Girl on the Moon

by Burnett, Jack McDonald

  “Congratulations. You must be very proud to be the first of your countrymen on the moon.”

  “Da, thank you,” he said.

  “How was the ride down?” Daniels asked. “Find the place OK?” He grinned again.

  “No problems. I’ve got dozens of people to thank for that, though.”

  “I know what you mean. Hey, I heard about Peo Haskell. I’m really sorry.”

  His sentiments startled her. Was there something that Brownsville wasn’t telling her? “I heard she was in the hospital...”

  “Yeah, that’s what I mean. Hopefully, she’s still tuned in, right?”

  “I’m sure she is,” Conn said, but she began to doubt. In a momentary panic, she wondered what if Peo isn’t watching?

  Daniels continued, “You know what was awesome? Getting to see you land. We weren’t oriented to see the Chinese landing. There’s another first, huh? First to see a lunar landing from the surface.”

  “That’s right. Congrats,” Conn said.

  “You looked great.”

  “Thank you.” It was easy to be friendly to Daniels, especially since it kept her from having to interact with Eyechart.

  Neither astronaut had any word from the Chinese about meeting Conn after she landed. “They use their own frequency. We’re not allowed on it, but what would I say anyway?” Daniels commented. “‘No fair, you said you could come outside?’”

  “’Come meet Conn, the party’s about to start,’” Conn offered, eliciting a grin from Daniels.

  “We ought to start putting the rover together,” Eyechart said to Daniels, just as fake-brightly as when he spoke to Conn.

  “Right,” Daniels responded, and added to Conn, “You’re welcome to join us; we’ve got six hours scheduled.” Conn thought it was odd they had Daniels working for six hours starting at midnight, but then she realized midnight central time was nine hours behind Moscow time, seven hours behind Paris. She didn’t envy Daniels the committees upon committees that must be involved in his mission, all the different factions on different parts of the Earth he had to please.

  “Thanks, but I need to put the wheels on my lander,” Conn said. “Then they have me getting some sleep.”

  “Well, pleasant dreams. Really nice to meet you, probably see you around!” He winked at her. Conn said congratulations again to both of them, and left them to their work.

  She thought about strolling to the Apollo 15 plaque, or even going up to the Chinese lander and knocking on the hatch, but she had to get used to the fact that wandering wasn’t something she was allowed to do on the moon. Too much science, too much money to be earned. She was bushed, too, and figured she would sleep as long as they’d let her. She made her way back to Mrs. Whatsit.

  The tires and fifteen inch rims on the outside of the lander had to be affixed to their axles. She was grateful that she’d be able to do it without having to slide around on her back in a space suit. She gave a moment’s thought to making sure she had properly stowed or mounted everything inside. Then she fastened a crank to a hydraulic input and levered the lander onto its rear end. From there, it was easy enough to attach the front wheels standing up, and to crouch to attach the rear wheels. She righted the lander, and everything looked good.

  She unpacked and set up more equipment, including proprietary sensors and antennas, solar panels to help keep the lander’s fuel cells charged, and a more powerful communications antenna. Eventually, Brownsville advised that it was time to sleep.

  She returned to the lander, slowly pressurized and aerated the inside, and extracted herself from her pressure suit. She stowed it, strapped herself to a wall, and tried to fall asleep.

  But she was overexcited and worried about Peo, replaying her first steps on the moon in her mind over and over...she had a four-hour sleeping pill, but she was reluctant to use it. Eventually, she put herself to sleep softly singing a favorite Feelstronauts song.

  She would be well rested when everything started happening the next day.

  PART THREE

  I can’t promise you the moon, baby

  No one goes there anymore—

  The only Martian’s a dead Martian

  I can barely make it to Brooklyn

  Or the Sixth Street liquor store.

  — Feelstronauts, “The Moon,” Your Favorite Band Sucks Records (2027). Used with permission.

  TWENTY-SIX

  On the Surface

  September 1, 2034 (US central time zone)

  As if to close the loop, Brownsville woke Conn with the chorus of the same Feelstronauts song she had sung herself to sleep with. She had slept hard and well, and she was anxious to get outside.

  “It’s September second across the International Date Line,” Brownsville told her. “We’re about eleven and a half hours from September second Zulu.” Zulu: the aviator’s designation for coordinated universal time, or UTC. Conn had memorized the math and could have told Brownsville what time it was at the International Date Line, Zulu, and anywhere else on Earth. But she understood the importance of the information.

  There was no way to tell what September 2 specifically meant to the aliens. It was September 2 in New Zealand already, and it would be the second in growing parts of the world for more than eleven hours before the calendar flipped in London, the zero hour for UTC time. Less than eighteen hours before it turned September 2 in Texas. The meeting could be any time during those eighteen hours—or during the twenty-four afterward. Conn had a lot of science to do, experiments to conduct, samples to collect, readings to read, and she would be outside for eight hours, sleep six, then out for another eight—suited up at all times, in case company arrived. Then a planned three-hour nap and another five hours outside. It was a punishing schedule, and she would have to pace herself. She wouldn’t take the lander out for a spin on its new wheels until after the meeting: Brownsville didn’t want her ten kilometers away when the aliens arrived.

  The Chinese had staggered their taikonauts’ outside time, Luan out and Cai in, followed by both out, followed by Luan in and Cai out, trying to be sure one of the men was awake, outside and ready whenever the visitors arrived. NASA and Roscosmos didn’t want one astronaut outside alone, so they had a different schedule. At present, they were inside at the ready. They would sleep from ten central to September 2 UTC time, followed by ten hours outside, inside at the ready, asleep, outside again.

  Conn’s breakfast was a high-carbohydrate military MRE and some coffee. This MRE, “Meal Ready to Eat,” like the ones she would eat in eight and again in sixteen hours, would maximize her energy and minimize her waste. The coffee would make her pee, but she could handle that without breaking stride outside, and it was a small price to pay for caffeine.

  Hurrying her breakfast wouldn’t get her outside any sooner. Her schedule was rigid. She ate at a leisurely pace, checking systems that needed regular inspection while she did. And she got an update on Peo: resting comfortably, but they weren’t letting her out of the hospital. She had company at all times and access to any feed she wanted. So she was watching Conn on the feeds instead of as things happened at the operations center in Brownsville. The world saw Conn’s landing and emergence onto the surface in real time, and it would see her first contact with aliens the same way. But other than those historic moments, Brownsville kept everything on delay, ensuring whatever got out wasn’t proprietary or confidential. The important thing, of course, was that there was no change in Peo’s status since before Conn went to sleep. It worried her.

  Conn had agreed to spend time that morning showing viewers how she put her pressure suit on, starting after the water-cooled underclothes, of course. “We’re feeding delayed video to about eight hundred million people,” Brownsville told her. “And more than that in Asia are watching Luan Yongpo out on the surface.” Eyechart and Scott Daniels, inside their lander, were probably not nearly as interesting as exploring the surface or watching a twenty-three-year-old woman getting dressed.

  Once suited u
p, Conn depressurized the lander and stepped outside. “I’m thrilled to be representing the human race on this historic occasion,” she said. She had decided in retrospect it was what she should have said on her first step the day before: “historic occasion” could refer to the first woman on the moon or humanity’s first contact.

  She took a minute to stand and contemplate the moon. It was monochrome, placid, alien. Utterly silent, utterly untouched. To the east and south, enormous mountains rose miles into the lunar sky. To the south and west, a ridge formed the lip of Hadley Rille, the gorge she had passed over right before landing: a kilometer across, and enormously deep. She carefully bounded over and tried to peer down into the gorge, but the waist-high ridge kept most of it from view. She thought about Grant exploring the giant Ithaca Chasma on Tethys.

  Due west, the horizon was impossibly close, and curved. It looked ridiculous—the horizon was flat, the Earthling in her insisted. Boulders ejected from meteor impacts, and small, perfectly round craters were strewn at random around the Marsh of Decay. The moon seemed like a shooting gallery for meteors, like it must get struck by something huge once a week. Conn’s human mind couldn’t comprehend the moon’s timeline. Intellectually, she understood that she was looking at the results of a billion years of meteor strikes with no atmosphere to soften the sharp, deep cuts and craters. But she knew she couldn’t truly understand how long the moon had been untouched by life, or wind, or wear.

  Which reminded her of her first task for the day: find evidence the moon shower aliens had been to the Apollo 15 site. The Chinese had evidently come up short, or weren’t sharing their findings. Eyechart and Daniels hadn’t looked for evidence yet, not thoroughly. Conn made her way toward the Apollo 15 plaque, about three kilometers south-southeast, narrating what she saw, stopping to examine this or that rock or crater when Brownsville asked her to. She would install equipment and perform experiments later in the day, off feed, but right now, she would have a sizable audience, once Brownsville released the footage. She was much more conscious today when there were no footprints where she walked—not only because she was looking for evidence of the aliens, but because she had settled into an appreciation of how empty the moon was.

  She approached the Apollo site. Antennas and equipment were exactly where astronauts Dave Scott and Jim Irwin had left them in 1971.

  But beside one antenna was an indentation in the dust, as if it might have fallen and then been replaced upright. By Scott or Irwin? Eyechart or Daniels? The Chinese? Or somebody else?

  Then she stood before the commemorative plaque:

  APOLLO 15

  FACLON

  JULY 1971

  “Brownsville, I’m not seeing any nonhuman footprints. There sure are a lot of human ones this close. Not so much around the descent stage.” The descent engines would have cleared much of that dust during landing, and subsequent takeoff. “I see two sets of footprints between here and the European lander, which I assume are those of Erik Tyzhnych and Scott Daniels. Two sets between here and the Chinese lander. Many others that I presume were left by Dave Scott and Jim Irwin. All human.”

  “The aliens had to have investigated the site,” Gil Portillo said from Brownsville. Gil was CapCom—an anachronism from the early days of spaceflight, “Capsule Communications”—the one in Brownsville doing all the talking to the astronauts. Though others could and would be CapCom during the mission, Conn hadn’t yet been without Gil’s voice in her radio since landing on the moon. “The plaque is only nine inches wide. They had to get close.”

  “I’m here looking right at it.” I’m looking at the landing marker for Apollo 15...holy crap. The dust was blasted away for meters around the descent stage. Outside that radius, to the north, west and east, footprints. Except...

  “Wait. Brownsville, there’s a swath about a meter wide—make that two separate swaths—in a west-northwesterly direction from the descent stage. It’s hard to make out. But the footprints in those areas are slightly disturbed. Blurry...Are you seeing?”

  “Some of us are and some aren’t, Conn.”

  “Here, I’ll pan. These are really clear.” She pointed her helmet camera directly at footprints that looked like they’d been made five minutes ago. Then she panned to the disturbed areas. “But here the footprints get—I don’t know. Blurry.” She moved closer, careful not to add her own tracks to the confusion. “Look! Where the footprints end, there are still smooth places, really hard to see, I don’t know if you can pick them up from the camera. Gil, what if something came and went, a hovercraft of some kind maybe? Something that would disturb the dust but not leave any footprints or tracks.”

  “We see it, Conn. We think you’re right. Good eye.” This was exciting. Because no matter how much everyone worked to convince themselves that aliens had invited humans to meet them on the moon, it was still a hypothesis. But something had ridden some kind of hovercraft to and from the Apollo 15 landing site. And no one on Earth, not even Dyna-Tech, had invented a hovercraft that would work on the airless moon.

  So it hadn’t been a human being riding that hovercraft.

  Conn did her best to follow the delicate tracks, and found them heading for Hadley Rille. She had a sudden thought: was the alien hovercraft able to cross the kilometer-wide canyon?

  The tracks ended at the lip of the chasm. And her hour of scheduled exploration was up. She reluctantly headed due north toward her lander. There, she picked up an equipment bag, took a breath, and began to do science.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  The Accident

  September 1, 2034 (US central time zone)

  Five hours later, Conn was again following the ridge bordering Hadley Rille, this time, looking for a safe way down. Many scientists would give their eyeteeth for samples from the bottom of the canyon, or even the strata on its sides, but Conn hadn’t found any place where she could safely descend.

  She halted and took a pull from the water nipple inside her helmet as she scanned the ridge. All she could hear, other than Brownsville intermittently on her radio, was her own breathing.

  She saw a flash of movement, which startled her—she had grown used to the stillness and solitude of the moon. A rover, traveling fast and silent along the ridge from the south toward her like something from a dream. Eyechart and Daniels were scheduled to be asleep. This must be the Chinese taikonauts.

  The rover was headed right for her. And it wasn’t slowing.

  She waved her arms above her head as best she could in her pressure suit. No effect. She turned to her left and lunged out of the way.

  The driver must have seen her, finally: the rover jerked left as he yanked the steering wheel, kicking up dust and rocks as it skidded and tried to find a grip. After a second, which seemed much longer, the tires bit, but there was no time for the driver to straighten out. The rover whipped left and crashed through the lip of the ridge. It went airborne, spinning, crashed down facing backward...and then shuddered and rocked another long second before tipping over the ridge, into the canyon. Conn watched in horror as the rover’s back end struck a boulder and bounced in the one-sixth lunar gravity before turning upside down and falling away into the gorge.

  “Did you see that?” Conn nearly shrieked. Gil Portillo said they had, and advised caution approaching the accident site. It wasn’t until then that Conn realized she was bounding toward the edge where the taikonauts had gone over. She skidded to slow herself and intentionally fell forward, arms outstretched to brace herself on the ridge. The rover had taken some of the lip with it, and she was able to lean over and look down.

  The rille sloped relatively gently for about ten feet, then dropped precipitously. A taikonaut sprawled no more than five feet below her, gripping rock to keep himself from sliding the rest of the way down the canyon. Conn’s blood was rushing in her ears. “Brownsville, he’s in trouble. I can’t see the rover, or the other taikonaut.”

  “Conn, stand by.” Stand by? She had to help this guy. She bent over the break i
n the ridge and reached as far as she could, but it wasn’t enough. So she lay on her stomach and inched her way down slowly, keeping what she hoped was a good grip on the damaged lip of the rille with her feet. Laying down in a pressure suit on a rocky surface surrounded by vacuum wasn’t recommended by the equipment manufacturer. She stretched: now he was within reach. But she didn’t have solid enough a grip on the ridge to support them both.

  “Conn, you need to get back to safe ground and stand by!”

  She ignored Gil. But she did realize her approach was stupid—she had a spool of CAT-5 cable in her equipment bag. She tried to scrabble backward to safety, but she didn’t have the leverage. She panicked for a moment before she worked out the right way to push herself backward with her arms. That did it. She backed up and out, frantically looking for her bag. She spotted it not far away, and ran to it.

  She rummaged for the cable—and saw the kink and the hole in the pressure pipe running up her right leg.

  She kept her head. She had duct tape in a pressure suit-friendly dispenser. She tore off a long piece and wound it around the pipe, plugging the hole. Help yourself first, then others, had been a mantra from her survival training. She couldn’t do anybody else any good if she died herself. She hoped the kink let enough pressure through, or else her shin and foot were going to depressurize.

  She scrabbled back to the break in the ridge. “Conn!” came Gil’s voice over her radio. “Listen. The Chinese say one of them is alive, but the other isn’t, according to vitals. But they can’t tell who’s where. The one you’re looking at, is he moving?” Conn couldn’t see movement, though he seemed to have a strong grip on the rocks keeping him from sliding down. On the other hand, he couldn’t be in great shape if he couldn’t tell Chinese ops his situation. Or maybe his radio was busted.