Geena said, “I thought I ought to—”

He talked fast. “What? Come say goodbye? Gee, thanks. You want to see 86047? That’s the rock I’m taking to Edinburgh. Or rather, it is taking me. The only piece of lunar bedrock you’re likely to see. What an honour. And the centrepiece of what’s left of my career.” He eyed her. “Maybe you’d like to stomp it, like you stomped my balls.”

She stepped back, until her butt came up against the display case of Moon rocks. She hadn’t expected so much anger; it was like an explosion in her face.

“Change the record, Henry. You aren’t good at bitterness.”

“You think I’m giving you a hard time?”

“I don’t deserve it.”

“Like hell. You shafted the Shoemakers. We were going to the South Pole,” Henry said. “A place your Man-in-Space heroes had never dared think about. Great science, and two probes for two hundred million bucks apiece. Christ, do you know how much we could have learned?”

“I know, Henry.”

“Do you? Listen to me — there’s water at the South Pole. Not just the bathtub full that Prospector found, but a whole frozen ocean of it, laid down by the comets, in great dusty layers, carbon dioxide too, maybe enough to flood the whole damn Moon—”

“I know, Henry. And your fancy probes would have performed the deep core sampling that would have proved it. You told me a dozen, a hundred times. You told everybody else. Maybe—”

“Maybe what?”

Maybe if you didn’t shoot your mouth off so much, to me and the NASA managers and on the TV chat shows and in the tabloid papers and in the goddamn JSC staff canteen, you’d exert a little more influence. Maybe this wouldn’t have happened to you.

Suddenly, she felt weary of all this. “You do blame me, don’t you?”

“Hell, yes. If you hadn’t come out publicly and backed shutting down Shoemaker…”