The receiving lab had been built at the height of the Cold War Apollo era, when funds flowed relatively freely, and everyone worried that there might be bugs in the Moon rocks, that would devastate the world. But the Moon rocks had turned out to be the deadest things ever seen.

She could see Henry at the far end of the room.

He was obviously busy, organizing the packaging of some precious rock or other. He was clustered around a stainless steel workbench with three or four techs, all of them in their white bunny suits, like a conference of surgeons.

She drifted to the front of the lab, and waited until Henry came free.

At the front of the room was a glass wall, beyond which was a viewing gallery, dimly lit.

And here there were three big rocks on display. Each of them was maybe the size of a grapefruit, sawn in half.

These were Moon rocks, she knew.

She’d been with Henry long enough to pick up, however reluctantly, a little geology. The rock on the left was obviously a basalt — a kind of lava — a dark grey structure shot through with vesicles. The rock on the right was a breccia, its structure compound like a granite, big shapeless blobs of different materials. Breccias were the result of violent events, which smashed up rocks and welded them back together again. On Earth they usually formed in river environments. But these lunar rocks had been shoved together by an ancient meteorite impact which pulverized some part of the Moon. Even that impact was more than three billion years ago, older than almost all rocks on Earth. And the centre rock, perhaps the most nondescript, was all of four and a half billion years old.

“…Treat that with respect, Geena; it cost forty billion bucks.”

It was Henry, of course, his fleshy nose like a bird’s beak, his black hair an unruly tangle that wouldn’t stay put under his NASA-regulation trilby.