Free Girl on the Moon by Jack McDonald Burnett Page A

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, anyway. 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.
    Two suits hung on the wall, each with a separate top and bottom. When they were locked together, flexible tubes ran from above the ankle to just behind the armpits. The top had additional tubes from wrists to shoulder blades, and the bottoms from inside the ankle to about the tailbone. The setup