“It wouldn’t have made a difference. Don’t you get it? It’s all about money and politics and power and rivalry between the NASA centres, Henry. It’s a game, that you never figured out.”

He thought about that. “So what game were you playing? If it made no difference what you said, why say anything at all?”

“I was trying to advance my career. What else?”

“At my expense?”

“Look, Henry, it could be worse. You got your lunar bedrock, haven’t you? The most important unanalysed Apollo sample left, so they tell me.”

“86047? It’s a piece of shit.”

“How can you say that? It’s bedrock.”

“But that asshole Jays Malone didn’t do his documentation right. I don’t have the context.”

She knew enough geology to understand him. The geologists had been complaining about the astronauts” performance on the Moon since 1969. Without its context — knowing exactly where a sample had come from, how it was positioned, all the rest — a rock’s value was hugely diminished, for a geologist. Maybe that was why they fobbed off Henry with it.

He was still talking.

“…And I have to go to Edinburgh to work on it. The only place that would have me.”

“Come on, Henry.”

“Where the hell is Scotland anyhow?” He waved an arm vaguely. “Some Scandinavian country, thataway somewhere.”

“You need a change, Henry. A career break. Face it. All this bitterness—”

“The thing of it is, we’ll never know. Don’t you get it yet, Geena? We’ll never know, about the South Pole ice. Not in my working lifetime. That’s what is killing me.”

She tried to focus, to stay sympathetic, but her attention drifted.

She’d heard this before, too.

Was this the definition of the end of a relationship? When you’ve heard everything the other person has to say — not once, but many times?