Girl on the Moon

by Burnett, Jack McDonald

  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.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Liftoff

  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.”

  After more than an hour’s wait, the launch was officially scrubbed and rescheduled for six hours later, at 9:00 p.m. central. They had to top off the rocket fuel and reset systems, and evidently needed only six hours to do it. Conn hoped they didn’t cut corners. The astronauts made their way out of the spacecraft and back down the ladder. Then they reported back to quarantine.

  Everything was reset, including the astronauts with another quick, last-minute physical exam. Dyna-Tech and the Brownsville Police doubled the number of people keeping spectators and reporters out of the vicinity of the tower, in the water and out.

  Then another problem arose. “We’ve received a threat,” a liaison told Conn and Jake. “We’re scrubbing tonight’s launch.”

  “Probably another reason they’ve doubled security,” Jake speculated.

  “So they’ve doubled security, but they’re still going to scrub the launch because of a threat?” Conn said. “How much more protection do we need?”

  They set a new time for six o’clock the following morning, Monday. American employers rejoiced that the new launch would still not intrude on the workday. Conn and Jake struggled out of their flight suits and made their way dejectedly to their bunks.

  They were back at the clean pre-launch area by 3:30 a.m, and now the weather was a concern. The tropical storm had died down, but had decided to advance toward the Texas/Mexico border. A run-of-the-mill, ordinary storm, nothing tropical anymore, but a potential obstacle nonetheless. It was believed that at 6:00 a.m., the storm would still be well offshore, but it was relentlessly bearing down on Brownsville as the astronauts made their way back to the capsule at 4:40 a.m. By 5:15, they were strapped in tight again. As 6:00 a.m. approached, it became clear that they would have to liftoff in weather, or else scrub again.

  An ordinary moon mission could have waited, Conn mused, snorting at the thought of an ordinary moon mission. But the aliens would be at Hadley Rille, at the site of the Apollo 15 landing, on September 2 whether Conn was there or not. Postponing the launch until the weather cleared risked Conn’s getting to the rendezvous point, best case, in the early hours of that same morning. Which was cutting it too close. There was no time in the invitation, just a date. Who knew if the aliens meant midnight, central time? Or Beijing time, thirteen hours earlier?

  Conn imagined she could feel the weather approaching. The sun wasn’t due up until seven, but Conn could see trees swaying in gusts, the stars blotting out, an indistinct grayness enveloping the tower. She couldn’t hear what arguments were going on at tower control, but she was sure there were people on both sides: Don’t launch, it’s too dangerous versus Get Conn to the moon. Tower control didn’t betray any indecision, though, as it vocalized its countdown milestones.

  Conn felt irritated, having to do everything over again, and she worried the launch would be scrubbed this time, too. She tried to breathe normally. She tried to remember where she was going, what was on the other side of all this.

  At T-minus-four minutes, tower control called for its go/no go’s. Every call out was go—though Conn imagined she could hear petulance and reluctance in some of the voices.

  “Spacecraft,” tower control said.

  “Go,” Conn and Jake said together.

  At T-minus-twenty seconds, as the engines ignited, rain began to slap the windows of the SSIV capsule. Conn closed her eyes. She had no intention of allowing herself to see anything that would make her abort the launch this time. She listened intently as the tower counted down ten.

  Then she was pressed into her seat, and the Strummer I-IV blasted them skyward. As the pressure on her chest mounted, she grinned. She tried to whoop, but it only squeaked out.

  They rose through the storm. Conn saw lightning, and heard a master alarm sound. “Charles Wallace, Brownsville, we think you’re OK,” a new voice said: operations control, which took over as soon as they had cleared the tower. “Likely a temporary surge, I say again, a temporary surge. Advise you shut off alarm and see if it resumes when you turn it on again.”

  Conn swallowed hard and killed the master alarm, counted to five, and switched it back on. It remained silent, and none of the other instruments or screens looked out of trim. She exhaled.

  “Charles Wallace is on its way, Brownsville,” Jake said. “Everything is working. We’re clearing the weather.” Pressed down by four G’s, Conn saw blackness become brightness: they were over the storm, and high enough to catch sunlight from the east.

  “The sun is shining on the Charles Wallace, Brownsville,” Conn said, knowing her every word would likely be eventually broadcast to a billion people: and indeed, the most popular headline in the feeds for the next twelve hours was a variation of “Sun Shines on Moon Mission Launch.”

  “You ought to do most of the talking,” Jake said. “You’re a lot better for the feeds. They don’t give a shit about me.”

  “Charles Wallace, Brownsville. Your mic is hot, Jake.”

  He shut it off and said, “Shit.” He blushed and smiled at Conn. “I’m new at this.” Conn laughed as best she could with a bag of rocks on her chest.

  They broke the
sound barrier, and the rumble of the engines couldn’t reach them anymore. The relative silence was eerie.

  The first stage of their rocket, fuel tanks spent, ejected from the bottom of the Strummer I-IV, pushing Conn and Jake forward hard against their straps. There was another shudder as the emergency separation rockets fell away. “First stage separation, Brownsville. Emergency rockets gone, too,” Conn said.

  “Roger that, Charles Wallace.”

  The minutes crept, and though she wasn’t being pressed down as hard now, Conn forgot what it felt like to breathe normally. She looked at the mission clock: T-plus-eight minutes, twenty seconds. “Brownsville, Charles Wallace ready for third stage.” At eight forty-five, mission elapsed time, right on schedule, the astronauts were once again smashed back into their seats. Less than three minutes later, the SSIV was in orbit.

  Conn was “weightless”—continually falling, at sixteen thousand miles per hour in a circle around the earth.

  The station appeared in the window. Conn thought it still looked like a toy. The SSIV sidled up to it, Jake and the computer accomplishing a perfect docking. The astronauts unstrapped and flexed muscles that had clenched on the ride up. Conn’s heart was thudding. She led the way out to the space station airlock.

  She saw the command module with the lunar lander attached for the first time. It was a neat package. The command module, conical with three engines in back, a squat face and windows looking in multiple directions, was designed to carry two things, engines and people, and had exactly enough room for both, including a semiprivate bathroom. A Mohawk-type protrusion also had a window looking straight ahead in the direction of travel.

  The lunar lander was attached to the command module’s nose, basically a box with four super-durable tires affixed, two on each wide side. On the moon’s surface, Conn would attach them to axles that converted the lander to a basic rover. The lander had thin, high windows on the wide ends and a larger one in front: unlike the command module, created to live and die in space, the lander did have a true front, back, up, and down to accommodate movement under gravity.

  She and Jake made their way into the command module. Conn closed the hatch.

  They ran through their preflight checklist, checking each other’s work, until both were satisfied that everything was shipshape. Thirty minutes later, they were ready to go to the moon.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon

  August 28–31, 2034

  Jake nudged them away from the space station with maneuvering jets. Once clear, he fired the engines as Conn braced against the far wall, clutching handholds as tight as if she were dangling out a window. As Jake increased their speed, the spacecraft rose until he could position it in an orbit about half a mile above the space station.

  They tumbled through two orbits of the Earth at seventeen thousand miles per hour. At a precisely scheduled point in space and time, the computer fired the engines again. The craft circled the Earth for another few minutes, and then Aunt Beast’s instruments told Conn and Jake that their distance from the planet was increasing. They had used their momentum from the orbits to sling themselves toward the moon.

  It didn’t appear to Conn like they were going anywhere fast. The planet did appear to be receding, but so slowly that she couldn’t tell it was happening while she watched. Jake used the starboard attitude jets to reorient them so their front was foremost with Earth at the rear, behind the command module’s engines.

  It made it worse to not even be able to see the Earth. Conn knew they must be traveling through space at a hugely impressive rate of speed. But there were no mile markers outside. The stars didn’t budge as they traveled: when Conn looked out the windows, she saw a static field of pinpricks of white through each. It was like they were standing still.

  In reality, they were on a free return trajectory whereby if Jake and the computer did absolutely nothing for the next few days, the spacecraft would swing once around the moon and the moon would sling them back toward Earth, to a point not that far from the space station. But if nothing catastrophic happened, Jake would brake once they reached the moon and insert the spacecraft into lunar orbit.

  It was slightly inaccurate to say Jake didn’t have to do anything, Conn mused. It was a feat of mathematics and computing to get them as close to a free return trajectory as they were; Jake would have to make slight course corrections using both the main engines and the command module’s maneuvering jets to keep them on the rails.

  “Brownsville, Aunt Beast. I want to put us in barbecue mode,” Jake said. In this mode, the spacecraft would spin slowly on its forward-back axis to keep any one part of the craft from being in or out of the unfiltered sunlight the whole trip.

  “Aunt Beast, Brownsville. Go for barbecue.” Jake fired the attitude jets on the port side briefly. The craft shuddered, but as far as the computer was concerned, they were not spinning. Jake looked out the nearest window to visually confirm. “Brownsville, Aunt Beast. That looks like it was a negative on the maneuver.”

  “Computer says you fired the jets for eight tenths of a second, Jake. Did you feel it?”

  Jake gave Conn an inquiring look. Conn nodded. Jake said, “Brownsville, we felt a wobble up here. It didn’t feel like it caught.”

  “Roger that, Aunt Beast, stand by.” A minute passed, the astronauts floating in silence, until Brownsville said, “Ah, Jake, down here they want you to try again. They don’t think it can hurt.”

  “They don’t think?” Conn said.

  Jake said, off-mic, “I don’t think so, either, so if they’ll go along with it, I’ll try again.” Back on the air, he said, “Roger that, Brownsville, stand by.”

  He fired the port jets again. This time, the astronauts didn’t feel a thing, not even a wobble, and they were still not spinning.

  “Brownsville, let me try the starboard jets.” He instructed the computer to fire for eight tenths of a second. The astronauts heard the jets groan; the spacecraft jerked and then began to spin.

  “Brownsville, port attitude jets are no go, I say again, port attitude jets are no go.” Conn’s gut clenched.

  “Roger that, Aunt Beast. Stand by.” There was a lot of standing by involved in flying to the moon, Conn was learning.

  They would have to make do with one set of attitude jets, as well as the unreliability of a computer that thought the port-side jets were working just fine—this meant that any attitude adjustment would have to be worked out by hand by Jake, double checked by Conn, and triple-checked by someone down in Brownsville. Conn sighed inwardly: at least it would be something to do.

  But not right now. Conn was reminded of the words of Eugene Cernan, the last person to have walked on the moon: “Funny thing happened on the way to the moon: not much.”

  Conn had smuggled in her fone. She was delighted to find that Jake had brought his as well. They did crossword puzzles and played games during their frequent downtime; with no way to recharge the devices, they would be out of luck on the return trip, most likely, but it was a good way to pass this time. And they still had duties to perform at regular intervals, which Conn didn’t doubt had been spaced out in time to help fight the monotony.

  In one way, Conn pitied the Apollo astronauts: each Apollo mission had a military vibe, or at least military personnel, and to relax on a spaceflight would be tantamount to admitting weakness. Frank Borman told Bill Anders on Apollo 8, the first time humans had orbited the moon, that if he caught Anders looking out the window, he’d fire him. That was no way to fly.

  Conn pulled herself up to the Mohawk and looked out the forward window. The moon was getting bigger. It was one way she could tell visually that they were actually moving, and not just spinning.

  Two and a third days after leaving Gasoline Alley, at 4:32 p.m. central time on Thursday, August 31, Jake and the computer spun the spacecraft around so they now traveled engines-first. Then he fired the engines to brake, and inserted the spacecraft into lunar orbi
t. Conn was mesmerized by the closeness of the moon, by how much detail she could make out when the sun lit it up.

  And then the Earth rose.

  A blue sphere. A football-shaped section of it lit by sunlight. Marbled with wispy white, greens and browns. Conn fought back tears. It was so bright, so alive, so welcoming.

  She lived there. Everybody lived there.

  They passed out of radio range on the far side of the moon. Communication with Brownsville or indeed with any human being was impossible for the next forty-eight minutes. It was a complicated orbit that swung them north-northeast, not far from the pole, to reappear in the south-southwest, mirroring Apollo 15’s route to its landing site. They would orbit twice, separate the lander, and Conn would land at Hadley Rille on the third time around.

  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.