Authors: Jack McDonald Burnett
Her body had very specific ways it had learned to do things, and it needed to unlearn them in zero- or low-gravity. Practice made perfect, though, or more nearly perfect. At the end of three weeks, Conn felt far more confident that she wouldn’t make an ass of herself her first time on the moon than she had been in months.
In their final week of training, at Elgin AFB, things got real. They did two days’ parasailing in the Gulf of Mexico, detaching from their tether once they’d reached a certain speed and height to practice safe water landings with a parachute. Landing was the easy part—it was getting the chute off your back and treading water for many minutes that could really kill you.
On the base were two huge wave pools, both nearly the size of the pool in Houston. In one, a one-to-one size model of an Apollo-era space capsule was suspended from a crane. The astronauts had to clamber into it. Then it was set on (simulated) fire and detached from the crane to give them practice in escaping from a burning, sinking capsule. Conn died more than once before they started to nail it. She was glad it wasn’t always her fault—it had been a long time since Eyechart had undergone similar training.
In the other wave pool, the instructors stirred up five-foot crests and dropped Conn and Eyechart feet first into the middle of it. They had to practice either staying afloat or swimming to the nearest safe, dry spot, depending on where one of those was. Their last two days, the weather in the Gulf cooperated enough for them to practice their feet-first drops outside, in real three-to-five foot waves. Conn left Florida for the Dyna-Tech operations center in Brownsville ragged, sore, and worn out.
She was as big a celebrity in Houston and Florida as she had been in Cleveland, and it started to wear on her. She knew Neil Armstrong had retreated from the public eye after being the first man on the moon, and she started to be able to imagine why. She knew her fame would only grow until after her return from the moon, so she tried to bear everything as cheerfully as possible. She tried to imagine being the center of attention in one of her depressive lows, and she was thankful that Peo had busted her and made her take her meds again.
July–September, 2033
The public didn’t quite know what to make of the three simultaneous moon missions.
The Chinese—armed with Peo and Conn’s solution to the puzzle of the animation—had announced theirs first. When the NASA/ESA/Roscosmos joint mission made the news, many thought that the Western agencies were trying to hog some of the spotlight and ought to stay home. You guys had sixty years to go back to the moon, now it’s China’s turn.
People in Russia were delighted that, at last, one of their number would walk on the moon; and they were positively dizzy that it would be Erik Tyzhnych, who was as close to a national hero as astronauts got in Russia in the twenty-first century. On the public relations front, Russia had done exactly the right thing bringing Eyechart out of mothballs for the mission.
Europeans were less satisfied. Their man, Didier Gonalons, wouldn’t walk on the moon. Since (in the underinformed public’s view) it didn’t matter who piloted the command module, many felt Europe should send a woman. (Conn, reading the feeds, rolled her eyes.
Save us from “feminists” who want to include women—as long as they don’t do anything important!
) Or a gay man. Or a transgendered person. Or...On the other hand, some said it was precisely because it didn’t matter that Gonalons was a good choice: it was a bad message to send a woman to the moon and make her stay in the command module.
The British didn’t participate in the debate: they simply felt a Briton should go. Either instead of Gonalons, or instead of the NASA guy.
In America, the debate hadn’t changed since 1972: there were more important federal priorities than moon exploration, and the government shouldn’t spend so much on NASA. Let a European transgendered person go. Or whoever. On the other side of the debate, the argument ran that the mission was a matter of national security (although those who knew why—first encounter with a highly technologically advanced extraterrestrial race—weren’t allowed to say). Also, America was founded by explorers, and if something needed to be explored in 2033, America should be in on it. The extreme underbelly of this faction asserted that the moon belonged to America, and China and Russia and Europe shouldn’t be allowed on it at all.
Chinese public opinion was difficult to gauge: because China’s authoritarian government had come back with a furious roar, more powerful than ever, once again information had to pass through government censors going both ways. The official position was that the nation was bursting with national pride over their pioneering moon mission. If stories about widespread malnutrition and poverty in the nation were true, though, opinion was probably more in line with some Americans’:
what a waste of money
.
Dyna-Tech’s public opinion was whatever Peo said it would be, as usual. Only a tightly controlled group of top executives knew about the animation and the rendezvous with aliens. Others reacted to the shift in priority toward a moon mission with puzzlement, but everybody did their jobs.
More difficult to discern was what the worldwide public thought about three missions at once after sixty years of nobody on the moon. Plenty of sharp people thought it must have something to do with the moon shower; many of those thought there must be contact arranged with whoever did it. The counter-argument was usually that half a dozen countries or more couldn’t possibly keep that a secret. Someone, somewhere in the world who knew the truth would leak it.
But that didn’t happen, perhaps miraculously, in the year after the missions were announced. So most people chalked it up to the West not wanting China’s iron-fisted government to bask alone in the glory of a moon landing. NASA, the ESA, Roscosmos, and Dyna-Tech were all happy to let that sentiment percolate instead of the truth.
Come July, Conn was living in Brownsville full time, keeping in shape, learning about the vehicles they would fly to the moon, and meshing with her crew.
Four hours a day were rigidly scheduled. The whole three-person crew plus backups had to be there during that time: Conn arrived two hours early almost every day, and was usually the last one to leave. Her work ethic helped smooth over some rough edges in her relationship with her crewmates: Al Claussen and Jake Dander’s lives were on the line if Conn didn’t know what she was doing, or was sloppy. She proved to them that neither was the case.
Her title at Dyna-Tech was now Astronaut, which made her collapse on her bed in delighted laughter every time she thought about it. She still assisted Peo informally. There was nobody Peo trusted as much as Conn.
In September, one year before the mission, Peo made a hurried trip to Brownsville. She arrived just a couple hours before some intimidating-looking federal agents showed up, one male and one female, who dressed alike. There was a lot of
dark
. Both agents’ sunglasses were even gray-tinted. Conn was sure they had to make an effort to match so well.
They turned out not to be agents. They were a little higher up the pay scale. He was a deputy director of Homeland Security. She was a deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, which Conn figured meant she might have once been a spy. Conn thought that was cool.
The feds and Peo exchanged frosty small talk in Peo’s office for a few minutes while Conn waited outside as Peo had ordered. Then Peo beckoned Conn in. Her Brownsville office was about four times the size of the office at Illinois Tech. For this meeting, Peo sat in a soft leather armchair, and offered the feds places on the matching sofa opposite her. Leather squeaked as they settled down. Conn, unsure, remained standing.
The male fed shifted his weight anxiously. He had narrow eyes and chubby cheeks, slicked-back hair, and a dorky smile. The female had short, dark hair and a permanent frown. She regarded Conn more coolly: her eyes were probably round, but she kept them narrowed, out of suspicion, anger or contempt, Conn wasn’t sure.
Finally, the male could keep his peace no longer. “Conn Garrow. Right? Not Constance. Definitely not Connie.” He chuckled. Conn had told an interviewer on
24/7
that the soon-to-be first woman on the moon was called Conn, “definitely not Connie,” and the phrase had taken on a life of its own somehow. Conn got hate vees from girls—and women—named Connie, who were just fine with the nickname, thank you. Conn welcomed them to it.
“Pleased to meet you, Ms. Garrow,” the female said. “I’m Deputy Director Raich of the CIA. This is Deputy Director Cullen of DHS.” Turning to Peo: “Ms. Haskell, we will be touching on sensitive topics in this meeting—”
“Conn stays,” Peo said. “She’s my lawyer.” Conn had gone through about three-quarters of the required classes for paralegal certification.
“We’re not authorized to have this discussion with anyone present but you,” Raich said. “Even your...counsel.”
“Then what else should we talk about?”
The feds looked at one another. “We’re not authorized—” Cullen began, but Raich cut him off.
“We need to talk to you about certain sensitive facts that impact national security. We know that you are aware of them, and we need to know who else knows what, and whether they should be allowed to be made aware of future developments in the same area,” she said. Conn had learned to speak bureaucratese as Peo’s assistant, but even she was impressed. “This meeting is about who can and can’t attend this meeting. If you will.”
“There are no sensitive national security facts I know that Conn doesn’t.”
“Is this about the animation?” Conn said.
Cullen looked stricken. Raich gave Peo a severe look. “We weren’t advised that you knew about the animation.”
Conn could hear that Peo’s patience was about at the limit when she said, “I see. Then why did you think I was sending people to the moon?”
“You learned about the...”—Raich looked at Conn disapprovingly—“
invitation
to the moon, but not the animation itself, from a source at NASA.” She said it as though it was fact, and as though Peo was just confused. “We’re here to make sure information about the invitation was and is under control.”
“By whom? Never mind. We, Conn and I, came into possession of the animation in February of last year. Go ahead, let me know when you’re done writing. OK? And we did not receive it from anybody in the federal government. Conn figured out what the animation meant before anybody else did—including the Chinese, who beat you guys by how many weeks?” She did not mention that the Chinese knew because they’d found out from Conn and her—Conn almost wished she would. But no, Peo wouldn’t want the Department of Homeland Security and the CIA to know the Chinese had bugged her office. “I don’t know what relationship you imagine I have with my astronauts and executives, but I don’t keep secrets from them. Especially my astronauts—they’re going to risk their lives going to the moon, and they’ll damned sure know why.”
Raich stiffened—a feat, with how stiff she started out. “We’ll need a list of everybody who knows about the invitation. We need to vet them.”
“Your list is: the people I decide need to know about it. And I’ve already vetted every one of them more thoroughly than even you would.”
“We were told we could count on your cooperation,” Cullen said. “Told by Nate Petan.” The NASA Director.
Peo was close to an eruption. Conn had seen a Peo eruption two or three times, and they were epic. “Nate knows me to be a cooperative gal. When I don’t work well with others, it’s usually because they come bumbling into my office ignorant of the fact that I know more than they do, and trying to get my information ‘under control.’ You want to vet my people? Do it. But don’t come in here demanding
lists from me and acting entitled to my company’s hard-earned and often expensive intelligence.”
Raich said, “Your company intelligence
is a matter of national security. It no longer belongs to you.”
“Subpoena me,” Peo said, in the same tone of voice as if she’d said “Fuck you.”
“You’d be surprised what I can do without a subpoena. Or warrant.”
“My lawyer will see you out,” Peo said.
Conn thought about it, and the people who knew about the alien invitation to meet on the moon were probably herself, Al Claussen, Jake Dander, Hunter Valence, Skylar Reece, and Grant. How difficult would it be, really, to just tell Raich that?
The feds left, and Raich, at least, looked like she wasn’t done in Brownsville. Conn gave Cullen an autograph.
October–November, 2033
Conn’s second six weeks training with NASA was in reality only four: the first two weeks were devoted to physical therapy for Eyechart, and Conn was given leave to skip them as long as she stuck to her personal fitness regimen. Peo was only paying for Conn’s training at this point.
Since Conn’s last visit to the Neutral Buoyancy Lab, Peo had arranged to have partial replicas of both the Dyna-Tech and European spacecraft submerged in the Lab’s pool: segments of the outer shells of each command module and lunar lander, with full-scale, one-to-one hatches so the astronauts could practice spacewalking in an environment that was true-to-life, just not true-to-life for all three hundred sixty degrees.
The prospect made Conn uneasy. Like water survival, it was important to learn this in case of emergency. But if things were bad enough that she had to perform extra-vehicular activity, an EVA, in the zero-G of space, they had bigger problems than whether Conn knew how to spacewalk. On the other hand, she was learning the Dyna-Tech spacecraft command module and lander inside and out, and if there was an emergency, maybe she really could help fix them.
The NASA instructors and safety divers were less patient with Conn than last time. When she did something wrong underwater, they whistled the play dead and made her start over—and it happened a lot.
Every move made in zero-G has an equal and opposite reaction. That’s true on Earth as well, but gravity makes it seem otherwise. Push on a wall on Earth, and gravity and friction keep you rooted to the spot you’re standing on. Push on a wall in zero-G, and your body moves in the opposite direction. There’s still friction in space, and Conn was learning to use it to her advantage, but it couldn’t make up for the lack of a force holding her down.