The traffic lurched forward in spasms.
She’d made Houston her home for ten years now, but she was San Francisco born and bred, and she’d never quite gotten used to Texas. Houston was hot and flat, water towers and shining green lawns and under-used malls that sprawled untidily around the downtown towers poking out of the city’s heart. Houston was new, its growth fuelled mostly by oil money, but it was half-empty and soulless.
Oh, Houston could give you its moments — driving around the Loop you would sometimes get a fine view of the Port of Houston, refineries draped in feathers of steam, lights on the stacks glowing yellow — but then she’d never had an ambition to live in a Blade Runner diorama.
And this area, Clear Lake/NASA, was really pretty seedy. It was a long way out of downtown Houston, off the Galveston Freeway, I-75. The Johnson Space Center was the home of the nation’s space program, but at heart it was just an old-fashioned government facility, fading 1960s buildings stranded in an area full of desolate mini-malls and little else.
But even so, she thought, maybe it wasn’t Houston’s fault she felt so sour about life here.
It would be better when Henry had gone: Henry, ex-husband of three days, the living, breathing embodiment of everything that had gone wrong with her life.
As she approached the JSC entrance, she realized she wasn’t up to facing the press, or Henry. Not just yet.
She pulled into a parking lot close to the Days Inn NASA, a chalet-style motel almost directly opposite the JSC entrance. She used to stay here when she was an impoverished ascan, an astronaut candidate, in happier days a hundred years ago. Near the Days Inn was the Puddruckers hamburger restaurant where she used to eat, and a Chinese restaurant. She bought a Houston Chronicle, 50¢ from a vending machine, and walked into the Chinese. It was full of old folks watching TV, and she bought herself soup and a sandwich for $2.95.
The Chronicle was stuffed full of ad sections and bewilderingly dull local news. But it had reasonable coverage of the space program, especially when a mission was in progress, with two or three features a day. A lot more informative than NASA TV, she thought.
Her soup arrived. When she looked up, past the middle-aged waitress, she could see spacecraft, the superannuated inhabitants of JSC’s rocket garden, poking above the trees like minarets from some ruined temple. And there was the white-and-black flank of the Saturn V, an operational Moon rocket, lying in the grass.
In the Chronicle there was a series of ads for stomach stapling, aimed at those more than a hundred pounds overweight. Americans always eat too much, Arkady often told her. Maybe she’d clip this out to show him.
She ate her soup, trying to make it last.
Through the JSC security gate she parked her car. It was a late February day, unusually cold. She walked to where Henry would be working, at the Lunar Curatorial Facility in Building 31N. This was the building where, for thirty years, they had stored the Moon rocks.
She had to climb two and a half storeys. The height was for protection against Class 5 hurricane floods; Mission Control was raised to this level for a similar reason. The weather was thought to be the most likely danger to the rocks, in these post-Cold War days. But just in case of a nuclear attack or similar catastrophe, a proportion of the irreplaceable samples were stored in Brooks Air Force Base at San Antonio, separation being the only defence in case of such a disaster.
To be destroyed in such an attack would have been a strange fate for the battered old rocks which had seen so much, she thought.
She found a friendly technician who would take her in. The woman had worked here for twenty years. The tech was pregnant. That struck Geena as odd: what a start to life, here in the Moon rock lab, halfway off the Earth.
She had to go through the clean room. In an outer changing room she put on a bunny suit: two layers of overshoes, and a button-up white coat and McDonald’s-server hat. The garments were labelled “Lockheed Martin’. There were no gloves, but she had to take off her wedding ring — gold evaporating from its surface could contaminate the samples — and when she slipped it into a pocket she realized, for the first time, she needn’t put it back again.
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…
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.