Girl on the Moon (22 page)

By 1:00 p.m., she had driven her lander with its outside lights ablaze due north to the base of the mountains three kilometers from the Chinese lander, well outside minimum safe distance.

Her lander didn’t have a reverse gear—too much additional weight for too little utility. She was doing a wide turnaround to point the vehicle in the direction of Luan’s liftoff. She was thinking about being the only human being on the moon. Distracted, she slammed the lander into a waist-high boulder, head on, at about five kilometers per hour.

She was thrown forward. Her radio, hanging from her neck, bore the brunt of the impact. She bruised her collarbone. She rebounded off the fore instrument panel and fell down in one-sixth-gravity semislow motion onto her rear end.

It was her fifty-third hour either outside or in rover mode, and there was comparatively little communication with Brownsville. She tried to call and tell them that she’d had an accident, but the radio was bricked.

She climbed out to survey the damage. The right front of the lander was caved in. Conn saw light through it. Inside light. There was a hole in the lander.

She waved her hands frantically in front of her helmet cam—then realized that wouldn’t be broadcasting, either.

She had to get to Luan. At best, she might need his help to fix her lander. At worst, she needed a ride home.

It was 1:02 p.m. central according to the clock on her left arm.

She took off toward the Chinese lander at as close to a run as lunar gravity and the rocky terrain would allow, doing the math on the move. She could average about eight kilometers per hour at her present pace; to cover three kilometers, that would take...twenty-two-and-a-half minutes.

She prayed Luan was running late.

As she ran, she kept trying her radio—trying anything to get word to Brownsville to have the Chinese hold Luan up.

1:12. Her left foot struck a rock and she tripped. She landed on her outstretched hands. She got up and kept going.

1:18. She had to pick her way through a particularly rocky field. The rocks were small enough for the lander to go over, but not small enough to step on without breaking stride, or hurting herself.

1:22. Her legs were on fire. The backs of her knees were stretched painfully tight from trying to avoid rocks and crevasses at speed.

1:23. Luan should be able to see her from the lander—if he was looking. She waved her arms as she kept running.

1:24. She was going to make it. They had called the Chinese when they hadn’t been able to communicate with her. All she had to—

The bottom of the lander erupted in silent flame. “No!” Conn shrieked. She was pelted with rocks and dust.

She was jumping up and down.
Stop the liftoff, stop the liftoff, stop
...

Please
.

The Chinese lander rose into the lunar sky.

Conn felt the exhaust from the engines, warm through her pressure suit.

That was how close she had been.

September 5, 2034

Getting back in contact with Brownsville, if at all possible, was at the top of Conn’s survival checklist. She thought she might be able to plug a cable from her radio into the antenna booster outside on the lander, and get a message out that way. If that worked, she might also be able to plug into one of the signal amplifiers in order to receive.

Her walk back to her lander gave her plenty of time to think about what she should say if she could get a message out.

She said: “Brownsville, Hippeia Base. I’ve had an accident with the lander. There’s a breach—there’s a hole in it. I tried to flag Luan down but was unsuccessful. Unsure of options. Have just now returned to the lander, and will be making a closer inspection shortly. Hopefully. My radio is toast, but I can plug directly in to the booster to send—if you’re hearing this, anyway—and will go from here to plug directly in to the receive amplifier. OK, give me a minute. Hippeia Base out.”

She plugged in to the amplifier—and heard, “Hippeia Base, Hippeia Base. Hippeia Base, this is Brownsville. Come in, Conn.”

Gil sounded close to frantic. They were looking for her. They hadn’t heard her. What was going on? Was the booster on a different frequency? How come the receive amplifier worked?

She sat down and put her head in her hands.

“Hippeia Base! Conn! We read you! Thank God. Message received. OK. Stand by.”
Where would I go?
she thought.

“OK, Conn. First priority is getting the hole in the lander plugged, however necessary. You probably knew that. If you can take a picture of it and send, or if you can somehow plug your helmet cam into the booster, we can try and give you a hand. Over.” Useless. There was no way she knew of to send a picture or plug directly in to her helmet camera.

She switched her cable to the booster. “I’ll see what I can do about getting you a picture. In the meantime, tell me whether Luan can come back and get me.” She presumed Eyechart and Daniels’s command module was already on its way back to Earth, and they already had three aboard anyway. She very much doubted the Chinese lander had enough fuel for another landing and takeoff. It might not even have saved fuel on account of not having Cai Fang aboard, if they had Luan load up on extra geological samples. But tasking Brownsville with getting her a ride let her focus on what was in front of her.

It wasn’t a pretty sight. The biggest part of the hole was the size of her fist, and then there was a section about as high and wide as an outstretched palm. The thin aluminum alloy around it was crumpled. She could plug the big hole—maybe—but the crumpled hull might have a dozen more cracks she couldn’t see. She had practiced this in simulation, but only on clean tears. This was much worse. Epoxy and a patch weren’t going to do the trick: their usefulness depended on a flat, undisturbed surface around a tear.

Unless she made the tear clean. She could cut away the damaged part of the hull and use a huge amount of patch material to cover the resulting larger hole. She dug out the patch material. There wasn’t as much as she hoped, and she hesitated. If it wasn’t enough, she’d end up with a great big gap, nothing to plug it with, and no air.

She concentrated again on the damaged lander. She needed to plug the hole temporarily, somehow. Buy time to work out a permanent fix.

She considered a sample pouch that she used for collecting rocks. It was the right size. OK, fast forward. Whatever she plugged the hole with, she would then have to use duct tape or epoxy to hold it in place. Neither duct tape nor epoxy would adhere to the sample pouch. She needed something like...duct tape itself.

She could wad up some duct tape and plug the hole with it, then tape it down on both sides. That might give enough seal to allow her to repressurize the lander and let her breathe its air before the air in her O2 tanks ran out.

But if there were cracks where the hull was crumpled...well, one thing at a time. At least she had plenty of duct tape.

She would have given almost anything for one of Persisting’s pressure fields, so she could manipulate the tape with her bare hands. She tore strip after strip, wadding it up until it fit into the wider part of the hole. She repeated the process to plug the thinner part. It was difficult with pressure suit gloves to massage the wads of tape, compact them so they would fit, then stretch them out so they covered as much of the hole as possible.

When she was satisfied she couldn’t do any better, she tore strips to tape over the plug, first inside, then out. She inspected her work. She was confident her fix would stand up to the repressurization of the lander—as long as there weren’t any smaller cracks around it.

Her hands ached. She plugged in and messaged Brownsville: “I think I have the hole plugged. I’m worried about micro-fissures around it. The hull is crumpled up pretty bad. Am thinking about cutting it out so it’s smooth, then using the patch and epoxy. Not sure I have enough, though. For now, I’m going to repressurize the lander and get me some new air, unless you have contrary instructions. Over.”

A minute later, Brownsville told her to go ahead and try repressurizing the lander. She consulted the checklist for the procedure. She was trained to do that every single time so there was no chance she would forget something, or do something in the wrong order. She went through the list item by item, until she got the pressure reading 960.0 millibars. She stayed suited for five minutes, watching the reading to see if it went down, but it held steady.

She was in better shape, but by no means out of the woods. She took off her pressure suit helmet and gloves. It was prudent to keep the rest on, in case she had to suit up again in a hurry. With her bare hands, she could take a crack at fixing her radio.

It took twenty minutes and some creativity in replacing damaged components, but she got it working. She could communicate wirelessly again, and Brownsville could see through her helmet camera next time she was suited up.

“Conn,” Gil Portillo said at one point, “we did ask the Chinese to hold up for you. They said they would wait a couple hours, until the next time their CM came back around. We asked them to send Luan back out to look for you, and they even sounded like they were willing to do that. Then they took off, no warning, twenty minutes later. I don’t know what happened.”

That put everything in an interesting light. It was almost as if Luan had taken off as soon as he could see her. He should have been half-expecting her, if he knew she was without a radio and potentially in trouble.

“Well, then we’ll have to get this thing running,” Conn said.

September 5, 2034

It was difficult to ballpark how much of the hull she would have to cut away to use the patch from inside. She suited up again and depressurized. Outside, now with Brownsville watching, she precisely measured the size of the hole she would have to make.

She had two twenty-five-by-twenty-five-centimeter pieces of patch. They would just cover the hole, once Conn was done expanding it. “You’ll need to trim an inch off one side of each patch,” Gil was relaying from the Brownsville engineers. “Side by side, you would have more than you needed in height, and be short about two inches lengthwise. The two patches minus an inch, plus the two strips, should just cover you.”

“What if it doesn’t just cover me? Say I accidentally make the hole too big.”

“Stand by...OK, they say don’t do that.” She rolled her eyes.

The cutters she had to use were glove-friendly, but tiny, meant for small repairs. It took twenty minutes to smooth the border of the hole. She carefully measured an inch of each sheet of patch, cut, and began pasting the remainder down with epoxy.

“I’m seeing a sliver at the top that’s not covered,” she said. “Four centimeters by maybe one, if that.”

“Stand by.” She kept epoxying. “If you have some patch left over, use that,” Gil told her. “Otherwise, duct tape.”

“Will that work?”

“Stand by. They say it’ll work, because if it doesn’t, we’re screwed.”

She was running out of epoxy.

“You’re using too much,” Gil relayed.

“No, I’m not,” she said. “I’m using it exactly as I was trained. The hole is too big. How come I don’t get the right amount of epoxy for the patch I have? Can somebody find that out for me, please?”

“Stand by. Duct tape,” Gil said, ignoring the last part. Conn had to duct tape one side of the first inch-wide strip and all of the second one. She taped the sliver that was showing, too. She went inside to tape the other side as well. For good measure, she taped the entire hole on the inside. Now she was running low on tape, but the more duct tape she needed, the less likely it was that duct tape was the solution.

It was decided in light of the accident to bring her home immediately. She had done everything anybody had paid for. The rest would have been pure science and sightseeing. She could have kicked herself for hitting that boulder and costing herself time on the moon.

But she would be back. Nothing and nobody said she couldn’t come back.

She started up the lander and crept it forward until her readings told her it was as close to level ground as she was going to get at the foot of the Apennine mountains. Outside, she jacked it up and removed the wheels and tires. They would stay on the moon—she had enough geological samples to make up for the weight.

“Brownsville, I have air left in my tanks. I want to stay outside while we wait for the command module. Let me know if you’re OK with that.”

“Stand by. OK, roger that, Conn, you would have had to lift off now to catch the command module this time around. Go on outside, then we’ll get you out of there on its next orbit.”

“Roger that.”

“Conn, I’m being told to tell you to disregard my last, and get you on board to prepare for liftoff and rendezvous.”

“About an hour and a half to the next window to grab the CM?”

“That’s right, about ninety minutes.”

“Then I’m staying outside.”

Bathed in nothing but soft earthshine, Mount Hadley was a charcoal-colored rent in the starry sky. The landscape to the west and south could have been a blasted, empty desert on Earth at night, except the sense of something alien, something primeval, intruded. The stillness was a presence, covering the land like water in a lake.

Conn wished she could have toured all six Apollo landing sites, seen everything the first moonwalkers saw. But she would settle for indelible memories of the alien desert she shared with the Apollo 15 astronauts.

And she was looking forward to being home. Sleeping on a pillow. A shower. Walking normally. If she had been offered two extra days on the moon, she would have gladly accepted, but if she needed to leave now, she left with a sense of closure, of accomplishment.

She clambered back up into the lander and repressurized it. She stowed her helmet and gloves within reach, but left the rest of her pressure suit on. “I think I can fly her as long as my hands are free,” she radioed Gil. She wanted to be mostly suited, in case the patch and duct tape didn’t hold.