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supposed to have that?”
    He grinned, his teeth white in Venus light. “Hell, no. I told you. It’s a federal offense. I grabbed it when I was deep inside the rille, out of sight. They never missed it. Our documentation wasn’t worth jack shit anyhow. I wanted to leave it to you and the kids. So I will. I never even took it out and looked at it before, all these years. Come on.” He stepped toward the porch.
    The eastern sky, behind the house, was growing pink, but the Atlantic behind them was a mass of darkness still. Jays found a place to hold his rock so it cast two shadows in his hand, from sun and Venus.
    “It looks like coal,” she said.
    He laughed. “The Moon is dark. If it was bright as Earth, acre for acre, you could read by its light. But you’d never see the stars…”
    There was a sharp smell. Like before a storm. Or like a beach.
    “Dad, what’s that?”
    “What?…” But now his older senses registered it. “Ozone. Electrical fire.”
    We’re not in a spacecraft now, dad, she thought. But still, maybe she should go get the kids—
    Jays dropped the rock—it thumped dully on the wooden patio—and he tucked his hand under his arm. “Jesus, that’s hot.”
    2
    The day of Geena’s post-flight press conference was, it turned out, the last day Henry would spend in Houston. So Geena, with a sinking heart, realized she had no excuse to duck out of seeing him, one last time.
    She drove the couple of miles to the Johnson Space Center from their abandoned Houston home, in the decaying 1960s suburb of Clear Lake. On NASA Road One, she found herself queuing in a bumper-to-fender jam. Once more, NASA Road One was being rebuilt; it was choked by huge, crudely assembled contraflows, and the multiple surfaces made ramps that slammed into the suspension of her Chevy.
    The short drive took her the best part of an hour, and she had no option but to sit there with her starched collar itching at her neck, the skirt of her suit riding up around her knees.
    At length she crawled past the wire fence that separated JSC from the rest of the world. Through the chicken wire she could see the JSC buildings, black-and-white cubes scattered over the old cow pasture, looking small and cramped and closed-up, out of place in an era when every office building was a glass-walled rhomboid.
    She tried the radio. Every station she found seemed to be playing country music, the modern stuff that sounded to her like soft rock. The DJs harangued her about a write-in campaign to have TNN—The Nashville Network, country music TV—retained by the local cable company. She flipped around to another station, 93.7 FM, which seemed to play nothing but “fun oldies.” They had a policy of no repeats during a single day, and on Sunday mornings, she learned, she could enjoy breakfast with the Beatles. Themusic, every track of which she’d heard before, was depressing Boomer stuff, and sounded much worse than she remembered; it made her feel very old.
    At last she found a news channel, and listened to an earnest debate about whether ebonics should be allowed in schools, and an ill-informed discussion about the latest news from Venus.
    She had flown in space on four missions now: two Shuttle missions and two stays on Station. Her last Shuttle flight had finished a month ago, just before the Venus event. And every time she returned to this —from the black silence of space, the simplicity of her life and objectives up there—she felt depressed as all hell.
    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 fueled mostly by oil money, but it was half-empty and soulless.
    Oh, Houston could give you its moments—driving around