Welcome to Gaia! ::

It was a quiet afternoon at the Destiny City Earth and Space Museum - their busiest days were when it rained, and today was sunny and mild for early summer. On days like these, Iouri cut the staff back to a skeleton crew and ran the admissions desk himself, played Soviet-classical music on the lobby sound system, and caught up on his reading.

A slowly rotating model of the solar system spun slowly overhead, doing interesting things to the light that filtered in through the tinted glass ceiling. A plaque on the floor explained that the model showed the approximate locations of the planets in their orbits, but was not to scale. Also, it did not include Pluto.

Iouri looked up from his magazine as the doors slid open, and set it aside as he focused in on the lone visitor. "Can I help you?" he asked, in his own lightly-accented brand of English.

The computer monitor on the wall behind him was advertising a Murder Mystery Gala and Planetarium Opening, set for a date some two weeks off.

While awaiting the boy's next move, Iouri tugged on his ID card, trying to straighten it. It said "DIRECTOR" in big red letters. It was red because that was how people knew he was in charge.

"Five dollars for students..." said Iouri slowly, trying to figure out what the kid was so nervous about. He was fidgeting like an escapee from a KGB raid, and frankly it was making Iouri wonder if there was some dangerous situation outside his doors that he ought to know about.

Or maybe the kid was just excited. It had been so long since Iouri had seen someone come through those doors and be genuinely fascinated by every single thing on display in the lobby or advertised on the signage that he was rusty at recognizing it. He flashed the kid a welcoming smile with only a few too many teeth, and hit a couple of keys on the computer behind the desk to register a sale, and printed out a wristband for the boy. It was white, with a cheery graphic of a space shuttle blasting around the band.

"Earth halls in the East wing, Space halls in the West," he explained, pointing. Then, realizing that the afternoon was as good as dead and he possibly had a burgeoning scientist on his hands, he added, "...Would you like a tour?"

The boy's wordless enthusiasm was okay with Iouri - he could do more than enough talking for the both of them. He less opened the gate on the side of the kiosk and more vaulted over it, paused to put up a "Back in fifteen minutes!" sign, and clapped his hands together in excitement.

"Where do you want to start?" he asked the boy, pacing excitedly across the lobby. They crossed in and out of the solar system's slowly undulating shadows. Iouri came to a stop under the sun and looked towards each wing in turn. "We've got a couple of dinosaurs - one of them that they found locally! And, let's see... the sixth largest meteorite on the east coast!"

He'd had to argue with a bigger museum two towns over to keep that. They'd lost some of the gem collection when the museum changed hands and had to reorganize their finances to keep from going under, but the meteorite was far more valuable to the museum's scientific integrity than a couple of examples of rare minerals. Iouri had every confidence that they'd get similar samples back again someday - the meteorite had to be held on to.

"Or! Or!" he exclaimed, skipping towards the west wing. "Oh, we just re-opened this hall two months ago! We have an Apollo capsule! Not one of the famous ones, but it's an Apollo capsule! It's orbited the moon!"

He was practically bouncing with enthusiasm - he really wanted to show this stuff off! "You want to see that, right?"

Iouri noticed the kid's stutter, and sympathized deeply - his own struggles with his accent had left him terminally shy in high school, and it hadn't properly gone away until an acting class in college. "Let's look at the meteorite first!" he said triumphantly, marching ahead into the hall, but not too fast that he couldn't be followed.

He hooked a left at a case holding a space suit, calling, "We'll come back to that later!" as they passed it. The exhibit widened into a hall all about stellar and planetary formation. Eventually it looped around the courtyard into the hall of rare minerals, but this at least was thoroughly space, and was centered around a platform with a huge chunk of iron on it, roughly four feet by two feet by two and a half.

Iouri bounded over to it and rapped a hand against the pockmarked surface of the meteorite. "Our rule is that if we let you get close enough to touch it, you can!" he said cheerily, waving the boy over. "Here, don't be afraid. This rock is over four billion years old!"

"Why don't you ask me where it came from?" he goaded.

"Well, originally this thing was whizzing around the solar system, somewhere in the vicinity of Earth, and got a little bit too close," explained Iouri lightly, slapping a hand against the cool metal surface of the meteorite. "When that happened - which we think was about three hundred years ago, this chunk of iron ripped through the atmosphere and cut a crater the size of this room out of the valley it fell into."

"Which was..." He practically skipped across the room to a map on the wall. Closer investigation would show it to be of the general part of the east coast where Destiny City was located. He pointed to a point about eighty miles to the west, up in the mountains. "Here."

"There are a few records of when this thing came down, but of course this area was still British Colonial at the time... The museum didn't exist yet, we were founded in 1921, when several smaller institutes consolidated under a single name. The meteorite was, at that time, in the private collection of a local newspaper giant..."

He trailed off and looked over at Cass. "I'm not boring you, am I?"

"With science!" bubbled Iouri enthusiastically, bounding around the meteorite like an excited puppy. "Back then, all this stuff was very finders-keepers. Now if a meteorite like this fell, there'd be a team of scientists there in a heartbeat!"

He hopped down from the platform and bounded across the room. "But! Enough about that!"

He waved for Cass to follow him back towards the fork in the exhibit, where the spacesuit stood silent sentinel. "This is from a Gemini mission!" he said, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet. "Isn't it cool?"

Iouri beamed expectantly at the boy. Of course it was cool. He knew it was cool. And he would be sorely disappointed if Cass didn't agree.

Iouri made a face. It might have been a 'kids these days' face, but he only wore it for a split second so it was impossible to tell. He gestured to the space suit. "NASA has had four major manned space programs, each consisting of a series of launches. The first was Mercury, which was single-person capsules. Gemini came second... as the name suggests, it was a two-seater capsule."

He smiled brightly. "We've got an Apollo capsule down that way - a three-seater. Those actually went to the moon. Gemini was just a high-orbit craft. It did mostly spacewalks."

He gestured down the hall into the space wing. On the wall nearest to them was a life-sized poster of Yuri Gagarin, a height chart, and several paragraphs about 'Do you have what it takes to be a Space Pioneer?' From this distance, all one could tell was that there were several heights plotted out on it, and most of them were pretty short.

Iouri trailed off for a moment, staring at the wall, and then said, brightly, "Why don't you check that out? See how you measure up?"