Free Gift From The Stars by James Gunn

close enough to read what it said. The entire place filled her with melancholy, like a Space Age Stonehenge raised to forgotten gods, and the plaque, she had the feeling, was inscribed with the names of ancient heroes.
    Frances pulled to a stop, with their backs to the ocean, facing the vast Space Center complex with its roads and runways and buildings. “I don’t know where to look,” she said. “We could spend a week here and still not exhaust the possibilities.”
    “What about that place?” Jessie said, motioning toward a huge square structure that towered in the middle of the Center, dominating the entire complex. “It’s big enough to hide a small city.”
    “That must be where they assembled the big rockets,” Frances said. “Well, why not?”
    She headed back toward the massive building. It loomed even bigger as they approached, until the top reaches seemed to disappear into the blue sky. Most of it was white with darker panels. As they got closer, they could see some low outbuildings. On one side a gigantic American flag, perhaps two hundred feet tall, had been painted. Then came a dark panel inset with a lighter rectangle and, on the other side, a huge NASA symbol, once dark blue, now faded. Temporary structures surrounding the building had deteriorated and some had fallen apart, but the main building still seemed solid and as resistant to time as a latter-day Great Pyramid.
    Another chain-link fence surrounded the building, and turnstiles guarded the entrance. One of them had broken, however, and lay on its side beside the fence, its metal pipes reaching helplessly toward the sky, the entrance it had once sealed gaping beside it.
    “The Vehicle Assembly Building,” Frances said, as if that were the answer to a crossword puzzle. “The VAB. That’s what they used to call it. Shall we go in?” She got out of the car without waiting for an answer.
    The doorway to the VAB had been covered by plywood, but the wood, like the turnstile, had fallen away, leaving a dark, forbidding rectangle. Frances stepped through gingerly, Jessie following closely behind.
    Inside the building, rain was falling. Frances waited just inside the doorway until her vision returned. Light filtered from louvers high above, shining through the mist of descending rain and the clouds that had formed in the remote upper reaches of the vast spaces enclosed there. When the shower eased, Frances could see the inside of the building, though the far walls and the distant ceiling faded into gray nothing.
    She felt again as if she were in a cathedral built for an outworn worship. She shook herself and began noticing details: a wide avenue traversed the middle and on each side platforms, catwalks, what seemed like elevators, and cranes, a lot of them, and two huge cranes high above that crossed a gulf.
    “Adrian!” she called out in desperation, knowing that they could never exhaust the hiding places in this incredible structure. The name echoed back to her from near and far, rolling around the cavernous interior and returning to her moment by moment.
    “Please don’t do that again,” Jessie whispered. “It sounds so mournful. Like a lament for the dead.”

    Frances moved down the wide thoroughfare that ran through the middle of the building. Tools and leaves and other debris were scattered across what once must have been scrubbed as clean as her kitchen floor. In the distance loomed a tall structure. As Frances got closer, she realized that it was a rocket on a platform, solid boosters attached to an external tank. She craned her neck to look up at the top. All it needed, she realized, was a space shuttle and transportation to a launching pad and it could be launched.
    “What is it?” Jessie asked.
    “Either a rocket that was abandoned when the rest of the place was shut down,” Frances said, “or something that a bunch of amateurs are trying to cobble together from left-over parts. Either way, anybody would be out of their mind