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Visitors were not generally allowed onto the museum's third floor, with good reason because it was stacked to the brink with specimen cabinets. Iouri Specter loved it: the high ceilings, the skylights punched into the roof, the musty smell of old science. Lizards in formaldehyde, space rocks, dinosaur bones... like any established museum institution, the collection was way bigger than what could be put on display with any sort of coherency.

He was prone to taking long walks through the specimen cases whenever his office got a little too stuffy or his work a little bit too long. While strolling around the public floors was fun, the upper floor was calming. There was usually no one there, and it gave him a good opportunity to get his thoughts in order.

However, today he had the sneaking suspicion he was not alone. Iouri had heard footsteps further into the maze when he began his walk, and while reason said it was probably a museum staffer on their lunch hour, he couldn't help but be curious.

Rounding the corner, Iouri came upon a dark-haired child paused in front of a case. He recognized the display - an aging shuttle model he'd dragged upstairs himself when the grant money came through to buy a newer one. The thing reeked like the 1980s and mothballs. The kid had probably come up from the summer camp, and Iouri couldn't find it in his heart to be mad at the trespasser: at the very least, he had good taste.

Iouri walked over and leaned against a specimen cabinet labeled with the names of several genuses of moth. He crossed his arms, quirked an eyebrow, and asked in a friendly, lightly-accented voice, "Where are you supposed to be right now?"

Iouri tapped a finger to his ID badge, which stated his name (DR. IOURI A. SPEKTER) and position (OPERATIONS DIR.) and had a slightly outdated photograph of him (Old glasses and bad hair). "Incidentally," he said cheerfully, "Also the museum. But where did you wander off from? There's got to be a camp counselor looking for you..."

He pushed off from the specimen cabinet in a single, clean movement and moved to stand beside the boy, examining the shuttle model. "I would have liked to go see one of the last launches..." he said wistfully, "But time off is hard to come by when the building threatens to fall down around my ears whenever I try to leave it."

Such was life. In truth, Iouri could not take a vacation without taking work with him. Even time spent down in Florida to see space launches and geek out at Kennedy Space Center would probably devolve into angling for more grant money and/or artifacts by the end of the trip.

"Interesting you should be drawn to this piece, though," he continued, tapping the glass. Iouri had a pretty good sense for kids and what they wanted, although he had none himself. And it said a lot about a kid, whether upon breaking into storage they ran right to dinosaurs or taxidermy or tesla coils or, in this case, model spacecraft.

"Are you interested in Space?" he asked.

Iouri smiled fondly at the old model. It had served its purpose well, and he now regarded it with a certain loving nostalgia. Still, the replacement piece was more up to date and had none of the old one's fading paint and peeling lettering. It was a justified upgrade. "I was going to be an astronaut once," he said, tapping the thick plastic frames of his glasses. "Eat your carrots."

Iouri scrutinized the NASA homepage for a moment and nodded. He was impressed with the kid's ambition, and could sympathize with being bored in museum camp - a lot of the elementary school programs catered to the lowest common denominator, which was great for most kids but the top five percent sometimes wound up bored out of their minds. Which was a pity, because kids shouldn't be punished for being smart.

"Which camp are you in?" asked Iouri, trying to look for a solution. "I could move you up to the middle school section if you wanted. I'm doing model rockets with them next week." That would probably appeal to a budding space explorer - especially one at the top of his class in science. This wasn't accounting for the differences in maturity between the kid in front of him and the kids who usually made up the Rocket Scientist session, but most of the attendees of museum camp at the middle school level were pretty tame by definition. Iouri wasn't worried.

"You may call me Iouri," he added, putting syllables to the jumble of letters on his name badge. Any amateur space explorer worth his salt would probably recognize the name as having the same pronunciation as Yuri. With a namesake like that, how could a scientifically-minded young boy not dream of traveling to the stars? "And you are?"

"It's spelled the same in Russian," Iouri assured the boy. It wasn't his fault that his parents had picked a weird latinization. He was proud of his name and he'd most certainly come by it honestly and some accident of birth - not because he just thought it sounded cool.

Iouri made a bit of a face. Moving a child from the fifth grade group to the sixth and seventh grade group wouldn't cause any trouble, but pulling someone up from third and fourth to sixth and seventh would get the camp director mad at him. But the kid was obviously interested enough to warrant putting the effort in. Iouri had this pet theory that if you let kids be bored in the sciences, they wouldn't want to continue studying science: it was imperative to get Peter moved up to a group where he'd be intellectually challenged.

"I'll have a permission form to you by the end of the day," he promised. Reorganizing the sessions was not something to be done without parental involvement - especially when explosives were involved. The sixth graders would just have to deal with it: Iouri liked this kid's chutzpah.

"How long have you been interested in space?" he asked keenly, eyes drifting back to the retired model shuttle.

"Probably not," sighed Iouri, although he didn't sound properly sad about it. While space was still his fondest and most distant dream, he was beginning to reconcile himself to the impossibility of it. While thirty-two was not too old to join the training program, the rejections he'd received in grad school (with his poor eyesight highlighted and circled) had been what finally pushed him towards museum science. Better to help the next generation than to just give up.

If they'd never moved from Russia, maybe things would have been different... but Iouri Spekter knew better than to dwell on the what ifs. "But when I was little... it was the nineteen-eighties in the Soviet Union. Space was one of the only things we had we could be proud of." Iouri had just never grown out of it. Even when they'd moved - especially then. He'd watched every shuttle launch on TV, started building model rockets in the back yard.

He beamed at Peter. "It makes me glad to hear the younger generation taking an interest, though." It had been a long time since he'd met a child who genuinely wanted to be an astronaut. Perhaps America had fallen out of love with space somewhere along the line. Most of his students in the rocketry camp wanted to be engineers or doctors or scientists: when you brought up the subject of space travel, they got evasive. None of them wanted to risk their necks for the distant dream of a dead president.

Iouri had another idea. "We have a moon rock in storage around here somewhere..." he said mischievously. "I've been trying to figure out a good way to display it, but until then it's in with meteorites I can't fit in the exhibit. Come on!" And he was off, making long strides towards another part of storage. Clearly, he'd forgotten that he was supposed to take his young protegee back to his camp group.

"Well, not quite touch it," backpedalled Iouri. It was true, the various fragments were sealed in plastic and could only be taken out under special circumstances - but you could get a better sense of them than just looking at them in a case when you held the little box in your hands. "Hold it, though."

Iouri paused to check a label on an aisle, then continued on ahead. Even he didn't perfectly know his way around in this maze: plenty of other museum technicians were always moving things in and out, and the filing system dated to the neolithic practically.

"I do event planning," explained Iouri, hoping he wasn't making he job sound too boring or unintellectual. "Fundraisers, guest lecturers, film series, classes? I also organize traveling exhibits and do some work with our acquisitions department. You'd be astonished how far a fluent grasp of Russian can get you towards winning a bidding war for a piece. And all of the renovations lately, I've had a hand in planning and organizing those. Basically, anything that keeps this place running and interesting, I do."

He chuckled at the mention of the squirrels. "That hall is actually next on the list for renovation," he assured Peter. "Now that we're done with the planetarium I can focus on the second floor."

While the first floor had basically been the subject of renovations since before Iouri had even taken his post, the second floor remained solidly stuck in the 1970s. The Apatosaurus was still called a brontosaurus, and the tyrannosaurus rex was articulated all wrong. There were currently talks to get a group of fossil experts in to fix the dinosaur hall, but in the mean time Iouri was turning his attention to the taxidermy modern animals.

"Here we are!" he beamed as they stopped in front of a locked cabinet labeled 'rocks - assorted, rare - small.' Iouri pulled a key ring from his belt and flicked through it, selecting a small silver key and opening the door. He trained his finger along rows of small, clear cases, squinting at the labels.

"Ah-ha!" Triumphant, he slid a case out of the framework. Inside was a small, gray piece of rock about an inch and a half in diameter. He held it low enough for Peter to investigate. "I would love to work this into the space history display. It came back with the same Apollo capsule we've got downstairs."

Really, all he was waiting for was a proper backboard and secure case.

"No," said Iouri, who was a man of science and, although tempted, was not going to take the rock out of the box and thereby destroy its remaining scientific integrity. "This has been in the collection since before I was born." Meaning, sometime in the seventies, although Iouri was not going to disclose his age to Peter. The boy could guess all he liked, though. (There was no shame in being thirty-two.)

He slid the rock carefully back into its place on the shelf and ran his finger along the row once more. "This one!" he said jovially, sliding out the case. This stone was far darker, nearly pitch black, roughly a square inch in size but irregular in shape. "We can touch this one."

He opened the case gently and held the stone out for Peter to take. The boy would find it was surprisingly heavy.

"This is a carbon chondrite," gushed Iouri. "They're some of the oldest rocks in the solar system. This one fell..."

He squinted at the label on the case. "Raleigh, Nineteen-Eighty-Seven. Well then." In nineteen-eighty-seven, Iouri was still a bratty kid in a Leningrad primary school.

"I was thinking of putting it on a touch cart when the budget finds room for a new one," said Iouri wistfully, taking the meteorite back and placing it into the box once more. Touch carts were hardly the most expensive thing he needed to buy for the museum, but they needed to be outfitted and stored, and you needed a staffer or volunteer to run them. Not nearly as expensive as a new high-end display, but it all added up after a while.

Iouri didn't seem at all phased by the mention of Peter's much older brother - it didn't seem all that unusual to him, even though he was an only child. "I was born... a while before eighty-six," he admitted, sliding the meteorite back into place. It was true he was beginning to feel old, if only because all of the high schoolers who volunteered and took his advanced classes had been born after the fall of Communism... something Iouri still remembered vividly.

"Not a whole lot else in this cabinet..." he muttered, scanning over the labels. A few more chondrites, some different uncommon minerals. Some of them had interesting visual properties but most just looked like rocks. Everything of particular interest had, for the most part, been put on display in the first floor hall of earth.

Satisfied with the scientific integrity of today's lesson, he shut the cabinet door gently and clicked the lock shut. He turned back to the boy in front of him. "I really ought to return you to your camp group," he said thoughtfully, in a voice that suggested the idea of turning back into a responsible adult was about as appealing as turning into a pumpkin.