“Or since man came out of the caves. Makes you miss Cronkite,” he said, “and I’ve been further out of the cave than most.”

The heatless light of dying Venus made her shiver. “So what do you think has happened up there, Dad?”

“Danged if I know.” His voice was light, but his face was a mask, expressionless. “I don’t think it’s a good omen, though.”

And that made her more queasy than all the fantastic speculations of the TV pundits.

He touched her arm. “Come on. I want to show you something.” He led her indoors, towards the lounge. “Something I never showed anyone. Not even your mother.”

“Why not?”

He grinned, and put his beer down on top of the piano. “Because it’s a federal offence.” He started to rummage at the back of a dresser drawer.

She looked around the room. So familiar, nothing changed since she was a kid, it was like being transported back in time. It was an old guy’s trophy room, with Jays’s photographs of airplanes and spacecraft, a whole-globe view of Earth taken with a hand-held Kodak, a little framed patch of spacesuit, grey with Moon dust. But everything was old and faded. Even the spacesuit piece looked like it had come over on the Mayflower.

Jays approached her. He was carrying something in a fist-sized plastic envelope. The plastic had gone yellow and brittle with age. In the gathering dawn light, she could see it held a piece of rock, black as tar.

“Oh, Dad. Is that what I think it is?”

“It’s a piece of bedrock, sweet pea. It froze out of a lava flow, that bubbled out of the Moon more than three billion years ago…”

It was, of course, Moon rock.

“Are you supposed to have that?”

He grinned, his teeth white in Venus light. “Hell, no. I told you. It’s a federal offence. I grabbed it when I was deep inside the rille, out of sight. They never missed it. Our documentation wasn’t worth jack shit anyhow. I wanted to leave it to you and the kids. So I will. I never even took it out and looked at it before, all these years. Come on.” He stepped towards the porch.