Girl on the Moon (3 page)

“By then, I’ll be indispensable. You can start paying me then.”

Peo laughed. Conn started that day.

April, 2030–October, 2031

When she was manic, before she was diagnosed, Conn developed a habit of creating Memorly files on people and things she was interested in. Like so many other things, she obsessed over them. She crammed her m-file on the moon with facts, scholarly articles, popular culture items, dossiers on all the Apollo astronauts. Her file on Peo Haskell was no smaller. That file, or at least the version of it in Conn’s head, continued to accumulate new material as the two women worked together. Conn thought she knew everything there was to know about Peo, but there was a lot she didn’t, and a lot she hadn’t understood well when she was twelve.

What she knew: born in Rockford, Illinois. BS, PhD, Aeronautics and Astronautics, Purdue University. Started a payroll services business in her twenties that she sold for $1.2 billion after seven years. Figured out how to make money in maglev rail, and built out infrastructure in greater Chicago, three California cities and Austin, Texas. Responsible for the lowest greenhouse gas emissions in those areas in fifty years;
Time.com’s
Person of the Year. Leased the whole thing back to state or local governments and sold her interest for a lot more than $1.2 billion. Bought a foundering aerospace company, renamed it Dyna-Tech. Built rockets and satellites and space stations. Wondered why she wasn’t using Dyna-Tech and her money to send herself to the moon. Sent herself to the moon, aged forty-nine. Tried to beat the fiftieth anniversary of the last steps on the moon—which, perhaps providentially, was also Peo’s fiftieth birthday. Lifted off with about a month to spare.

Had an accident in lunar orbit. Had to turn around and come back without landing.

Diagnosed with peritoneal cancer.

What she learned: while fighting cancer, Peo had ceded some of the day-to-day operations of her company to her executives. After she beat the cancer, her reduced role gave her more time to teach engineering at Stanford. Then she came to Illinois Tech to be closer to home. Teaching was easier on her than running the company.

She had shifted Dyna-Tech’s focus from getting her to the moon to building and operating a space station in orbit around Earth. Then, to everyone’s surprise, she announced a Hail-Mary project that would send a crewed mission to the moons of Saturn. A great expedition into deep space that Peo hoped would rekindle the world’s imagination and interest in space exploration—which was good for Dyna-Tech’s bottom line. Peo’s failure to land on the moon combined with the terrible deaths of Cole Heist and his crew on Mars had made the country lose its appetite for astronaut adventures.

Not Conn. Conn would have given anything to be going to Saturn. She would have settled for the space station.

The station, Dyna-Tech Station One, was complete. Dyna-Tech made money by building and repairing spacecraft there for whichever governments and companies had the cash. Its construction and repair work earned the station the nickname Gasoline Alley. If someone went into space, she likely got a ride from Dyna-Tech, and if not, she probably wound up at its space station anyway.

What it all added up to: in 2029, Dyna-Tech was space travel. And Peo Haskell could take whatever visiting professorships she wanted, but she was still Dyna-Tech.

Peo was right: after a while, it was easy to tell which messages she ought to see and which Conn could file, or give her own perfunctory response to in Peo’s name. Conn erred on the side of showing everything to Peo, as directed, but she did so longer—a few weeks—than she really needed to. And she read and watched what Peo didn’t see. She had to understand it well enough to accurately summarize what she’d withheld each day. One other thing Peo was right about: all the reading and filing and responding and flagging for Peo’s attention taught Conn tons about running an aerospace company. And about the people who ran Dyna-Tech.

Peo’s current CEO, Hunter Valence, had a tech background short on management. He had succeeded Peo seven years before. He previously had a long stint in the company’s Management Information Systems department, including a brief tenure as Chief Information Officer. Not a conventional choice for top executive, but Hunter had his virtues. He took direction naturally, considered anything Peo said to be gospel, and generally was good at moving pieces around the board. He left the game strategy to others.

Dyna-Tech’s Chief Operations Officer, the second since Peo’s departure, was of a different stripe. Skylar Reece had the kind of energy and élan Peo had shown the world ten years before, when she was a self-made celebrity aspiring to the moon. It sometimes got Skylar in trouble, when she went too far afield from the company’s mission or explicit instructions from Peo. Her fingerprints were all over company strategy, and she was frequently at odds with Hunter Valence.

Most of the rank-and-file of the company was devoted to the space station, its cash cow. The company had an honest-to-goodness sales force: account managers, regional directors, even a new-ish Chief Marketing Officer. Peo, and therefore Conn, didn’t hear much from or about the salespeople. In contrast, Hunter, Skylar, and the others who directly reported to Peo seemed to be single-mindedly pursuing the Saturn mission. The feeds speculated it wasn’t really going to happen. Conn learned early on that if Peo expected something to happen, it happened.

The mission, of course, was Peo’s brainchild, but it was as yet undecided which moon the crew would land on, Titan or Tethys. Peo wanted it that way. By not settling on one moon or the other, Peo kept the focus on getting there, where it needed to be at this stage—four years from departure. Later they could worry about what to do once they were there.

Conn was fascinated by the subjects discussed in memos, v-mails, e-mails. Corporate infighting over whether naturally-occurring propane and acetylene could be counted on to power equipment on Titan was a thousand times more interesting than differential equations. Through incoming and outgoing e-mails and v-mails she observed the Saturn astronaut candidates being vetted and selected, and she gritted her teeth. But she was doing exactly what she had set out to do: she was helping get people into space.

She overshot twenty hours a week and usually thirty as well. Her grades were suffering, not from a lack of study time, but because Peo’s work was so much more interesting.

Second semester of junior year, Conn met Grant Loomis.

She knew who he was. He was one of the Saturn astronauts. Callie Leporis, Al Claussen, and Grant: Conn knew everything she could find out about them. She started with a “Saturn astronauts” m-file, but eventually split it into three. Grant was the youngest of the group, at twenty-five. He would be just short of twenty-eight when the trio left for Saturn.

He had earned a BS in applied mathematics with a minor in engineering from McGill University in Canada in two and a half years, as a twenty-year-old. He joined NASA out of school, but quit outright and made himself available when he heard that Peo was going to send people to Saturn. Admiring his moxie, Peo hired him and let him compete for a spot on the Saturn crew. He won one of the three spots, and in his case, it wasn’t a difficult decision.

He wasn’t married. Wasn’t attached at all.

He enrolled at Illinois Tech for a three-semester stint to complete his BS in aerospace engineering. He had intended to finish his degree once he returned to Earth, but what he learned would never do him more good than when he was in space. So with Peo’s aid and encouragement, Grant became for all intents and purposes a junior in college. Conn’s college.

Peo succeeded in getting Grant’s training for the Saturn mission accepted as his required Illinois Tech interprofessional credits, and she brought him on as a
de facto
second academic assistant. Conn remembered Peo telling her that she didn’t have enough work for two people to do, when Conn was trying to get a job with her. Conn didn’t say anything or dwell on it, but between his obviously being a favorite of Peo’s and the fact he was going to Saturn, Grant was somebody Conn could have had a big problem with. It surprised her when she couldn’t stay distant around him.

He was the kindest, happiest person Conn had ever met. He shaved his head, had dimples, and had a baby-fat paunch around his middle, all of which accented his jovial personality. Once he wasn’t a name on an e-mail distribution list or an m-file stored in Conn’s Wear, Conn grew fond of him. He made Conn laugh, and at first, Conn thought it was because he was funny.

By the time they started dating, they were already classmates, coworkers, and friends. Conn worried that Grant would get sick of her, seeing her so much. What she was really worried about was that she would get sick of Grant, seeing him so much.

She didn’t. Grant was enjoyable to be around, anyone would have said so. But more than that, he was a young star astronaut with a trip to another planet in his future. It was the life Conn had wanted for herself, but couldn’t have. Having Grant in her life made her feel like she was participating in his adventure in some small way.

And Grant could never get enough of Conn. They both worked out of Peo’s office, they studied together, they went to Blackhawks games together, they spent the night together. Always at Grant’s Dyna-Tech-paid South Loop apartment, Conn still living at home on the north side. Grant would light up when he saw Conn, like a switch had been thrown. Conn couldn’t really comprehend it. But as with other things in her life then, she counted her blessings.

Conn accepted a salaried position with Peo between junior and senior year. Thirty hours a week, half-decent pay but not bank-breaking. At the same time, she moved into a twenty-fourth floor apartment in a tower just west of the Loop. It took an hour and a half each day off her commutes.

Grant spent the summer between junior and senior year in Brownsville, Texas, Dyna-Tech’s spaceflight operations headquarters, where the rockets launched from. Peo had Al Claussen taking aerospace engineering classes as well, an hour away at Texas A&M, and mission commander Callie Leporis took advantage of having everybody together in town to accomplish some important mission planning objectives.

Grant had Conn come down for a few days over the summer. It was right after she moved, so she welcomed the break. Conn tried not to goggle at everything and everyone as Grant took her around on a comprehensive tour. Everybody was already familiar with Conn, at least everybody who had to deal with Peo. She tried not to stammer when meeting Callie and Al in person, and Grant said she did OK. Conn returned to Chicago more convinced than ever that she was doing exactly the right thing with her life.

Once on the payroll, Conn took on more responsibility. She still screened and wrote correspondence, but she gradually began sitting in on meetings remotely and taking notes and providing her own input on company issues and ideas. The people in Brownsville who hadn’t been familiar with her became familiar with her, and Conn could sense that she was well-liked there. The company officers, in Sunnyvale, northern California, had a different reaction to Conn becoming more involved in management matters. Peo was unwavering in her trust of Conn, and no one in Sunnyvale ever said anything—anything that got back to Conn. But she could tell by the way, for example, Skylar Reece stiffened when Conn inserted herself in a meeting that her reception in Sunnyvale wouldn’t be the same as Brownsville. That was OK with her.

She had made herself indispensable.

November, 2031–February, 2032

Conn Garrow, of all people, had missed what came to be known as the “moon shower.” The night sky on the north side of Chicago was close and gray that evening, otherwise Conn might have been looking at the moon when it happened. At fourteen years old, she had looked at the moon every chance she got.

Theories about what the moon shower was, and what it meant, abounded at the time. But with the certainty of a teenager, Conn knew it was a survey of the moon performed by extraterrestrial technology. What else could it have been?

Conn saw enough of the moon shower on YouTube to know what happened by heart. There were several herky-jerky recordings made by fones after the phenomenon had already started. But the most-watched amateur video of all time came to be when a young, earnest boy in Carrabassett Valley, Maine used his Wear to record the moon through his new department-store telescope. His timing was historic—it was 10:34 p.m. US eastern time, March 5, 2024. Through his eyes, the smudgy lunar crescent resolved into detail. Along the terminus, shadows and shades brought the pocks and crags of the moon into sharp relief. The young astronomer, Maddox Watson, narrated, pointing out particular seas and craters—until abruptly, a series of tiny white lights winked into existence on the dark part of the disk. Earning the thanks of a grateful world, Maddox went silent and remained still. The lights were stationary for 3.42 seconds. Maddox started to ask “wh—,” then he shut up again as the lights went into motion, careening around the disk at random angles, impossibly quick, trailing phantom light behind them. It looked like the crescent moon was spitting out tiny pricks of light, or like someone was arc welding the moon, producing a
shower
of sparks. Thirteen-point-five-three seconds after they first appeared, the lights halted, burst with extra intensity, and then were gone, as though they had never been. The video ended with Maddox wondering aloud, “what was that?” with the voice of the world, for millions of naked eyes also saw at least part of the display.

It wasn’t a mass hallucination, or a hoax, or something coming apart in Earth’s atmosphere, Conn knew. No human space agency had done it. No human space agency could have.

She knew somebody had been up there, on her moon. When days became weeks became months after the moon shower and there was no further activity, the world stopped thinking about the event. Not Conn. To her, it was evidence that the surveyors had found what they were looking for on the moon, and would be back—or were there even now. Her m-file on the moon shower strained at the seams. Conn wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that no one on Earth had accumulated as much material on the event as she had.