The two of them paused to glance into the souvenir store, full of books and posters and T-shirts and hanging Enterprises—both shuttle and starship. Dairine was browsing through a Return ofthe Jedipicture book. "Whatcha gonna get, hotshot?" Kit said, teasing."Dunno." She put the book down. "What I really need," she said, looking down at a set of Apollo decals, "is a lightsaber.""And what would you do with it once you had it?" "Use it on Darth Vader," Dairine said. "Don't you two have somewhere to be?"Nita considered the image of Dairine facing down Darth Vader, lightsaber in hand, and felt sorry for Vader. "C'mon," she said to Kit. They ambled down the hall a little way, to the Ahnighito meteorite on its low pedestal— thirty-four tons of nickel-iron slag, pitted with great holes like an irregularly melted lump of Swiss cheese. Nita laid her hands and cheek against it; on a hot day in New York, this was the best thing in the city to touch, for its pleasant coolness never altered, no matter how long you were in contact with it. Kit reached out and touched it too. "This came a long way," he said.350 SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL WIZARD"The asteroid belt," Nita said. "Two hundred fifty million miles or so . . .""No," Kit said. "Farther than that." His voice was quiet, and Nita realized that Kit was deep in the kind of wizardly "understanding" with the meteorite that she had with trees and animals and other things that lived. "Long, long dark times," Kit said, "nothing but space, and the cold. And then slowly, light growing. Faster and faster—diving in toward the light, till it burns, and gas and water and metal boil off one after another. And before everything's gone, out into the dark again, for a long, long time. …"
