. “Very fine. Almost no cohesion or adhesion. If you disturb the sample at all, layers of it just fall off.”

Henry frowned. “That makes no sense. That damn rock was picked up by some galoot on the Moon, and then dropped from two hundred and fifty thousand miles into the Indian Ocean. That’s what I call disturbance. Anything loose should have been shaken off long ago.”

“I know,” Mike said. “I’m just telling you what I found.” Henry pulled at his lip. New forms of silicates?