“I’m sorry.”
“Stop apologizing, already.”
“I’m—” Mike laughed, and seemed to relax a little. “You’re the boss.”
Mike’s car, in the multi-level airport car park, turned out to be a small, battered Rover. Henry, unfamiliar with the Brit numberplate system, couldn’t tell its age, but he was willing to bet it hadn’t been radiation-proofed according to the new international code. There was room in the trunk — no, the boot — for Henry’s luggage, but Mike had to clear boxes and papers off the seats before Henry could sit down.
“Sorry,” Mike said. “I wanted to pick you up myself. But the car’s always full of shit.”
Henry shrugged as he buckled up his seat belt. “We’re geologists, remember. Geologists live in shit. It’s in the job description.”
“Here.” Mike handed Henry a cardboard carton of orange juice.
“What’s this for?”
“Jet lag. I know how it feels.”
Henry grinned, and held the carton to his mouth.
Mike queued his way out of the car park, and set off along the freeway — motorway — towards central Edinburgh, eight miles away. The sky was blue, fresh, marked by a few moist-looking cumuli; but, when Mike opened a window, it was cold.
He became aware that Mike hadn’t spoken since the airport. Mike seemed to have picked up Henry’s inner sourness; maybe the poor kid thought Henry’s mood was somehow his fault.
“So,” Henry said with an effort. “What’s the shit, specifically? The boxes in the car.”
“Oh.” Mike looked vaguely embarrassed. “They’re for my sister. I get her samples through my buddies at the University. She sells rocks.”
“She’s an academic supplier?”
“Not exactly.”
“Oh. Don’t tell me. Not rocks; crystals.”
Mike shrugged. “She knows more about geology and mineralogy and stuff than she admits. But she has to make a living.”
“So, what about you? You have a pet rock at home?”
Mike laughed. “No. But I have a rock collection. I started when I was a kid. The first item was a piece of basalt from Arthur’s Seat. When I was a schoolkid I joined a local geology society. Field trips to the Pentland Hills, and stuff.”
“Sounds fun.”
“You know, Edinburgh is the home of geology—”
“So they tell me.”
Mike looked embarrassed, and again Henry found himself absurdly regretting his sharpness.
“Go on,” Henry said. “So you wanted to be a geologist.”
“I never got that far.”
“As far as what?”
“As taking A-levels. The exams that would have got me to University.” He shrugged. “But I learned a lot about rocks. I was always good in the field, and I turned out to be good in the lab. I got a job as a technician in the geology department here.”
“You could study. Do some kind of correspondence thing.”
Mike flashed a weak smile. “I’m happier with the rocks.”
“Especially Moon rocks, huh.”
“Oh, yes. Especially the Moon rocks.”
To Henry the British roads looked clean, wide, kind of crowded; this was indeed a small island, he thought. The exit ramp from the motorway was a baby-gentle curve, signposted miles in advance. They emerged onto a roundabout, a system of ordered chaos, with an unspoken etiquette about giving way Henry was going to have some trouble mastering. Not to mention the fact that Mike was sitting on the right, and the roundabout traffic turned clockwise, counter to the way God intended humans to travel…
Henry felt irritated by all this. He wasn’t interested in learning about the eccentricities of the British road system. The truth remained that he didn’t want to be here, and still wouldn’t even after he got past his jet lag. He let himself get annoyed at Edinburgh, Scotland and Britain, however unfair it was.
They entered the city itself. Henry’s immediate impression was bustle, colour, lovely old sandstone buildings, hills everywhere.
Mike, following the traffic along a broad, sunlit shopping street, turned towards the train station. “Your hotel’s the Balmoral. Kind of swank. We checked you in here until you find somewhere more permanent. NASA are paying…”
Henry peered gloomily at the hotel, a sandstone pile punctured with slit windows, topped by a huge, fairy-cake clock tower. Builders were working on the roof, adding what looked like a layer of radiation-proof lead shielding. Overall, the hotel looked like a prison.
He checked his watch: 9.00 a.m., British time.
“How far are we from work, Mike?”
He shrugged. “A few minutes. Do you want to check in first, freshen up—”
Henry scratched the stubble on his cheeks. “Hell, no.” He grinned. “First impressions are vital. Let’s go see that Moon rock.”
Mike pulled away from the kerb.
The Edinburgh University Department of Geology and Geophysics turned out to be part of a sub-campus called the King’s Buildings, a couple of miles south of the city centre. Most of the science and engineering departments lived out here, Henry learned, along with a couple of government research institutes. The department itself was housed in a building called the Grant Institute of Geology, a blocky 1930s frontage with rambling modern extensions to the rear.
The suburbs of Edinburgh ran away to the north. To the south there was an open area, trees and grassland, that turned out to be a golf course.
From Mike, Henry learned that Edinburgh was in fact pretty much ringed by golf courses.
When Henry and Mike walked up to the entrance a couple of undergraduates came out, carrying notebooks. They both seemed to have pierced tongues — my God — and, in their lurid war-paint sunscreen, to Henry they looked about twelve years old.
There was a security check at the door. Henry signed the book, alongside where Mike had already filled in his name for him. He’d spelled it wrong: HNERY.
Oh, Henry thought.
The entrance hall was 1930s grandiose, but its glory was faded. There were portraits of the department’s great men on the walls, and three granite slabs with lists of former professors. But the slabs weren’t up to date, and the hall was cluttered with a couple of fish tanks and a small seismology station. Mike shrugged. “We’ve been putting in stuff for the undergraduates. That’s a salt water aquarium over there, and this seismology station is live. Educational. But we have to scramble for the funding. And it costs a couple of hundred quid for every word you get carved on those big granite tombstones up there…”
Thus, thought Henry, times change, and not always for the worse.
Mike gave Henry a quick tour of the department.
The core of the Institute was the handsome old 1930s building, tall ceilings, oak panels, echoing; the modern extensions were cramped and rambling, with cheap ceiling tiles and linoleum floors. But, like every geology lab Henry had ever been in, the place was cluttered with samples. Even in the corridors there were big oak chests of drawers, all neatly numbered by hand-drawn labels. There were basement storage areas for the bigger samples — the foundations would have had trouble with the weight otherwise — and the rocks there were stored in open pallets or, sometimes, in cruder containers, like photocopier paper boxes. There was a cold room where ocean floor core samples were stacked up, in grimy metal tubes; Mike pointed out the department’s milk store here, ready to fuel the British need for a continual tea supply.
Rocks everywhere, all carefully labelled and tracked by a full-time curator. Grad students were encouraged to discard whatever they didn’t absolutely need for the future, but Henry knew that no geologist would willingly give up a single grain of sand.
To Henry it felt like coming home, after the crush and squalor of the plane, the jangling confusion of his first jet-lagged encounter with Edinburgh.