Free Girl on the Moon by Jack McDonald Burnett Page B

allowed different parts of the body to be pressurized separately, or rather, made it so that if one part of the body depressurized, the core might not, and the astronaut might not die.
    They detached the two parts and pulled the bottoms on like pants. There were boots built in, with a hinge to keep the feet from being rigid when pressurized. Thigh and shin were connected but hinged as well, which allowed some flexing of the knees.
    They shrugged into their tops, then sealed the connections. Wrists and elbow segments were separate, like ankles and knees, allowing some flexibility. Conn plugged her radio into a port on the ring of her suit’s neck. She rotated at the waist, getting a feel for how flexible the suit would be when pressurized. The inside of her suit smelled faintly of body odor. She thought she could taste stale air, but she knew it was her imagination—no helmet on, yet. Her heart hammered: this was bringing home the reality for her. She was going to the moon. It felt like she wasn’t going to be able to move very much when she got there, but she was going. She suppressed delighted giggles, tried to be all business.
    They put on and attached the suit’s gloves. Conn flexed her fingers: a good fit. Finally, the helmet, looking like a giant bubble her neck was blowing. Everything echoed faintly when it locked on. Eyechart said something that made the instructor laugh. It wasn’t about her, she was pretty sure, but she felt a little conspicuous. Eyechart checked the seals all over her suit, and she checked his.
    Within days, they would put the suits on underwater to get used to doing it in low- and zero-G. For now, once they were completely suited up and sealed, they were shown how to pressurize the suits—another thing that was easier for a partner to do. The baggy suit inflated some, and their movements became very stiff. She gladly endured it, though. Exposed to the vacuum of space, their blood, which was used to having to pump at a certain rate against the pressure of the air, would pump far too hard, and gush from every available orifice and then freeze at absolute zero. Or at least that’s how Conn imagined it. The suits kept Earth-normal pressure on their bodies, so their blood could behave as though they were in Houston, Texas, not on the moon.
    Conn couldn’t feel the hinges at her ankles or wrists working at all, though she supposed they must be. Her knees and elbows bent only with great effort. “That’s about twenty times more freedom of movement than, say, space shuttle astronauts had. Or Neil Armstrong, for that matter,” the instructor told them. He was short, bald, and peppy, and obviously the kind of teacher who used carrots instead of sticks. “The hinges are there more to bear the force of your movements than to let you swivel around and do squats. You’ll be glad for them after a few hours, believe me.”
    Their first week underwater was spent without pressure suits, just a breathing apparatus, so they could get used to zero-G inside a spacecraft. Eyechart could have taught that week, obviously, but he gamely went through the training start to finish. It made Conn feel bad for skipping their classes that second week in Cleveland. Then they moved into full suits, and learned to use all their tools in zero-G—or rather, all the tools that would be going with Eyechart; what was going in the privately owned Dyna-Tech spacecraft, tools included, was private property and therefore, nobody’s business.
    During their last week in Houston, their suits were weighed down to make walking on the bottom of the pool a similar experience to the surface of the moon. Conn had another moment of this is actually happening as she bounded along the bottom. It wasn’t perfect—there would be no water resistance on the moon—but she started to master the locomotion. She did trip, but because it was practice, and a billion people weren’t watching, she laughed and tried again. Time underwater seemed to