Girl on the Moon (13 page)

“This is going to be a piece of cake,” Jake said once over lunch.

“I thought you said it was already a piece of cake,” Conn teased.

“Yeah, but now I mean it,” Jake said.

By the end of her final three months’ training, Conn knew what every screen indicated, what every switch did, what every dial should be dialed to, under what circumstances. She had literally practiced everything anyone could think of that could possibly happen to the lander in flight and on the ground. Her training was all the more comprehensive because the powerful computer aboard the
Mrs. Whatsit
would do most of the work: there was simply less that
could
happen, or at least that Conn would be able to influence.

Peo took her leave of absence from Illinois Tech and arranged to have her radiation therapy and other treatment done in Houston, so she could be near her astronauts as they trained, as well as within driving distance of Brownsville. When she learned that her stomach would have to be surgically removed, she arranged for it to happen in mid-June so she could return to full strength by mission liftoff in August.

The weekend before the surgery, Peo and Conn spent an evening together. Over a delicious seafood dinner—perhaps the last such Peo would be able to indulge in—they talked about the near future.

“What you need to understand is that your mission is to help advance Dyna-Tech’s interests,” Peo told Conn. “You have a flag patch on your space suit, but you’re not there to represent America. Scott Daniels is. You’re there as an employee of Dyna-Tech.”

“I understand.”

“So you need to do two things. First, stay focused. Every one of the experiments you do and every sample you take has the potential to make Dyna-Tech money. Don’t blow them off. As difficult as it may be, don’t let your excitement over meeting an alien intelligence—or being on the moon—keep you from doing the rest of your job.”

“I won’t.”

“The second thing I want you to do is to establish a relationship with this alien intelligence, if in your judgment you can do that safely. I fly to Brownsville and California all the time to entertain prospective investors, mutual funds, individuals, whoever is interested in our company. Right? I glad-hand them, shmooze them, make them feel important. Let them know I know what I’m doing and that I do it well. Your challenge is to do that as best you can with these aliens. You are not a passive observer. You’re a celebrity. You can take charge of the meeting and no one will have anything to say about it,” she continued. “The world expects it. That includes the astronauts up there with you. They may resent it, but if you take the lead, they’re not going to correct you, or try to overshadow you.”

“Eyechart might.”

“Eyechart can suck it. I trained him and the ESA is giving him a ride up there because people owe him favors, not because he’s the best our species has to offer. You are.”

Conn felt herself blush.

“I mean it,” Peo said.

“I’m just nervous. I don’t know what to expect.”

“Nobody does. You’ll do fine. They wouldn’t invite us for a meeting if there wasn’t some way to communicate with them. Or if they were going to be in any way hostile.”

“I’m grateful for the pep talk, but what makes you say that? They could be letting us know they’re declaring war on us and are going to wipe everybody out, starting with the people standing in front of them.”

“Oh, pshaw,” Peo said. “To what end? So we can be ready for them? If they were hostile, they wouldn’t want to talk first.”

“Not even to give us the opportunity to surrender?”

“You’re going to make yourself sick with worry if you keep thinking this way. You’ll do great. You’ll be fine.”

But Conn wasn’t convinced. The last thing she wanted was for the aliens to give her the opportunity to speak for her people and talk them out of annihilating the human race, and for her to blow it. It gave her nightmares
.

Over and over she dreamed she was on the moon, underwater because that was “on the moon” in her training experience. Two terrifying beings appeared before her, gray-green, enormous heads, sharp teeth in wide, drooling mouths—the monsters from the twentieth-century
Alien
series. They asked her if she was there to save her world from destruction. She couldn’t speak. She could only strain and groan and grunt as they killed her for her silence.

August, 2034

It was less than two weeks to liftoff for Gasoline Alley and the moon. The Chinese had announced their launch for early morning central time on Sunday the twenty-seventh, so the NASA/ESA/Roscosmos joint mission decided to leave on Saturday, August 26. The Chinese mission would launch their command module into orbit, where it would rendezvous with and attach to their lander; then the whole thing would proceed to the moon, just like the Apollo missions had done. Dyna-Tech was sending Conn and Jake to Gasoline Alley, where they would find
Aunt Beast
and
Mrs. Whatsit
attached to one another and ready to fly to the moon. The joint mission was splitting the difference: its command module would ride the rocket into orbit, detach and dock at Gasoline Alley, pick up their lander there, and proceed.

Peo was pleased that the other missions were struggling with one another to get there first. She scheduled Conn to lift off on the twenty-seventh—fashionably late, the better to make an entrance. But she also wanted the flexibility to keep Conn on the moon for a number of days after September 2.

Hunter Valence and Jake Dander both expressed concern for the plan. Arriving last was fine, but they preferred that Conn not be the last to leave—in case of a problem with liftoff, she might need help, or in a real emergency, a ride. Peo conceded that the final decision would be made based on a comprehensive systems check of the lander after touchdown. If everything was A-OK, Conn would stay after everyone else left: if there was any concern, they would plan an earlier liftoff. Valence was satisfied, Jake was not—too many things could happen to a spacecraft that looked perfectly functional on the ground.

On August 23, the British, of all people, spilled the beans about the alien rendezvous: they expressed unease that the West’s first contact with alien intelligence would be either a glorified Russian bureaucrat or a recent American college graduate. They called for Didier Gonalons instead of Eyechart to land with Scott Daniels—as though all the jobs on the spacecraft were interchangeable, and the astronauts could swap at the last minute. Shortly after the British went public, NASA jumped right in and released a copy of the invitation animation on the feeds.

What appeared to be confirmation of the existence of alien intelligence rocked the world. Video of the moon shower was resurrected and played constantly. No major political leader wanted to admit he or she had been in the dark about the invitation, so every one of them expressed as much confidence in the moon missions and the personnel as if they had had a hand in selecting them. President Clinton all but took credit for picking Conn for Dyna-Tech’s privately funded corporate mission. It made Peo, who hadn’t voted for her, angry; but Dyna-Tech was in media blackout until liftoff, and so Peo held her peace.

There was panic on the fringes, but the fact people who knew what they were doing had been planning the moon missions for two years was a salve. In the main, the public was cautiously optimistic. But people wanted to know more about Conn than ever, as well as the specifics of the missions. What would be the first words said on the surface, the first words to the aliens? What science would be done? How would the three missions cooperate? Dyna-Tech had nothing to say, and the joint mission could only talk about what it was going to do, not Dyna-Tech or the Chinese, so the public—and the feeds and channels—speculated wildly.

Mostly, there was a collectively held breath. It was a scant week and a half before the alien rendezvous. After that meeting, everyone would have a better idea of what to worry about.

Conn spent a lot of time after her training officially ended still practicing in the submerged lunar lander simulator. On Friday, the twenty-fifth, she went home to Chicago to be with her dad for a day. They watched the joint mission liftoff Saturday morning. Then, Conn took a private chartered plane to Brownsville. She should already have been in quarantine, but Peo made the call: Conn should have time with her family the last thing before liftoff. A tropical storm brewed in the Caribbean, and all involved with the launch kept a wary eye on it.

At 4:00 a.m. central Sunday morning, 6:00 p.m. in Sanya, Hainan province, China, the Chinese rocket lifted off, with its three-man contingent. Conn’s countdown was T-minus eleven hours.

She slept after the Chinese launch, and woke feeling completely unrested. She reported to a clean staging area at noon, armed with a month’s worth of medicine for her bipolar disorder. Jake met her there. As they were both scrubbed clean and put in orange flight suits, the monitor in the common room was covering the joint mission. Conn watched the astronauts float inside their command module with a surreal sense of detachment.

At 1:00 p.m., Jake and Conn were weighed, and the results sent to the operations center, which would advise if any tools or equipment would have to come off the spacecraft before launch. They were herded into an elevator that lifted them toward the top of the rocket; they had to climb a scaffold ladder the last twenty feet to get in the capsule.

The weather threatened not to cooperate. The storm had moved into the Gulf of Mexico and stalled, acting like it couldn’t decide whether to head straight for Brownsville or not.

Bringing up the rear, Conn stopped, and looked to her right and down. She could see the Gulf, blue and coolly inviting. She smelled the salt in the air. The air was charged, the humidity oppressive. Conn felt like she was breathing through a washcloth. She looked back up. She had a sense of how much propulsive power would be beneath her soon. She felt dizzy.

She entered the capsule. She made her way to the copilot’s seat up front. NASA astronauts had someone help them strap in as tightly as possible: Peo believed if you had a belt you wanted people to be able to wear tightly, you should design it so they could tighten it and loosen it themselves, so Conn used a hand crank to tighten the straps around herself, nearly to the point of cutting off her circulation. It was a little after two.

The capsule was part of a SSIV like the one Conn had taken into space the first time. A flyer was mounted on its back, the one Conn and Jake would fly back to Texas in. The SSIV would be taken care of by dunkers. When enough SSIVs were docked at the space station, astronauts were hired to take them back down through the atmosphere and splash down in the right ocean. They called it dunking, and they called themselves dunkers.

Conn and Jake waited. Now not only did they have nothing to do, they couldn’t watch the feeds, and they couldn’t even move. Conn put her visor down and closed her eyes, breathing heavily.

“Are you OK?” Jake asked.

“Yeah. You?”

“Sure,” Jake said. Then they sat again in silence.

With fifteen minutes left in the countdown, they began to receive instructions from tower control. Jake, as the pilot, flipped the appropriate switches and swiped the appropriate screens. The computer would do most of the flying. There was nothing for Conn to do.

With ten minutes to go, Conn fought off a wave of nausea.

With seven minutes to go, tower control reported: “
Charles Wallace
, Brownsville tower control. We are looking good, entering the final phase of the countdown. Weather’s cooperating.”

“Roger that, tower control.
Charles Wallace
just wants to get moving.”

“Good to go, Conn?”

“Good to go.”

With four minutes to go, commands and reports started to come one after another. None of them required Conn’s participation. When they asked for a go/no go from the spacecraft, Jake replied
go
almost instantly.

Countdown reached twenty seconds, and the enormous rocket engines beneath the astronauts erupted to life. Conn knew that at ten seconds, tower control would begin counting the seconds off, but she could barely hear. The engines roared menacingly underneath her, but her heart was hammering, her anxiety producing a roar of its own in her ears.

She picked the voice out of the noise as it reached
three...two...one...

At the same moment that tower control said “one,” Conn lashed out and slammed the abort button.

August 28, 2034

The engines shut off. Jake was frozen in place, mouth half-open. Conn’s heart thumped hard.

“We’ve had an abort, we’ve had an abort,” tower control said. “Sound off if you aborted.” There were many abort buttons, in addition to the two in front of the pilot and copilot on board the spacecraft.

“I did. Spacecraft,” Conn said. “There’s a boat out there.”

Security people working for Dyna-Tech and the Texas State Police were (supposed to be) keeping reporters’ and spectators’ boats well away. If anything catastrophic happened in the seconds after liftoff over the Gulf, anyone in the water in the immediate vicinity could be killed by debris, or by the rocket’s emergency engines firing to propel the SSIV on a short parabola into the water. A boat in the water within two miles of the tower was an A-plus, no-second-thoughts reason to abort the liftoff sequence. It was a failure that deserved scrutiny that Conn had been the first to see it with one second left in countdown.

“Shit!” Jake said, craning his neck to look out Conn’s side of the window. A small motor boat chugged toward open water, away from emergency lights on shore.

“You guys sit tight,” tower control said. “We’ll get you out of there and start looking for a new launch window.” It would be hours at a minimum, Conn knew, but she sat tight, as directed. Jake knew it, too, and loosened his straps.

“That was very brave,” Jake said. Conn was grateful to hear it, because she felt like she had ruined everything. “Really,” Jake went on. “A lot of people would have hesitated the one extra second it would take to lift off for the moon. I might have. You did the right thing. The harder thing to do.”