Girl on the Moon

by Burnett, Jack McDonald

  “I’m the lucky one,” Conn said, and gave Peo’s hand a squeeze. “Times about fifty. You let me do what I always wanted to do, before I even graduated from college. Do you know how rare that is?”

  Peo dabbed the corner of her mouth with her napkin, then quickly each of her eyes. “I have something to tell you, and I want you to promise you won’t get upset.”

  Peo looked anxious. Worse, she looked lost. Conn withdrew her hand and took a nervous sip of water.

  Now Peo reached across the table and held Conn’s hands in her own. She shook them a few times, as though it would help her get the words out. Finally, she said, “My cancer has come back.”

  Conn was sure she looked like she felt, startled and worried, but Peo had just said she didn’t want Conn to get upset, so she recovered herself. “So, you beat it again. You’re already one-and-oh.” At another table, mock cheers for some ordinary accomplishment.

  Peo smiled and withdrew her hands. “I’ll fight it,” she said, “but I can’t tell you how exhausted I get just thinking about it. Ten years ago, I killed myself training to go to the moon, and I was in outstanding shape. And fighting this damn thing almost did me in then. I’m ten years older, and it seems like my only exercise lately has been walking to dinner with you.”

  “You jog three miles four times a week,” Conn reminded her. “You always walk when it’s walking distance, never a cab, and I’m not sure when the last time was you were in an elevator.” She heard the desperation creeping into her voice. She had to hold it together.

  “Still. I don’t know if I can do it again.”

  Conn could smell fresh coffee, as it was poured at a nearby table. “If I know you, though,” she said, carefully, “ten years ago, you gave fighting everything you had, twenty-four-seven, without let-up. You’ll use more cunning and guile against it this time.” Peo smiled, on the brink of a laugh. “Cancer used to be a death sentence. There’s a lot they can do now, even for sixty-year-olds who aren’t in astronaut shape.”

  “As I said, I’ll fight it. I’ve lived years longer than I expected to, and I’ll scratch and claw for more—”

  “That’s the spirit,” Conn said.

  “But, well. I thought you should know.”

  The rest of Conn’s fettuccine looked like it would be dry and chewy. “I’m glad you told me,” she said, but she wasn’t.

  # # #

  The return of Peo’s cancer was not news for general consumption, and Peo even withheld it from her C-level executives. Conn respected her choice, in turn not telling her friend Jody, with whom she was glad to keep in touch after college, or Pritam, whom she saw every day. Peo’s radiation therapy meant Conn was also in the office without her more frequently.

  Chemotherapy used to leave a person exhausted and sick. They’d beaten that with the advent of Regrupin, but it still wore Peo down enough that she worked shorter days.

  “See?” Conn said, one cold winter day. “They didn’t have Regrupin ten years ago. That’s going to help you keep your strength up. This time, fighting isn’t going to almost kill you.” Peo smiled, but Conn had the sense she wasn’t that convinced.

  One day in February, shortly after the Bebop’s maiden test flight, Peo shut her office door and swept her hand over where one of the Chinese bugs had been. Peo didn’t want to be overheard, then—it signaled to Conn that something important and secret was coming. Her stomach clenched at the thought that it had to do with Peo’s cancer.

  “Two things,” Peo said, all business. “Number one. My negotiations with the agencies evidently weren’t done.” She rolled her eyes. “The Russian, Eyechart, needs some boot camp to get spaceworthy again after seven years on his living room couch. Roscosmos wants me to pay NASA to train him. All the very basics, starting from square one. Fitness, pressure suit, neutral buoyancy pool, survival training...”

  “What the hell?” Conn said. “What happens if you don’t?”

  “It doesn’t matter. That would be several moves down the line,” Peo said vaguely. “What prompted me to agree to pay for the training is the second thing I have to talk to you about. For now, suffice it to say I’ve agreed to pay NASA to train Eyechart for six months, starting from the beginning, and that will start in mid-May.

  “Number two is unfortunate, but we’ll make an opportunity out of it. Ashlyn Flaherty neglected to mention when I recruited her that she had trigeminal neuralgia.”

  “What’s trigeminal neuralgia?” Conn had written it down phonetically.

  “An incredibly painful disorder that comes and goes, randomly, without warning. There’s nothing they can do about it but prescribe painkillers.”

  “That’s awful. She can’t—I mean—”

  “No, she can’t. If it was something we could manage with drugs, that would be one thing. But if she has an ‘eruption,’ as she calls them, on the way to or from or on the moon? She’ll be in agony beyond the point where she could still do useful work, or else stoned out of her mind. She’d be a danger to her crewmates, herself, and everyone else on the moon, including our new friends, whoever they are.”

  “She must feel awful.”

  “It’s a conversation I never want to have again.”

  “So, OK. Who takes her place?” Conn said. “Obviously a woman—did you pick somebody already, or are you searching?”

  “I’ve picked someone. She hasn’t accepted yet. She’s going to need the same training as Eyechart—everything, from the beginning. That’s why I don’t mind paying for him.”

  “We keep it quiet till she says yes, obviously. OK, I think I’ve got—”

  “Constance.” Conn was brought up short by the use of her full name. Peo had used it the day they met, but not since.

  “Yes?”

  “You’re one of the brightest people I know, so I must be giving out the wrong hints. Conn, I want you to take Ashlyn Flaherty’s place. I want to train you as an astronaut, and I want to send you to the moon.”

  PART TWO

  If they could offer up a way to go to the moon that wouldn’t kill you, I’d sign up. First in line.

  — Tom Hanks, “Tom Hanks wants to spread optimism with his new movie ‘Larry Crowne,’” Orlando Sentinel (June 24, 2011)

  TEN

  Training

  May, 2033

  “Why the moon?” Conn asked. It was a chilly May afternoon. “I mean, you’re a species that can travel from star to star, you did that thirteen-second survey of the moon however many years ago, you’ve probably studied the Earth even more thoroughly and in ways we can’t even comprehend. Why set up your first meeting with the human race on the moon? Why not New York? Why not Medicine Hat, Alberta? I bet getting to Medicine Hat is slightly easier than getting to the moon. They have to know enough about us to know we don’t go to the moon anymore. Or we didn’t. I wonder if it’s like 2001: A Space Odyssey and they want to make sure we can get there before we’re allowed to take our next step in joining the community of starfaring civilizations.” Conn was babbling a lot lately. She knew it annoyed Erik Tyzhnych, who had enough English to be dangerous but not enough to follow Conn when she went off on one of her vocal adventures.

  The bulky, creaky Russian had t-shirts older than Conn, and he said so. He stood no more than five-foot-eight, but he carried the three or four inches he had on Conn like it was a foot. His face was chubby under a dust-colored receding hairline. He looked like he was used to being top-heavy—wide shoulders and chest. They still were beefy, but he’d gotten thick around the torso, dampening the effect. With the height and girth differences, there was a great deal more of him than there was of Conn. And all of him deeply resented sharing his retraining with a recent college graduate—he didn’t even bother to hide it. The first week of “boot camp,” Conn used that as motivation.

  Astronauts trained for years for a single mission. Eyechart and Conn would train for months. It would be all Conn would get to prepare her for the moon, while Eyechart had first gone into space before C
onn was born. He had probably spent as much time in space—no, on spacewalks—in his lifetime as Conn had spent behind the wheel of a car. As much as they said Eyechart needed total training from start to finish, he had obvious advantages over Conn. Conn would just have to work harder than he did.

  Neither astronaut would learn to fly their spacecraft during their first round of NASA training: Eyechart was commanding a European vehicle, Conn a proprietary Dyna-Tech craft, and NASA didn’t yet have a simulator for either one. Instead, they were undergoing two weeks of strength and endurance training at the NASA Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, followed by three weeks to begin learning their pressure suits inside and out, and then using them in simulated low and no gravity at the Neutral Buoyancy Lab in Houston. Finally, they would go to Elgin Air Force Base in Florida for a week-long crash course in water survival.

  Conn’s days in the first week of training started at 6:00 a.m. with supervised stretching. She bounced with energy during her stretches, and was chastised by her NASA fitness trainer. “Bouncing doesn’t stretch you, it yanks you,” Joe Trevose said. “It takes your muscle and pulls hard on it. Sometimes it tears. You don’t want that.”

  After stretching came jogging for Conn, and some kind of physical therapy for Eyechart that he didn’t discuss with her. Conn’s instructions were to jog around the south and west property lines of Cleveland Hopkins International Airport before breakfast. Three and a half miles out, three and a half miles back to NASA Glenn in the early morning Ohio spring air, ambient temperatures in the high thirties or low forties. Once outside, Conn took the course at a run, and barely let up until she was back where she started. Planes were just starting their days, and a sleepy few would take off while she ran. Not many landed in Cleveland at 7:00 a.m. Conn waved to the taxiing planes when she was near enough. She was pretty sure some people waved back—her training at NASA Glenn was an open secret, and some travelers might have guessed the identity of this early jogger around the airport.

  She was grateful not to have to jog with Eyechart, but they did have breakfast together at eight thirty. There, Conn was able to avoid the cosmonaut by being a celebrity: that first week, plenty of NASA Glenn employees wanted pictures with her, wanted to wish her well, just wanted to see her. Less frequently, people would make the effort to shake Eyechart’s hand as well. He was going to the moon, after all, and he had spent more time in space than all but a very few NASA astronauts. That got him some attention, and certainly admiration. He acknowledged both with grunts and long faces.

  After breakfast, the astronauts had free time until ten, followed by an hour’s classroom time learning about the developments in aerospace engineering and astronautics over the last ten years. Conn was bouncy through this, too, having just earned a bachelor’s degree in the subject. She could tell Eyechart wasn’t thrilled about the class, but he did concentrate and take notes. When something surprised him, he made a strangled, almost choking noise, and then smiled at the instructor. Conn couldn’t think of anything in her life that had ever been more annoying.

  From eleven to twelve thirty, interval training: Conn and Eyechart each on a treadmill or stationary bike, pacing themselves until the signal at regular intervals which meant they should go all out for ten seconds (the first couple days) or fifteen seconds (the rest of the week), then wind back down to their previous pace.

  Lunch was at one, and Conn had just as many visitors the first few days as at breakfast. Monday night she did a search for her face on her Wear. She found at least twenty pictures taken that very day by employees and others at NASA Glenn, posted proudly for the world to see.

  Grant got hold of her on Wednesday, wanting to know how Conn found astronaut training. She gushed to him about it. “You told me all about your training, but that was something that happened to someone else. You know? This is happening to me. Really happening!”

  “I couldn’t be happier for you, Conn,” Grant said, and Conn knew he meant it. Conn talked Grant’s ear off for twenty minutes, barely letting him get a word in. When she hung up, she smiled. Her relationship with Grant had been a source of regret for her, since their breakup. She felt like she had made everything right between them on the phone.

  Thursday, in lieu of lunch, Conn agreed to speak at a middle school assembly arranged in her honor. She was a motormouth there too: they had to politely stop her after a while.

  At two thirty, the astronauts hit the pool—not the Neutral Buoyancy Lab “pool” where they would train underwater for their time in space, but a regular Olympic swimming pool where they did stretches and exercises with resistance. Then from four to five, it was yoga stretching. Conn felt like a million bucks at the end of each day, already anxious to start the next one.

  Friday of the first week—they would train Monday through Saturday—Peo called. Conn was excited to hear from her.

  “I saw footage of your talk at the middle school,” Peo said.

  “I hope it was OK to do that,” Conn said. “They kind of sprung it on me, but to be honest, I wasn’t eating that much at lunch anyway because there are always so many people who want to see me. I was glad to have something else to do.”

  “No, it wasn’t OK. You didn’t do anything wrong, but that kind of thing won’t be happening again while you’re training.”

  “I suppose that’s good. Yeah, it’s probably best that we have more control over who I talk to and when and about what, rather than oh, there’s a middle school down the road or whatever.”

  Peo was quiet momentarily. Then she said, “Conn, are you OK, really?”

  “Never better,” Conn said. “I love it here. Well, I love training. I can’t believe it’s really happening, and I have you to thank for it. Thank you so much—”

  “Constance.”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you have your medication with you, or did you leave it behind?”

  Conn swallowed. “No! No, I have it, of course. Of course I do. Why?”

  “I understand that you want to do well and make a good impression. But I shouldn’t have to tell you that going off your medication is not an option.”

  “I just thought I could—”

  “Period. Not. An. Option. You are to take your medication again starting immediately, or whenever your next dose is supposed to be.”

  “Tonight before bed,” Conn said glumly.

  “It’s easy to make yourself believe you can control your illness because you’re older and wiser, but it’s not true. You make yourself unwell when you stop taking your medication. You make yourself unfit.”

  Conn mumbled an apology.

  “If I discover that you’ve stopped taking any medication you’ve been prescribed, for any reason, I will replace you just like I did Ashlyn Flaherty. I am not playing around, Conn. Take me seriously.”

  Conn did take her seriously. It really was a bad idea to stop taking her meds. This was proven Saturday, when Conn wasn’t feeling well, and Sunday and then Monday, when she barely made it out of bed. She was nauseous, weak and worn out. On Monday, a NASA doctor was called in to examine her.

  “Are you currently taking any medications?” was one of his questions. Conn said she was: Symbax, Levalil, Wellbutrin. She told him she didn’t take them for almost two weeks, but that she started back up Friday night. The doctor looked like his pet kitten had just told him to lose twenty pounds. When he recovered, he said Conn’s illness was likely caused by stopping then restarting her meds, which Conn could have told him, and then he took off looking like he had a purpose. Conn heard later that he’d tried to get her disqualified for space, somehow, but since she was working for Peo, not for NASA, there was nothing he could do.

  She knew she had dodged a bullet.

  ELEVEN

  It's Real

  May–June, 2033

  Her missing training on Monday didn’t do anything to make Eyechart take her more seriously. Conn kept her head down and worked harder the rest of their time in Cleveland. The physical stuff, anyw
ay. She was allowed to skip the 10:00 a.m. “class” time the second week since they wouldn’t cover anything she hadn’t just learned as an aerospace engineering major. She watched movies instead—Apollo 13, The Right Stuff, The Eagle, true stories.

  Despite the oppressive Houston heat, Conn didn’t miss Cleveland after they left. She associated it with getting sore and sick. Three weeks at the Johnson Space Center’s Neutral Buoyancy Lab was sure to take her mind off it.

  The facility that gave the lab its name was a giant pool about the size of Conn’s entire high school gymnasium and twelve feet deep. Replicas of parts of the International Space Station, Gasoline Alley, and Lagrange Point fluttered under the water. The water was a solution that mimicked zero gravity—you didn’t float to the top. Thus, the name of the lab.

  Conn wasn’t thrilled about zero-G training—it seemed daunting—but by weighing down their pressure suits, the pool could also simulate the one-sixth gravity on the surface of the moon. That, she looked forward to. Conn already had nightmares in which she tripped over her own feet and fell with her first step on the moon, and a billion people saw it. Because they would, if she did.

  The crews of the joint mission and the Dyna-Tech spacecraft used the same pressure suits, manufactured in Delaware. After a good fifty or sixty years with virtually no change, the suit had been substantially redesigned in the twenty-teens and twenties, right before Peo’s trip to the moon. Eyechart had never put one on, either, having used a Russian model for his twenty years of active space duty. It pleased Conn that they were starting at the same level with something.

  She learned first thing that it took two people to put one pressure suit on. In a couple weeks, they would learn how to get into one alone. For now, Conn and Eyechart had to cooperate.

  In a changing room, Conn put on a diaper and some cotton long underwear. You didn’t need a diaper in training, you hoped, but putting it on was a good habit to get into. She would be grateful to have one after about ten hours on the surface of the moon. She donned a “Snoopy cap,” a leather bowl-shaped covering with what looked like floppy ears, a last remnant of the old space suits. Once it was on your head, your radio microphone was right there by the side of your mouth with a cord that plugged into the pressure suit. She put on a pair of cotton gloves and left the changing room to find Eyechart in the same underclothes as her, protesting, “I don’t use this,” and holding his Snoopy cap like it was a dead animal. The patient NASA instructor told him that yes, he did, because that’s how the radio worked in these suits.