Girl on the Moon (15 page)

The astronauts had plenty of checklists to complete while they were on the far side, including pressurizing the lander and the tunnel in between. Conn couldn’t help thinking of Peo as she got closer to separation and landing with nothing going awry, like it had for Peo. She wondered if Jake was thinking about her, too.

Then, as they swung around to the near side again and communications were reestablished, Brownsville radioed bad news. “
Aunt Beast
, Brownsville. Guys, Peo had to go to the hospital a couple hours ago. We waited to tell you till you were done with insertion. She’s OK. Watching you on TV, I’m sure.”

Conn felt an emptiness in her stomach: this was the culmination of both Peo’s and her dream, and Peo was sick. Conn looked toward one of the wall-mounted cameras recording everything, waved, and mouthed, “I love you.”

They were less than two hours and a single orbit and a fraction away from landing. All the command module checklists for separation were complete and double-checked. “Brownsville, I’m going to make my way to the lander,” Conn said. She smiled at Jake. Jake furrowed his brow, then smiled back. A zero-G hug would have been too awkward to accomplish, so they shook hands.

Jake whispered to her, “Go make Peo proud.”

Conn launched herself through the passageway and into the lander. She had been in several spacecraft over the last three days. When she emerged from this one, she would be on the moon.

“Brownsville,
Mrs. Whatsit
. Bringing her online now. Hatch is secure and I’ll be venting the tunnel.” That was what they called the space between the hatches of the command module and the lander.

Conn considered what to do next. Upcoming was part of the mission plan that annoyed her. They wanted Conn to separate the lander from the command module while the two craft were still on the near side and in communication with Brownsville. They were babying her: there was plenty of time to separate on the far side and make the landing site next time around. She banished thoughts about what else she could do and followed the mission plan. There was no real question. She and Jake would orbit the far side in formation, doing nothing more than waiting for Conn’s window to descend. The people who had come up with the mission plan—which included her—believed that was the best way to do it, and they’d gotten her this far.

Jake was at ease and garrulous. He hadn’t seemed it in 2022, to an eleven-year-old in Wicker Park, but not all the chatter on a private spaceflight was broadcast to the world, so how would she really know?

They returned to the near side and the comm link. Everything was go. With
Godspeeds
from Brownsville and Jake, Conn began the separation sequence, with a quick look toward one of the cameras in the lander: “Here I go, Peo.”

The lander separated cleanly. Conn felt a surge of triumph. Though the lander and command module would remain in tandem for a while, until her descent, for all intents and purposes, she was alone, orbiting the moon.

August 31, 2034

Conn focused on her landing site east of Hadley Rille at the foot of the Apennine mountains, where the Chinese and joint missions awaited her. Her screen showed her the positions (within six meters) of their landers. She would form a triangle with them, keeping a good, equal distance but still within shouting distance of the Apollo 15 marker. Not that she could shout to any effect on the moon.

The moon,
Conn thought. Her heart thumped.

Once they reached the part of the far side that was lit by sunlight, she busied herself checking her trajectory by sighting the sun through a navigation scope. She triangulated her position relative to the features of the moon on a US Geological Survey atlas. The lander’s computer knew exactly where she was, but one of Conn’s responsibilities, especially at this crucial stage when so much was happening, was to double check what the computer told her. She would have given anything for GPS, but someone would need to orbit some satellites around the moon first—worth doing, as far as she was concerned, since it would also give them communication with Earth while on the far side. She should convince Peo to fund some lunar satellites; then she remembered with a stab of worry that Peo was hospitalized.

They said she was fine,
Conn thought.
And watching
.

As Conn prepared for descent, she had a moment of panic that she had forgotten to bring her pressure suit over to the lander. That was ridiculous, she realized. She and Jake had gone through every relevant checklist together. Everything she needed to land and walk on the moon was in
Mrs. Whatsit
.

The lander couldn’t fire its engines to brake until the command module was out of the way. “
Aunt Beast
,
Mrs. Whatsit
. If you’re ready to climb, I’m ready to fire.”

“Roger that,
Mrs. Whatsit
. Brownsville, I’m go to climb.” From their altitude of sixty-three nautical miles, Jake reoriented the command module and fired its main engines, accelerating and climbing above the lander toward a circular orbit.

When Jake was clear, Conn fired the lander’s engines, and slowed her orbit. Slowing down made her descend. She established her own oblong orbit, the closest point to the moon’s surface of which would be four nautical miles. As she neared that distance, she fired her engines again, to brake and descend. Now she was in a descent that she wouldn’t stop until she reached the surface of the moon.

She reoriented the lander so its bottom pointed at the surface. That allowed her to switch on her descent radar. More quickly than she imagined—or than she had simulated, it seemed—she was at forty thousand feet. She was as close to the moon as airplanes often were to the Earth.

The computer did most of the work, but much of Conn’s time was spent reconciling where the computer said she was with her own calculations and observations, as a sanity check. She spoke her results to Brownsville, as well as noting milestones in the descent. Brownsville responded, sometimes with questions, sometimes with information. Twenty thousand feet.

Conn had a much larger viewing area than the Apollo landers had had, and she watched the surface of the moon rise to meet her.
Mare Imbrium,
the Sea of Rains,
didn’t look as dark this close up as it did from Earth. The mountains loomed near the landing site, some of them topping fifteen thousand feet. She checked her position: thirteen thousand feet. She swallowed hard, her throat dry. Her status reports to Brownsville began to sound ragged.

She cleared the crater Archimedes, eighty-three kilometers in diameter. The mountains beckoned, unexpectedly large. She opened up the descent engines a little more, then quickly eased off. She wouldn’t crash into the mountains, but she might fall short of her landing target. Falling too short might mean landing on the wrong side of Hadley Rille, the kilometer-wide gorge west of the Apollo 15 landing site.

“
Mrs. Whatsit
, Brownsville. We show you descending a little faster than optimal.”

“I know that,” Conn growled. She had a fleeting thought that she should act more professionally for all the feed viewers watching—the historic landing itself was being broadcast by Dyna-Tech in real time—but she realized that the way things had gone so far, she could do no wrong. The public would lap up her growling at Brownsville.

She was over the
Palus Putredinis
, the Marsh of Decay, lava-flooded, relatively flat. The Apollo 15 people had picked an attractive landing site, from an aeronautic point of view.

The master alarm went off. Conn said, keeping her voice even, “Program Alarm 660.” She didn’t know what a 660 was.

“Copy that,
Mrs. Whatsit
, stand by.” Conn stood by, while still narrating each step in the landing. Finally, when she had a moment, she said, “Brownsville, kindly advise on Program Alarm 660.” If she needed to abort, she had to do it soon. She felt sick at the prospect.

As though they had had the answer all along, Brownsville immediately replied, “You are go to disregard that alarm. Repeat, you are go for landing.”

If they had told her what it meant, she might not have felt like they were taking chances with her life. But she didn’t have time to worry about it now.

Down to under a thousand feet. She didn’t want to brake too much; she needed to compensate for her earlier unplanned slowdown. She eased up a little. The computer approved, or at least didn’t complain.

When she was one hundred feet above the surface, the descent engines started kicking up a billion years of dust from the surface. She briefly sighted one of the other landers before the cloud enveloped everything. She was doing OK. She definitely wanted to clear Hadley Rille. If she could do that, where she was headed was flat and free of anybody else’s landers.

By necessity, the computer took over. Conn kept a grip on the joystick/trigger that let her manually brake, her other hand hovering near the toggles that would open up manual control. The dust briefly cleared: she had made it over the rille and was passing over the valley at the foot of the mountains. She felt the lander tilt backward and realized for the first time, she was under the influence of lunar gravity. She was standing, feet on the floor. The tilt slowed her descent to the point where she was essentially hovering. She wished she could see below her.

“Contact light,” she said, as the cords with sensors on the bottom had dropped and now were in contact with the lunar surface. The worst that would happen was she would fall five meters to the surface. She should be OK if that happened. But still, she was sweating.

She did drop that five meters, but slowly, with nothing worse than a jolt as the lander landed. She checked her fuel—plenty to go before she would have had to abort. She was in great shape.

“Brownsville, Hippeia Base,” she said. She hoped it pleased Peo that she had decided to name her landing spot for Peo’s lander. “
Mrs. Whatsit
is stationary and...pretty close to level on the surface. Powering down.” She heard a whoop over her radio from Jake. When Brownsville opened their channel, she heard applause and cheering.

“We copy that on the ground,
Mrs. Whatsit
. Great job, Conn.”

“Thank you,” she said. She let out a whoop herself.

August 31, 2034

During Conn’s descent, many feeds periodically cut to split-screen video of Glenn Bowman and some of his followers as they watched her landing, complete with wonderfully dramatic reactions that included imploring with hands toward heaven, and hiding their faces when they glimpsed monsters in the shadows of the lunar landscape. It was great theater.

Bowman predicted Conn wouldn’t make it back alive. That got him plenty of coverage, too. After Conn landed, he backed off his prediction, and wished her a safe visit and safe travel home. He was likely calculating what saying otherwise might cost him in followers and revenue. The world was definitely on Conn Garrow’s side at the moment.

Conn suited up. Getting the pressure suit on and checking all the seals by herself took far longer than with a partner, but she was ready in just under half an hour. She put on her helmet, realized she hadn’t put on the Snoopy cap with the radio lead, did that, then put the helmet back on. “Brownsville,
Mrs. Whatsit
. I’m getting ready to go outside.” She’d been instructed to make that announcement and only then depressurize the lander—probably to allow feed viewers to finish up in the washroom, or microwave some popcorn, she thought cynically. She was anxious to get outside.

The last traces of air trickled out of the lander. She had brought the void inside with her. She felt wary, tentative, as though one false move would depressurize her. On the bright side, opening the hatch now would not cause her to explode out the hatch and die. That was important. She grinned to herself and banished her over-caution. She bounced in her pressure suit, marveling at the weakness of the lunar gravity—it was like the pool in Houston, but without the surrounding water resistance, or whistles going off.

She and the lander were ready. She opened the hatch. She positioned a motion-sensitive camera on its rim and placed another in an equipment pouch on her suit to install once she was down.

The Apollo landers had been high enough off the ground that the astronauts had to use a ladder to descend to the surface. Conn’s lander was only about half a meter off the ground. She turned around, lowered herself to her knees, and began to back out of the lander.

She put one foot on the moon.

Conn had intentionally given absolutely no thought to what to say. Neil Armstrong had winged it, she reasoned, and she didn’t want to jinx herself. It didn’t cross her mind now to come up with something profound like “one small step for man.” She stepped down with her other foot. She backed away a step, and turned around.

“I’m on the moon,” she said, almost—but not quite—to herself.

“Copy that, Hippeia Base.” Conn could hear their amusement. “You certainly are.”

Crap,
Conn thought.
I’m on the moon?
But she didn’t dwell on her nonchoice of words. She shuffled forward, then tried a tentative step or two, and then had to restrain herself from running off like a kid let loose in a park. She was twenty-three years old, and the first woman on the moon. It all seemed as unreal as the alien ground and landscape.

Looking around, Conn had the impression of being at the bottom of a lake. Above, mountains broke the surface, and promontories drove wedges through the water, but on the bottom, the landscape felt still and untouched. She had to fight off a reluctance to disturb the caked dust and scattered rocks, to step where no human had ever stepped. If she gave in to that reluctance, she literally wouldn’t get anywhere.

“Hippeia Base, Brownsville. Conn, stand by for the president.” Conn froze.

“Conn, congratulations,” came President Clinton’s voice. “Our whole family has been watching you today, as has the rest of the world. You represent the best of the human race, and we wish you luck and Godspeed on your mission.”