Geena had never met Jays before. He had retired before she had even joined NASA. She’d seen him on Apollo retrospectives and the like, but he was a few generations too remote from her astronaut class to have made any difference to her career here.

Jays stood up to speak. He propped his leg up on a chair, leaned on his knee, held a mike with one hand, and when he spoke, his free hand fluttered around his head like a bird, as if out of conscious control.

So, Colonel Malone, why “Jays’?

“It was my sister. When she was a kid she couldn’t say ‘James’ right. It came out ‘Jays’. It stuck as a nickname.”

Is it true you changed your name by deed poll to Jays?

“No. And it’s not true I trademarked it, either…”

Laughter. The journos were friendly enough, Geena realized, rows of faces turned to Jays like miniature moons.

Why the title?

“Something that occurred to me on the Moon,” he said. “Maybe Earth is unique. But the Moon isn’t, even in our Solar System. The Galaxy has got to be full of small, rocky, airless worlds like the Moon, Mercury. Right? I was only a quarter million miles from Earth, but if I looked away from Tom and the LM, away from the Earth, if I shielded my eyes so I could see some stars, I could have been anywhere in the Galaxy — hell, anywhere in the universe…”

The audience shifted, subtly, showing he had hit the wonder nerve. With the younger ones anyhow.

But Geena knew he was cheating a little. There could have been no time for such reflection during those busy three days on the Moon; such insights had come from polishing those memories in his head, over thirty years, like jewels, until he probably couldn’t tell any more what was raw observation on the Moon, or the maundering of an old man.

Your books are full of geology. But you weren’t trained in geology for your Apollo flight…

“That’s not quite true,” Jays said, and he expanded.

The Apollo guys had some training from geologists attached to the project — they’d be taken to Meteor Crater, Arizona, or some such place, and taught to look — they had to try to be geologists, at least by proxy, in a wilderness no true scientist had ever trodden before them. But in the end Jays had spent three days bouncing across the Moon, wisecracking and whistling and cussing; for the point of the journey was not the science of the Moon, of course, nor even the political stuff that pushed them so far, but simply to get through the flight with a completed checklist and without a screw-up, so you were in line for another.

But for Jays, there never had been another. After returning home he was caught up in the PR hoopla, stuff he’d evidently hated, stuff that led him to drink a lot more than he should. And by the time he’d come out of that he found himself without a wife and out of NASA, and too old to go back to the Air Force.

Jays talked about all this now. “It was a time,” he said with a smile, “I still think of as my Dark Age.”

The audience was silent.

“But I kept in touch with the studies of the Moon rocks we brought back I showed up at lunar and planetary science conferences. And that got me interested in geology I took a couple of night classes, even made a few field trips, over the years. For a while it was just a way to fill up time between Amex commercials and daytime talk shows. But I soon came to know a lot more about the Earth than I ever did about the Moon.”

And, he said, gradually, the geology stuff had hooked his imagination.

Death Valley, for instance: one of the most famous geological showpieces in America. But if you managed to look beyond the tourist stuff about bauxite miners and mule trains, what you had there was a freshwater lake, teeming with wildlife and flora, that had gotten cut off from the sea. Over twenty thousand years the lake had dwindled and become more and more saline; the trees and bushes died off and the topsoil washed away, exposing the bedrock, and the lake’s inhabitants were forced to adapt to the salt or die…

His first piece of fiction, a short story, was slight, a tale of a human tribe struggling to survive on the edge of such a lake.

Nods, from the sf enthusiasts in the audience. The Drying. It had won a prize.

The story sold for a couple hundred bucks to one of the science fiction magazines, Jays said he suspected for curiosity over his name alone. A novel, painfully tapped into a primitive word processor, followed soon after. He hadn’t read sf since he was a kid, but now he rediscovered that sense of time and space as a huge, pitiless landscape that had impelled him towards space in the first place.

Are you arguing for a return to space, in your books?

“I guess so. I think we need to be out there. You don’t need to know much geology to see that… On Earth, in a few thousand years the ice will be back, scraping the whole damn place down to the bedrock again, and I don’t know how we’re proposing to cope with that. And then there are other hazards, further out…”

The next big rock. The dinosaur killer.

“It’s on its way, maybe wandering in from the Belt right now, with all our names written on it… Or maybe there is some other hazard, waiting out there to bite us. But I’m not propagandizing here. This is just fiction, right? I want your beer money, not your vote.”

Laughter.

Of course, propagandizing was exactly what Jays was doing.

Jays had said on a multitude of talk shows how he was dismayed by the Shuttle program — a clumsy, compromised, primitive design, just a V-2 with air conditioning, it seemed to him — and by the lack of any serious consideration being given to any more advanced follow-up.

For the fact was there were smarter ways to get into space, to reach the Moon and beyond. For instance, orbits of spacecraft passing between the Earth and the Moon were actually unstable, because of the tweakings of the lumpy gravity fields of Earth, Moon and sun. If you gave your spacecraft the right kind of push, in the right direction, at the right time, you could use that instability to make your spacecraft drift to the Moon. It would take longer to get there than the three days it had taken him, but that wasn’t necessarily a problem, for it would be at a fraction of the cost in fuel and mass in low Earth orbit.

“Then,” he said, “once you are on the Moon, there’s oxygen, and water, and materials for rocket fuel, and materials to make glass and concrete… Once you are on the Moon, with all those resources out of Earth’s deep, heavy gravity well, hell, you can go anywhere!”

It was a vision he shared with a handful of others, inside and outside NASA: how, with a little imagination, the Solar System could, after all, be opened up for colonization, with the Moon as the key.

Unfortunately, nobody with any power, financial or political, wanted to listen. Even to somebody who had been there.

So he began to work in more subtle ways. He joined the board of the National Space Society, for instance. He published his conceptual studies wherever he could, and plugged them on chat shows. He started to work his ideas into his fictions, building up a body of work that, piece by piece, it seemed to Geena, amounted to a kind of schematic of the future, a ladder to history.

Robert Heinlein had done something similar, back in the “40s and “50s, and so nurtured the minds of the youngsters who would go on to run NASA, and touch the Moon. Now — in less optimistic times, with a deeper understanding of how God-awful difficult the whole enterprise would be — Jays Malone was trying the same trick.

“I tell you,” he said, “I’ve given up on you guys. Your generation. All this New Age crap. But there are always the kids. Always the kids.”

Jays talked on, taking the questions — dumb, perceptive, intrusive, whatever — with a clumsy, good-humoured grace.