For years, Dale would have used the moment for a joke.
Now he simply leaned on the top rail.
"Government done with you?"
"Never."
"You done with them?"
"Also never."
Dale nodded toward Raymond's truck.
"Carrier bearing?"
"Looks like."
"Got one in stock if you don't."
Isaac looked across.
"What brand?"
Dale named it.
"Garbage."
"There he is," Dale said, smiling.
He walked back to his shop.
Isaac returned to work.
His phone vibrated on the concrete beside him.
Eleanor.
He answered without sliding out.
"You're calling during business hours."
"You don't have business hours."
"True."
"Logistics is retrieving the last program equipment tomorrow."
"Good. Noah keeps trying to put sockets on the secure table."
"Is Noah still not your apprentice?"
"Correct."
"Does he know?"
"No."
A pause.
Then Eleanor said, "First planning meeting for the lunar surface access architecture is Monday at nine."
"I know."
"You'll be there?"
"That's the arrangement."
"Just checking."
"You don't check. You remind."
"Fine. I'm reminding."
He could hear traffic on her end, perhaps Houston, perhaps Washington.
Then came the pause he had learned to recognize: Eleanor deciding whether to say something personal.
"You know what's strange?" she said.
"Usually."
"When I was trying to decide whether to fly to Harlow, I pulled up your address on satellite imagery."
Isaac stopped turning the wrench.
"You surveilled me from space."
"Public imagery. Don't flatter yourself."
"Government overreach."
"Isaac."
"Go ahead."
"I looked at the image three times before I drove out there."
He slid partly from beneath Raymond's truck and looked across the garage.
The battered cabinets. The radio. The old regulator housing on the shelf. His father's carburetor beside it. Noah's notebook abandoned on a stool.
"Why?"
"Because I couldn't reconcile the man who wrote that report with what I was seeing. A little garage outside Harlow. A faded roof. Cars in pieces in the yard. I kept thinking I had the wrong address."