Girl on the Moon

by Burnett, Jack McDonald

  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.

  The computer did most of the work on liftoff, anyhow. She didn’t have to sight out the window and look for obstacles and flat landing spots.

  She went through the launch checklist, vocalizing each step, and each was confirmed by Gil. The pressure was holding at nine hundred sixty millibars so far. Conn glanced at the patch in the hull. Then she spared a last look at the surface outside. She saw her footprints in the regolith. She smiled.

  Launch checklist complete. Jake and the command module had emerged from around the far side and were on their way to meet her. The world would be watching her lift off. Peo would be watching. Thoughts were cycling through her mind too fast to follow. She realized she was exhausted.

  As the descent engines came online, a whine filled the lander. She focused.

  “Firing descent engines,” she said, and tapped the screen. Her knees bent as the lander rose a meter off the ground, clearing the way for the ascent stage to fire. Last one off the moon. She felt a stab of regret.

  “Ascent engines online,” she said. “Firing.” She toggled a switch.

  All that happened was that the descent engines quit and she dropped a meter back onto the ground with a crash. She lost her footing. Her helmet fell on her, slow motion in the lunar gravity.

  She scrambled to her feet. Fear gripped her heart and squeezed. In eight tries, nobody had ever failed to blast off from the surface of the moon. And this wasn’t the time for the first. She was utterly alone.

  Willing herself not to panic, she backed out of the warning screen, typed the command for the correct menu, and retried the sequence. Crash. No ascent engines.

  “Conn, let’s back up and go through everything again,” Gil said. “We both missed something, that’s all.”

  They went through the checklist again, making sure of every step. Again a whine. Descent engines fired. Ascent engines online. Fire, Conn willed as she toggled the switch.

  Nothing. Dropped again. Something was going to break if they kept this up.

  Conn’s eyes were already leaking with frustration and exhaustion. She didn’t want Brownsville to think she was crying. She sniffed and got herself together.

  OK, no big deal. Something’s not working. We’ll fix it.

  They would have to.

  THIRTY-SIX

  Don't Give Up

  September 5–7, 2034

  It wasn’t obvious that it was sabotage until Conn really got a good look at it. Whoever it was had been thorough, and had gone to some lengths to hide what they’d done.

  The starter that ignited the ascent engines was scrapped. Something, a micrometeorite or a loose piece from another part of the engine, could have done that, though it would be strange indeed for the starter to be destroyed with no damage to anything else around it.

  But the fuel tank ruptured, too. The ascent stage used liquid propellant—a nitrogen solution that until power-up for liftoff used the lander’s power to keep it above freezing (in its case, minus-346° Fahrenheit). The coils that kept the fuel above freezing had been severed. The fuel froze in the absolute zero of the moon, expanded, and ruptured the tank. During the ascent stage’s power-up sequence, the frozen fuel melted and leaked out onto the lunar surface.

  “Seriously. There’s no way this computer could have told me I was leaking fuel?”

  “It’s only used for liftoff,” Sandy said after a time. “They say there’s no way you wouldn’t have anything but a full tank when the time came.”

  “I can think of one way,” Conn growled.

  One of those things—a busted starter or busted heating coils—would have been rotten luck. That it was both probably meant somebody wanted to strand her on the moon. “Probably” became “definitely,” to Conn, because both components were
broken with too much precision for it to have been accidental.

  At least her list of suspects wasn’t long. She immediately thought of Daniels, so strangely upset at her for obtaining concessions from the Basalites.

  Eyechart had never liked her at all. He had probably sabotaged her training at the Neutral Buoyancy facility. He definitely gave off the vibe that he couldn’t stand her, couldn’t abide the fact that an untested girl was going to the moon at the same time he was. He had waited a long lifetime for his chance.

  If it had been Luan—or even Cai Fang—then there was a political reason behind her attempted murder. She’d done nothing to make Luan angry enough to want her dead, of that, if of nothing else, she was sure. Same for Cai, since she had never even so much as met him. The Chinese made themselves suspects by trying to strand her on the moon in another way: having Luan take off when she was within sight of their lander.

  But if this was a political assassination attempt—Conn’s mind reeled when she thought about it—then the Chinese couldn’t be the only suspects. They all were, in that case. Even though Conn could think of no good political reason to kill her.

  And what if it was the Basalites? What if Persisting decided she couldn’t be trusted, and tried to get her out of the way? They were in every way alien. Perhaps they arranged one anothers’ deaths routinely. Maybe it was a sign of respect. But if they had shaken on a deal and then immediately turned around and tried to get Conn killed, what did that say for the future of the relationship between Basalites and humankind? Nothing good.

  She briefly entertained the possibility that two different entities wanted her dead, one trashing the starter and one cutting the heating coils; but as unbelievable as this whole thing was, it couldn’t be that unbelievable.

  All this careened through her brain in the minutes after she told Brownsville that she had been sabotaged. If Brownsville let the information out, a billion people would be thinking all the same things she was now. It lent further intrigue to the moon missions, that was for sure.

  “Conn, stand by for Peo,” Sandy Kearns said.

  Peo’s fury scorched Conn all the way from her hospital room to Hadley-Apennine. “The Chinese have already denied responsibility,” Peo said. “Wasn’t that quick?”

  “It might not have been sabotage at all,” Conn said, trying to keep Peo calm. “Things break—”

  “Two things? Two things you wouldn’t know were broken until it was time to lift off? When everyone else is gone already?”

  “OK, Peo, I get it,” Conn snapped, her nerves frayed. “Now what do we do about it?”

  Russia had issued a statement calling for a joint Roscosmos/ESA/NASA rescue, Peo told her. The ESA had enthused about the idea, if NASA had any recommendations as to how actually to pull it off. NASA hadn’t said anything, yet. “But we can’t count on that anyway,” Peo said. “There’s too much inertia in those agencies to get everyone turned around and pointed in the right direction quickly.”

  “Then can we do something?” Conn said. “Anything?”

  “I don’t know how long it will take to get somebody up there to bring you home,” Peo said, “but I’ve already got them loading up an unmanned spacecraft with supplies, air, fuel, and parts. As soon as the eggheads do all the math, it will be on its way to you.”

  “We’re talking at least three days.”

  “I would rather think at most three days.”

  “I have about two days’ worth of air left.”

  “You’ll sleep as much as you can. You’ll wring every oxygen molecule out of your pressure suit tanks. You will stay alive until the supplies reach you.”

  “I’ll do my best,” Conn said weakly. She had been angry; talking to Peo made her scared. This was really happening. There wasn’t really anything they could do about it.

  “If only the Basalites had left you with a way for you, or us, to contact them,” Peo growled.

  “I’m headed for the joint mission landing site in a bit,” Conn said. “See if their descent stage has any parts I can use. The Chinese, too. Hell, I’ll scavenge Apollo 15.”

  “That’s the spirit. The one thing you can’t afford to do is to give up. You wouldn’t let me give up. I won’t let you.”

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Look Inside

  September 7–8, 2034

  Brownsville got the schematics for the joint mission, Chinese, and Apollo 15 descent stages that had been left behind. They locked a team of people in a room with a breakdown of that equipment, and a list of every part, tool, and item on board Mrs. Whatsit. The team would be let out when they figured out how to fix the starter using only what Conn had at her disposal.

  Realistically, all this accomplished was to give the company, and especially the team members in the room, a tangible goal to achieve. Fixing the starter would only solve half of Conn’s problems. She still had no fuel.

  Peo’s promise of an unmanned spacecraft laden with fuel, air and supplies was problematic for a number of reasons. They had to reconfigure a spacecraft that wasn’t designed for landing into one capable of landing, with precision, before Conn ran out of air. And even if she could take off from the surface, there would be no command module to meet her: Jake Dander would run out of air sooner than later, and would have to make for home before he did. That stranded Conn as surely as a trashed starter and a lack of fuel did. Making a spacecraft capable of landing on the moon was one thing—but even Peo would acknowledge that conjuring one that could rendezvous with the command module to replenish Jake’s air and supplies was impossible. Rigging something that could attach was out of the question. A rendezvous with supply transfer via EVA was a pipe dream.

  Conn understood all this. Part of her wanted to tell all the people busting their asses for her in Brownsville and at Gasoline Alley that they could stand down. They weren’t going to be able to help her.

  Conn knew that Peo was trying every trick in the book, and would write any size check, to get the ESA or Chinese mission to refuel at Gasoline Alley, turn around, and go get her. The Chinese didn’t think Luan could land by himself, and that was that. Their excuse was that their computer didn’t do as much of the work as in Conn’s lander, and Cai Fang was instrumental to their landing. Conn had trained with Al Claussen long enough to know that both people in a lunar lander had to know everything there was to know about how to operate it. Maybe the Chinese did things differently, but she doubted it.

  The ESA hemmed and hawed and talked about getting buy-in from each of the contributing agencies, about insurance, about this red tape and that red tape, until Peo accepted that just wasn’t going to happen, either.

  All of this left Conn in the exact same position: stranded on the moon, with no realistic hope of rescue. A day passed with no good news. The Dyna-Tech team came up with a way to fix the starter—but it involved soldering, with an improvised soldering iron and improvised solder. Conn gamely took instruction, thanked everybody for their hard work, and cobbled together a starter. It solved exactly one problem, out of two.

  Conn wasn’t an introspective person. Even now, when she thought of the sabotage, she dwelt on the implications for a good relationship between Earth and Basal. If the Basalites struck a deal with her and then turned right around and had her killed, humanity was in big trouble. If somebody had stranded her because of the deal, that did not bode well for future humans who tried to bargain with their new neighbors. She fervently hoped it had been Eyechart, because he hated her. Or the Chinese, because she overshadowed their first manned lunar mission. Or Daniels, who, admittedly, she could scarcely see hating her enough to kill her after what little interaction they had together. (So it was probably him, she cynically reasoned.) In any event, she hoped it was something personal. She’d be just as dead, but it would end there. She wouldn’t influence human-Basalite relations from beyond the grave, or anything so dramatic.

  There were cracks in her objective facade, though. She recalled how she felt when Peo had told her that th
e cancer had come back. She imagined Peo feeling the same way now. Billions of people knowing she was going to die: that didn’t move her. One particular person—Peo—knowing she was going to die, that almost did her in.

  Nor was it uniquely her feelings about Peo. She imagined her dad. Even Cora—how they must feel right now, she thought, knowing she only had hours to live. When she felt a surge of panic over her plight, it was because the people closest to her had to suffer with the knowledge she was going to die and there was nothing they, or she, could do about it.

  As much as she would have spared them all those feelings, she also had moments where she regretted not having people in her life who were truly close to her. She had earned a reputation in high school for being brainy and obsessive, and the caricature survived her bipolar diagnosis and treatment. As a result, she had never made any lifelong friends in high school. She was blessed to have her friend Jody from college, but that friendship only came about because they were starting an adventure together as freshmen. She had friends she worked with, but true friends? Good, solid, always-there-for-you friendships?

  Good friends had obligations to one another, standing appointments. They couldn’t decide in advance when to be there or whether to comfort, commiserate, help out, join forces, conquer the world together—the demands of friendship didn’t line up neatly on a schedule. It was too disorganized, friendship. Too much of a potential time suck. She didn’t expect that kind of thing from a superficial friend like Jody—and he didn’t expect it of her.

  She had a chance to be close to Grant. But she had screwed that up like every other relationship she’d had. It wasn’t the time to dwell on whether she had made a mistake pushing Grant away, but it was hard not to think about him as she surveyed the wreckage that was her personal relationships.

  Peo was like a mother to her, and she was like a daughter to Peo. Right? What made the relationship work, Conn imagined, there on the moon, was that being there for one another was part of their jobs. Peo was trying to move heaven and Earth to prolong Conn’s life and get her off the moon—but doing so was good business. Was that it? Wasn’t there any more? She didn’t love Peo because she signed her paycheck. She wished she was in a frame of mind to believe Peo loved her back no matter what Conn could do for her.