Girl on the Moon Read online

  Illinois Tech did not have a basketball team. Jody confounded everybody by aspiring to an engineering degree instead.

  Neither Conn nor Jody made friends easily, but as former high school classmates, they were familiar to each other in an intimidating new world. They glommed onto one another; he settling her down when she wasn’t sure where her bio classroom was, and she helping him with his physics homework.

  “If I need homework help two weeks into freshman year, is my engineering career already doomed?” Jody asked.

  “No,” Conn said. “When I run out of stuff I already learned two years ago when I was manic, is my engineering career already doomed?”

  “Maybe,” Jody said. She swatted his arm.

  So with Jody as a sounding board and cheering section (and tutoring pupil and drunk dialer), but no other relationships worth much of an investment, Conn kept her head down, tried not to screw up her grades, and coasted to an attention-getting GPA. Whether it and standing in the sophomore class would get Peo Haskell to notice her, she hadn’t a clue.

  # # #

  Once sophomore year began, Conn genuinely thought she had a shot at becoming Dr. Haskell’s only undergraduate advisee. She made overture after overture, having mastered the art of the “chance” face-to-face meeting and the letter and e-mail that wouldn’t be screened by Susan. She chafed when Peo stubbornly refused to take her under her wing. Conn’s persistence made Peo recognize her by name or by face, but that was it—and it wasn’t necessarily a good thing. You would want to remember someone you wanted to avoid, Conn observed.

  Conn had all but resigned herself to having to wait years before she could work with Peo. Casting about for ways to be useful, she stumbled upon a grant open to Chicago Public Schools alumni that would pay a student for up to twenty hours’ work a week in an appropriate academic setting. She informed Peo of the grant immediately, let her know that she could basically work for free. Peo wouldn’t budge. She had a graduate research assistant. A boy named Pritam Chettri, with prominent ears, a big smile, and a limp Conn never asked about. Peo didn’t have enough work for someone else to do, she said.

  Instead, Conn caught on with Dr. Dutta, her Intro to the Profession teacher, doing undergraduate-level make-work. The grant money came in handy. On one income, Dad was sending her to college, and Cora was just two years behind.

  Then, during spring break, lightning struck. Peo had work, and Conn had made enough of an impression that Peo thought of her first. It would be perfect for her choose-your-own-adventure grant. Peo would square things with Dr. Dutta. She asked Conn to come in for an interview.

  # # #

  Conn wore a comfortable knee-length dress, and had to buy dressy but comfortable shoes. Her dark, red-tinged hair, usually only seen in a utilitarian ponytail, was primly up in a bun. She decided against makeup. She could never get it right—she was always drawing attention to her too-small nose or too-long mouth when she did her makeup.

  Her commute to school from Humboldt Park, where she still lived with her dad and Cora, was always a pain. It was no better that day—worse than usual because it was raining. She didn’t think about taking a cab until she was already changing trains downtown. She managed to make it to Dr. Haskell’s office reasonably dry and without exploding from nerves or anticipation, but it was close.

  Peo was hanging up the phone as Conn knocked on her open office door. Peo told her to come in, sounding disgusted. Conn hesitated at the threshold. She was back on her heels already, and the interview hadn’t even started.

  “I wish I could have caught you before you left home,” Peo said. “They won’t approve the work I have in mind under your grant program. Not academic enough. I’m sorry.”

  Conn reeled. She thought she might scream.

  Peo looked at her, eyebrows raised. Expectant. What was Conn supposed to say?

  “Professor, I took two long walks and two trains to get here. My feet are soaked. Could we at least talk? Over coffee would be great.” Peo cocked her head at the girl, smiled, and motioned for her to sit down. Then she got them both some coffee.

  Peo Haskell was tall, wiry, with dark hair Conn could tell was straightened and with some silver streaks piping through. She had freckles, mostly under her big, round eyes. The contrast between the freckles and the wrinkles that came with being in her late fifties was amusing. It gave Peo a disarming face. Conn knew enough about Peo not to be disarmed.

  “Thank you, Professor,” Conn said, taking the coffee.

  “I prefer Peo. Still raining out there I take it?”

  “I think I grew gills on the way here.”

  Peo laughed, and Conn thought sadly that she would have nailed this. But it was too late.

  “Let’s talk about you,” Peo said. “In your letters and e-mails, and in our previous meetings, you talked about how excited you are about aerospace engineering. Have you considered becoming an astronaut?”

  Conn had prepared for the question. “I considered it,” she said carefully. “I was pretty obsessed when I was younger, actually.”

  “It’s not for everyone,” Peo said.

  “It wasn’t for me.”

  The women were silent for a moment. Did Peo sense the real reason Conn had given up on becoming an astronaut? That she was broken, and NASA wouldn’t take damaged goods? Conn couldn’t bear the thought of Peo knowing that about her.

  “Um”—Conn sipped her coffee, her heart hammering—“this position you have. Had. You said it wasn’t very academic. May I ask what it is? Was?”

  “I have a company,” Peo said. “I don’t run it day-to-day anymore, but I still keep a hand in, and I’ve been getting more involved the last few months. My assistant back in California was my gatekeeper. She screened everything that was sent to me, and passed along what needed to be passed along. She handled the rest. Until she took maternity leave, and then quit on me as soon as it was over.

  “I’m a little sour on the idea of hiring someone two time zones away again. I wanted to bring you on to do what she did.” She shrugged. When Conn didn’t say anything, Peo continued. “Listening to voice mail, reading e-mail, watching v-mail, reading memos and reports, bringing to me whatever needs my attention, summarizing the rest in a daily report—that’s a failsafe. I would look at your report and make sure you didn’t miss anything I needed to act on.” Your report, she said.

  “Attending the odd meeting and taking notes for me. Nothing that would interfere with your class schedule. Arranging meetings I want to have. Writing basic memos and e-mails with my name on them.

  “So no, not a lot of academic work involved. But you would learn an awful lot about Dynamic Aerospace Technologies, LLC and running an aerospace company in general, if that’s something you would be interested in.” Peo finished, and Conn again wasn’t sure what she was meant to say, other than Great. This would have been my dream come true.

  Instead, she took her cue from Peo, and acted out her portion of the interview. She asked the questions that she thought would naturally come next in a production of Job Interview Theater:

  “How many hours?”

  “The twenty you were going to get paid for, but also more, if you didn’t mind working for free after that.”

  “You don’t need somebody full time?”

  “I’d love to have someone full time, but I wanted to try this out first.”

  “How would I know which things need your attention and which don’t?”

  “You would pick it up. You’re bright, you would get the hang of it in a week. And if you made sure to err on the side of bringing stuff to me to start—you’d learn that way, too.”

  Conn was almost bursting. This was exactly where she wanted to be, exactly how she wanted to start her career sending people into space.

  So she couldn’t get paid for it? She decided she didn’t care.

  “Could I try it out as an unpaid, I don’t know, intern? The money isn’t the point.”

  Peo appraised her. “You cou
ld. But you can’t do this and work for Dr. Dutta. My hesitation is, if it gets to be too much, you might have to scale back—or find something that pays.”

  “By then, I’ll be indispensable. You can start paying me then.”

  Peo laughed. Conn started that day.

  THREE

  The Job

  April, 2030–October, 2031

  When she was manic, before she was diagnosed, Conn developed a habit of creating Memorly files on people and things she was interested in. Like so many other things, she obsessed over them. She crammed her m-file on the moon with facts, scholarly articles, popular culture items, dossiers on all the Apollo astronauts. Her file on Peo Haskell was no smaller. That file, or at least the version of it in Conn’s head, continued to accumulate new material as the two women worked together. Conn thought she knew everything there was to know about Peo, but there was a lot she didn’t, and a lot she hadn’t understood well when she was twelve.

  What she knew: born in Rockford, Illinois. BS, PhD, Aeronautics and Astronautics, Purdue University. Started a payroll services business in her twenties that she sold for $1.2 billion after seven years. Figured out how to make money in maglev rail, and built out infrastructure in greater Chicago, three California cities and Austin, Texas. Responsible for the lowest greenhouse gas emissions in those areas in fifty years; Time.com’s Person of the Year. Leased the whole thing back to state or local governments and sold her interest for a lot more than $1.2 billion. Bought a foundering aerospace company, renamed it Dyna-Tech. Built rockets and satellites and space stations. Wondered why she wasn’t using Dyna-Tech and her money to send herself to the moon. Sent herself to the moon, aged forty-nine. Tried to beat the fiftieth anniversary of the last steps on the moon—which, perhaps providentially, was also Peo’s fiftieth birthday. Lifted off with about a month to spare.

  Had an accident in lunar orbit. Had to turn around and come back without landing.

  Diagnosed with peritoneal cancer.

  What she learned: while fighting cancer, Peo had ceded some of the day-to-day operations of her company to her executives. After she beat the cancer, her reduced role gave her more time to teach engineering at Stanford. Then she came to Illinois Tech to be closer to home. Teaching was easier on her than running the company.

  She had shifted Dyna-Tech’s focus from getting her to the moon to building and operating a space station in orbit around Earth. Then, to everyone’s surprise, she announced a Hail-Mary project that would send a crewed mission to the moons of Saturn. A great expedition into deep space that Peo hoped would rekindle the world’s imagination and interest in space exploration—which was good for Dyna-Tech’s bottom line. Peo’s failure to land on the moon combined with the terrible deaths of Cole Heist and his crew on Mars had made the country lose its appetite for astronaut adventures.

  Not Conn. Conn would have given anything to be going to Saturn. She would have settled for the space station.

  The station, Dyna-Tech Station One, was complete. Dyna-Tech made money by building and repairing spacecraft there for whichever governments and companies had the cash. Its construction and repair work earned the station the nickname Gasoline Alley. If someone went into space, she likely got a ride from Dyna-Tech, and if not, she probably wound up at its space station anyway.

  What it all added up to: in 2029, Dyna-Tech was space travel. And Peo Haskell could take whatever visiting professorships she wanted, but she was still Dyna-Tech.

  # # #

  Peo was right: after a while, it was easy to tell which messages she ought to see and which Conn could file, or give her own perfunctory response to in Peo’s name. Conn erred on the side of showing everything to Peo, as directed, but she did so longer—a few weeks—than she really needed to. And she read and watched what Peo didn’t see. She had to understand it well enough to accurately summarize what she’d withheld each day. One other thing Peo was right about: all the reading and filing and responding and flagging for Peo’s attention taught Conn tons about running an aerospace company. And about the people who ran Dyna-Tech.

  Peo’s current CEO, Hunter Valence, had a tech background short on management. He had succeeded Peo seven years before. He previously had a long stint in the company’s Management Information Systems department, including a brief tenure as Chief Information Officer. Not a conventional choice for top executive, but Hunter had his virtues. He took direction naturally, considered anything Peo said to be gospel, and generally was good at moving pieces around the board. He left the game strategy to others.

  Dyna-Tech’s Chief Operations Officer, the second since Peo’s departure, was of a different stripe. Skylar Reece had the kind of energy and élan Peo had shown the world ten years before, when she was a self-made celebrity aspiring to the moon. It sometimes got Skylar in trouble, when she went too far afield from the company’s mission or explicit instructions from Peo. Her fingerprints were all over company strategy, and she was frequently at odds with Hunter Valence.

  Most of the rank-and-file of the company was devoted to the space station, its cash cow. The company had an honest-to-goodness sales force: account managers, regional directors, even a new-ish Chief Marketing Officer. Peo, and therefore Conn, didn’t hear much from or about the salespeople. In contrast, Hunter, Skylar, and the others who directly reported to Peo seemed to be single-mindedly pursuing the Saturn mission. The feeds speculated it wasn’t really going to happen. Conn learned early on that if Peo expected something to happen, it happened.

  The mission, of course, was Peo’s brainchild, but it was as yet undecided which moon the crew would land on, Titan or Tethys. Peo wanted it that way. By not settling on one moon or the other, Peo kept the focus on getting there, where it needed to be at this stage—four years from departure. Later they could worry about what to do once they were there.

  Conn was fascinated by the subjects discussed in memos, v-mails, e-mails. Corporate infighting over whether naturally-occurring propane and acetylene could be counted on to power equipment on Titan was a thousand times more interesting than differential equations. Through incoming and outgoing e-mails and v-mails she observed the Saturn astronaut candidates being vetted and selected, and she gritted her teeth. But she was doing exactly what she had set out to do: she was helping get people into space.

  She overshot twenty hours a week and usually thirty as well. Her grades were suffering, not from a lack of study time, but because Peo’s work was so much more interesting.

  # # #

  Second semester of junior year, Conn met Grant Loomis.

  She knew who he was. He was one of the Saturn astronauts. Callie Leporis, Al Claussen, and Grant: Conn knew everything she could find out about them. She started with a “Saturn astronauts” m-file, but eventually split it into three. Grant was the youngest of the group, at twenty-five. He would be just short of twenty-eight when the trio left for Saturn.

  He had earned a BS in applied mathematics with a minor in engineering from McGill University in Canada in two and a half years, as a twenty-year-old. He joined NASA out of school, but quit outright and made himself available when he heard that Peo was going to send people to Saturn. Admiring his moxie, Peo hired him and let him compete for a spot on the Saturn crew. He won one of the three spots, and in his case, it wasn’t a difficult decision.

  He wasn’t married. Wasn’t attached at all.

  He enrolled at Illinois Tech for a three-semester stint to complete his BS in aerospace engineering. He had intended to finish his degree once he returned to Earth, but what he learned would never do him more good than when he was in space. So with Peo’s aid and encouragement, Grant became for all intents and purposes a junior in college. Conn’s college.

  Peo succeeded in getting Grant’s training for the Saturn mission accepted as his required Illinois Tech interprofessional credits, and she brought him on as a de facto second academic assistant. Conn remembered Peo telling her that she didn’t have enough work for two people to do, when Conn was tryin
g to get a job with her. Conn didn’t say anything or dwell on it, but between his obviously being a favorite of Peo’s and the fact he was going to Saturn, Grant was somebody Conn could have had a big problem with. It surprised her when she couldn’t stay distant around him.

  He was the kindest, happiest person Conn had ever met. He shaved his head, had dimples, and had a baby-fat paunch around his middle, all of which accented his jovial personality. Once he wasn’t a name on an e-mail distribution list or an m-file stored in Conn’s Wear, Conn grew fond of him. He made Conn laugh, and at first, Conn thought it was because he was funny.

  By the time they started dating, they were already classmates, coworkers, and friends. Conn worried that Grant would get sick of her, seeing her so much. What she was really worried about was that she would get sick of Grant, seeing him so much.

  She didn’t. Grant was enjoyable to be around, anyone would have said so. But more than that, he was a young star astronaut with a trip to another planet in his future. It was the life Conn had wanted for herself, but couldn’t have. Having Grant in her life made her feel like she was participating in his adventure in some small way.

  And Grant could never get enough of Conn. They both worked out of Peo’s office, they studied together, they went to Blackhawks games together, they spent the night together. Always at Grant’s Dyna-Tech-paid South Loop apartment, Conn still living at home on the north side. Grant would light up when he saw Conn, like a switch had been thrown. Conn couldn’t really comprehend it. But as with other things in her life then, she counted her blessings.

  # # #