‘If you do, you’ll be zapped by NASA laser beams.’
‘So these are Moon rocks.’
‘Yeah. Come see this.’ He led her to the centre of the room, where the largest single isolation tank stood, on four fat steel legs. She followed him, and they stood side by side, peering into the tank.
Standing this close to Geena, he remembered, there had always been the faint smell of deodorants, shampoo, perfume. The chemicals industry of the late twentieth century. But with Jane there was only the autumn-ash scent of her hair. Like Moon dust, he thought absently.
They’d been seeing each other, on and off, for a month now. Dinners. Walks, drives. A lot of gentle sparring as they picked at each other’s old wounds. Goodnight kisses like he used to get from his aunt.
Maybe he could detect the stirring of some kind of attraction in her, on a subconscious level. The way volcano junkies could sometimes sense the stirring of magma pockets far underground, before the most sensitive of seismometers showed a trace.
After all, she was here.
Or maybe that was all self-deluding bull. He had been disastrously and persistently wrong about Geena. After a month he still wasn’t sure.
The box contained a big, battered case made of aluminum. It was open. Inside the box was a series of dirty Teflon bags, some of them slit open.
Jane said, ‘What’s this?’
‘An Apollo Sample Return Container, in NASA-ese. A rock box, to you and me. This is one of the boxes Jays Malone and his buddy filled up on the lunar surface, with Moon rocks they put in those numbered Teflon bags. And it was left unopened in twenty-five years.’
‘You’re kidding.’
‘More than half the Moon rocks have never been touched. We had to sterilize the box, with ultraviolet light and acid, dried it with nitrogen, punctured it to let out whatever trace of lunar atmosphere was in there –’
‘Why? You can’t think there is any danger of contamination.’
‘Of us, by the rocks? Hell, no. But they planned for it back in the ’60s. They even sterilized the films the astronauts brought back from the Moon’s surface. No, now we’re more concerned with protecting the Moon rocks from us.’
Jane leaned forward and inspected the Moon samples, where they nestled in the slit-open bags. ‘I’m not sure what I was expecting,’ she said. ‘Something – primordial. More glamorous. This looks like –’
‘What?’
‘Like jacket potatoes that got left too long on the barbecue.’
He laughed. ‘The Moon is a dark world, Jane; it only looks bright in the sky for lack of competition.’
She pointed to an empty bag. It was numbered ‘86047’. ‘What happened to that one?’
‘That’s the most important rock in this box. The focus of the study. It’s lunar bedrock. Possibly …’
The work on the Moon rock was actually picking up quickly – although Henry hadn’t had much time for any real science yet, as so much of his time was being taken up with organizational stuff. He had to ensure the lab assigned the right facilities for the preliminary studies he wanted to run – emission spectrometry, X-ray crystallography, mass spectrometry, X-ray fluorescence and neutron activation. He wanted to push for a scanning tunnelling microscope study, but there was no STM here, and Dan McDiarmid made it clear exactly where the boundary of his budget lay, as if every STM in the world had been transported to the Moon itself.
It put Henry in his place, and he spent a lot of time fuming and fighting for turf.
But the work itself had soon gotten going well enough.
Mike Dundas was proving to be a good choice as his lab manager, confirming Henry’s hunch. Mike made sure procedures and operations ran smoothly, and didn’t get in the way of the researchers, including Marge Case, who were waiting to start their studies.
He told Jane, ‘I’m interested in finding fragments of the Moon’s primordial crust, the first that formed after the Moon turned into a molten ball, after it accreted. Global melting: if it happened to the Moon, it must have happened to Earth, and other large bodies like Venus and Mars. But we have to know how it all happened. And the Moon is a natural place to study the process; the evidence is all buried deep on Earth, by the continuing geology of the planet.’
‘And is that what your bedrock fragment is? A piece of primordial crust?’
‘Unfortunately, no. We haven’t found a large crust fragment in any of the Apollo samples. But in bedrock like this we can expect to find fragments in the breccias, recycled repeatedly from earlier ejecta blankets … That is, smashed up and stuck back together again several times.’ He eyed her. ‘Come see what I’m doing.’
He led her to a bench, where he’d set up his petrological microscope. This was just a crude microscope, set up so you could look through a thin rock slice on a rotating stage, illuminated by a light source beneath. Jane squinted, trying to see.
‘Your brother is good at producing slides for this, over in the rock cutting lab,’ he said. ‘You take a thin section of rock – say, five millimetres. You polish it with carborundum, take some thin chips, stick them to glass with optical glue, and then polish them in a grinder until they’re no more than fifty microns thick. Thin enough to see through. The art is the finishing by hand that comes after that; you need better than five microns tolerance, and to get that you have to overcome faults in the jib you use, even in the glass slides themselves …’
She looked dubious. ‘I’m surprised they let you bring that thing in here.’
He looked at the microscope, through her eyes. It was kind of battered, he admitted. He’d picked it up for twenty bucks as an honours student when his department had a clear-out, and it had been old even then. But the mechanism still ran sweet as a nut, and the Swiss optics were as bright and clear as the day they were ground, and the ’scope, worn smooth with use, had been all over the world with him.
Henry expected to be buried with his ’scope.
Still, Mike had banned him from bringing its wooden box in here, which was even more disreputable.
He stepped forward to check the alignment. The view through the eyepiece was a disc of multicolored light, irregular shapes of bright colour. He twisted the analyser disc to show up the colours.
‘Take a look,’ he said. ‘Try to keep both your eyes open. After a while, you won’t see anything through your other eye.’
She bent, and turned the analyser as he showed her.
‘What do you see?’
‘It’s like a view down a kaleidoscope.’ Jane straightened up. ‘Wow. I’m dizzy.’
‘That’s your other eye cutting in. Forget it. The point of the ’scope is that you can see what minerals are present there, just by letting the thin slice filter polarized light.’
‘Just like that? At a glance?’
‘At a glance. Neat, isn’t it?’
‘What am I looking at? Your bedrock?’
‘No. That’s a reference sample. A lunar basalt from another suite, closer to the norm of the Apollo samples. Tell me what you see.’
She bent again. ‘Lots of small shapes, like a tiled floor. And, here and there, like pieces of stained