Then the two of them crowded into an airlock, a little two-doored glass-walled room little bigger than a phone booth. Air blowers blasted at them from the ceiling.

The tech opened an inner door, and there she was, in the same room as the most famous rocks in the world.

And Henry.

The lab was a place of rectangles, of big stainless steel glove boxes and staff in white clean-room coats and hats and overboots. The roof was crowded with fluorescent tubes which filled the room with a sickly grey light, a greyness emphasized by the polished steel of the glove boxes and the nondescript floor tiles. At the back of the room, a heavy door led to a vault where the bulk of the lunar samples were stored.

This lab didn’t do much original science, in fact. It was really just a service lab, providing sample processing for external researchers. The cleanness standard was tighter than an operating room, though not so tight as, for example, a microelectronics lab.

There was a tour going on, bigwigs garbed out in their white coats, having their photographs taken with the rocks, enduring a running commentary from some flack in a white coat and a trilby.

…Eight hundred pounds of Moon rock is stored here, as two and a half thousand samples, split into eighty thousand subsamples. Something like a thousand samples a year are taken, mostly less than one gramme. The subsamples are stored in nitrogen, in triple-shelled containers. Efforts are made to reuse the samples, even ones which have been driven to destruction in some way — it is possible that other unrelated tests could be performed even on the detritus. There is a computer database on all eighty thousand subsamples, and handwritten notes and photographs on each one are stored in a fire-proof vault. Even today, sixty per cent of the samples have remained unopened since they were locked up on the dusty surface of the Moon…