Excerpt from When the Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Anyone want to tell me what's going on?"

"We don't know," Willa said. "I led a school trip through here at two. The rock was still there then. I came through a little after five thirty and this was there." She pointed at the white object wedged in the display. "I stared at it stupidly for a couple of minutes and then I called Bud. He called you. Here we are."

"Huh." Virgil stood up and stepped back from the moon rock display. The outer display was a rectangular prism of metal, ceramic and Lucite. The Lucite portion held inside of it a second triangular Lucite prism, inside which the rock was held. There was a modest shelf that went all the way around the display, in part to keep visitors from greasing up the Lucite with their finger- and nose prints.

Virgil examined the entire display, walking slowly around it. Bud and Willa stepped out of his way as he did so. "It doesn't look tampered with," he said, finally.

"Not in any way I could see," Bud said. "It's locked up tight."

"So sometime between two and five thirty, one of our guests entered in here, dismantled the display, stole the rock, replaced it with what looks like Play-Doh, reassembled the display, and then walked out without us knowing," Virgil said.

Bud, to his credit, looked absolutely miserable. "It can't have happened that way. But…"

"Why would they bring Play-Doh?" Willa asked. "I mean, I get stealing the rock. It's going to be worth millions."

"About three hundred thousand a gram," Virgil said. He knew this because of a Washington Post article a few years back.

"Right. So, all right, a smash-and-grab. But to replacing it with that?" Willa waved at the not-a-rock. "What's the point?"

"And rebuilding the display once they took it apart," Bud said. "That's just weird."

"Stealing a moon rock is weird," Virgil replied. He looked up at the east wall of the Moon Room, at the security camera there. He nodded toward it. "We looked at that yet?"

Bud motioned to the display. "We wanted you to see this first," Bud said.

"I've seen it," Virgil said. "Let's see what the cameras saw."

The cameras saw nothing. The three of them rolled the video back to just after the 2:00 p.m. school group Willa led through the museum, and then fast forwarded from there. Between then and 4:45, random individuals came through singly, in couples and in small groups. None them stayed in the room for any unusual length of time. None of them did anything to the moon rock except look at it.

The last guest, a middle-aged man on his own, walked through the room at 4:52, looked at the displays commemorating the various Apollo landings and considered the equipment that was used to get samples and do other scientific work. He walked around the moon rock display, reading the moon rock facts written there. When he was done, he checked his phone and walked off toward the Infinity Room, briefly interposing himself between the security camera and the display.

"Stop there," Virgil said, to Bud. Bud stopped the video. "Back it up. Watch the rock."

Bud backed up the video by a minute. The middle-aged man was leaning in to look at the rock. Then he turned and dug his phone out of the pocket of his hoodie. He stood there for a second looking at something on his screen, back to the display, blocking the view of the rock. When he moved toward the Infinity Room, the rock was noticeably brighter in the security feed.

"That's our man," Bud said.

"Maybe," Virgil allowed, unconvinced. The man wasn't doing anything but standing there, staring into his phone. Unless he had secretly hidden cunning spy technology into the back of his hoodie that could melt and reform Lucite in seconds, and replace a moon rock with a similarly-sized chunk of possibly modeling clay, all this dude was doing was blocking the camera.

Still, better safe than sorry. "Any way we can know anything about him?" Virgil asked.

Excerpted from When the Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi. Copyright © 2025 by John Scalzi. Excerpted by permission of Tor Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.