Back | Next
Contents

Chapter 1

“. . . And if you look out the window on the starboard side, you will see your first close-up view of the far side of the Moon,” shuttle captain Morris Joon announced over the loudspeaker. “In about four and one half minutes, we’ll be turning the port side toward the Moon, then doing our orbital insertion thrust maneuvers. So, buckle up, sit back, and relax. We will be in lunar orbit for about another thirty minutes or so. Once we get clearance we will start our final approach into Armstrong City Spaceport. Captain out.”

Reluctantly abandoning the oblong porthole, Barbara swam-floated into her seat as the seat belt sign turned on. She managed to pull herself into place partway above her chair, then the magnetic harness points on her white EVA suit aligned it with the harness on the chair and pulled her the rest of the way down. The south pole magnetic surfaces on the straps locked in place against the north poles of the seat with rapid clicks. She made sure her helmet was in easy reach in case of emergency.

Barbara’s stomach quivered. It felt as if she had a million butterflies flying around inside, though not because of the microgravity. After months of training and instruction at Houston, too busy even to stop and think, she was hours away from joining the Bright Sparks.

She felt nervous about actually meeting Dr. Keegan Bright. She was just as nervous about actually meeting the other Sparks. Dr. Bright’s show and his company were known worldwide, with millions of views and likes every day. They were all honest-to-goodness celebrity superstars. And now, Barbara was expected to just swoop in and be one of them. She had no clue how that was going to happen.

“Don’t stress over it, big girl,” her father had advised her. “Approach the job like a broken tractor that needs fixing, or any other problem you face in everyday life: check things out, make an assessment of the situation, then get to work.”

Her dad had made it sound so easy. If she was honest with herself, she was scared out of her wits, but hoped it wouldn’t show.

When she had left Earth a couple of days before, the near side of the Moon had shown a crescent of sunlight, but that had receded into a sliver. She could see the Moon’s outline, a gray shadow against the starlit sky. As they neared it, more details began to spring into view.

She managed to settle down and tried to relax for just a moment. She tapped Fido in his pouch on the shoulder of her spacesuit. The PDE sprang to life and projected her desktop of choice in front of her: walnut-sized icons floating in easy reach depending on how often she accessed them, with a holo of her family and Tabitha-cat in the background.

“Fido, go polarized for privacy,” she whispered softly. She reached in her other sleeve pocket, pulled out her polarized lenses and placed them on the bridge of her nose. “Data entry pad mode.”

The device projected a hand- and finger-driven menu before her. The qwerty keypad hologram displayed on the seatback fold down table as she dropped it in place. She tapped at the virtual keyboard for a bit and waved through the menus until she connected to the shuttle’s wireless router. With a glance to one side at her sole seatmate, Nelson, an ebullient, dark-skinned man from Cote d’Ivoire on his way to the Moon to negotiate for mineral shipments who was intent on the latest news in the Financial Times, she opened the Bright Sparks Web site and turned on the talking blog posts.

For weeks while she was in training, Dr. Bright had teased the big announcement he was going to make with a thirty-second video explaining that a new Bright Spark was about to report for duty. The bloggers had been in an uproar of speculation, trying to guess who that would be or where s/he would come from. About six hours before Barbara was due to land in Armstrong City, Dr. Bright had revealed her name in a worldwide live post that went out over the Internet, terrestrial television, and over the Bright Sparks app.

The net had exploded immediately with speculations and comments even before he had finished talking about her, and filled her new Sparks inbox with questions, congratulations, complaints, images, and memes. Barbara ignored all the negative comments. The most famous scientist on the Moon was welcoming her to his hand-picked group of young scientists and engineers. Dr. Bright went on to sing Barbara’s praises and his hopes for her future. She played the recording over and over again.

The crew of the shuttle had floated back one at a time to congratulate her. Barbara couldn’t help but beam with pride; yet, at the same time, she hoped she could live up to expectations.

Captain Joon’s voice interrupted the headphone audio.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we’re about to begin orbital insertion thrust. Please be prepared for a bit of a jerk and then continuous acceleration for a couple of moments.”

Barbara waited for several seconds with her hands gripping the arms of the seat until she felt the slight kick of the electromagnetic engines. The EMdrive thrust peaked at close to one gravity and pushed her down into her seat. For the first time in days, she finally felt her normal weight—her Earth weight. Almost as soon at the thrust started, it was over. Within a couple minutes, the shuttle was slowed down and locked into lunar orbit, resuming microgravity once again. The butterflies in her stomach fluttered back to life.

The training period had been intense but awesome. Barbara assembled every day with a group of adult scientists, technicians and specialists, all preparing to go to the Moon for their various projects who needed to learn the ins and outs of living there. Though she was by several years the youngest person in the group, they all treated her with the same respect they showed one another. At Dr. Bright’s request, she had kept the secret of why she was going, but it helped buoy her through the hard work. When the group ‘graduated,’ the center held a small party. Barbara desperately wanted to blog about it, but knew she couldn’t. Not yet. Now, she could tell the world—in fact, the whole solar system.

In her luggage in the hold of the shuttle, Barbara had packed her best party clothes and best sandals and some cosmetics, but she had never been much of a fashionista. It wasn’t just that she couldn’t afford fancy clothing, but she really wasn’t that interested in it. She found it perfectly natural and comfortable to spend all day in coveralls, much as she would have done on the family farm. What was going on around her was far more interesting.

“. . . On final approach to Armstrong City Spaceport,” Captain Joon said pleasantly. “To port, we’re now passing by the Apollo 12 and the Apollo 14 landing sites. If you look closely, you can see crews working on the museums going up there in the future sites for Conrad and Shepard Cities. Please remain seated and we’ll have you on the ground momentarily. Thank you.”

Barbara stared out the window, afraid to blink because she might miss something. The shuttle was slowly decelerating toward the bright lights ahead. The first thing she could see over the rim of one of the larger peaks was the edge of the city. The Armstrong Hotel and Casino triple towers stood as twenty-two-story mirror-image buildings that were lit up like holograms Barbara had seen of Las Vegas on Earth, another one of the million places she had never yet gone. That thought made her a bit giddy. She had lived only a four-hour maglev trip from Las Vegas, but she managed to visit a place four hundred thousand kilometers away from home first.

Armstrong City lay mostly underground, so from above it looked like an arrangement of crop tunnels covered in pale gray lunar regolith. The multicolored lighting seemed to have no particular plan or scheme to its design. Running through the city from top to bottom (north to south) and side to side (east to west) was the “cross of corridors.” Like the center of a complex spider web, smaller “strands” spread out in all directions seemingly at random. Barbara knew from studying the map of the city that the two main travel tubes were big enough to drive a flatbed cargo truck through. The tubes were the main highways of the city. Though she couldn’t see it yet, at the middle where they met was a ring of tunnels surrounding Tranquility Base Park and Museum where the Apollo 11 landing had taken place so many decades ago. The flag and statues of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin in spacesuits stood there, marking the first Moon landing. The hotel brochure pages claimed you could see the park from every room on that side. A replica of the Lunar Excursion Module had been rebuilt there, too. Barbara craned her head, trying to spot it out of the porthole.

The shuttle looped around the city in a holding pattern as it continued to slow its descent, and made a slight dogleg maneuver, clearing the hotel and the habitat center. Barbara gazed at the city, trying to pick out other landmarks. Farther south and east, the three large satellite communications dishes were surrounded by larger buildings. On one of them, the largest, she spotted the blue and red logo identifying it as the NASA Lunar Headquarters. Barbara could see what appeared to be gravel roads spreading out from the buildings and heading out from the edge of the city every which way, skirting craters and mountains as they snaked off to remote and as yet unpopulated regions of the Moon.

As the city grew closer, she thought she could make out the Bright Sparks Central habitat area just south and west of the hotel towers. It was the last thing she was sure of identifying before bright blue lights came on around a large concrete square, the spaceport’s landing apron. The shuttle’s engines vibrated under them. Barbara clutched her armrests.

At the apron’s edge were a set of three concentric circles of blue lights with a big green lighted X in the center. Just as the shuttle crossed into the landing zone to the north of the apron, Barbara could make out the domed center point which was the Apollo 11 Museum. The actual historical landing site was just below her. She let out a crow of excitement when she glimpsed it.

“Fido, zoom in on the statues, please?”

“Of course, Barbara.”

Her glasses focused instantly, pinpointing the two spotlit figures in the round park underneath the dome. There they were: Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, standing beside the American flag that they had planted there in lunar soil more than a century before. And now, here she was, Barbara Winton from Iowa, flying over the very spot where humankind first set foot on another world, about to follow in their footsteps. She hoped they weren’t too big for her.

Comments from Bright Sparks Weblog:

Back | Next
Framed