172 Hours on the Moon (4 page)

Sixteen-year-old Antoine Devereux found himself waiting alone on the Dupleix Métro platform. It had been a long day, one of
the longest. The kind of day that just kept going and going no matter how much time you tried to kill. But the morning had
been different. The morning had been just as beautiful as every single morning had been for the last five months after he
had met Simone at that party at Laurent’s up on Montmartre. Ever since they hooked up the following week, he’d pretty much
given up sleep altogether. He didn’t need it. Being with her was like being connected to an enormous battery. She was the
kind of girl people could fight a world war over. And he almost wished he could move with her to a deserted island that no
one ever visited, just so he could be sure no one else would discover how amazingly perfect she was.

But now it was too late.

Some idiot guy named Noël had shown up out of nowhere and put better ideas in her head. Well, different ideas anyway.

And in April, damn it, of all months. In April, in Paris!
Could it be any more tragic? If someone decided to hand out a prize for being the biggest failure, he was guaranteed to win
just by showing up.

He looked at his watch. The train should have been here ages ago.

Resigned, he left the station and decided to walk home. He headed toward the Eiffel Tower first. It was starting to get dark,
and the tourists were cramming themselves into its elevators like sardines for the ride to the top. One time he and Simone
had done that, too. It had been a little cheesy, obviously. No Parisian with any self-respect would go up to the top of that
tourist trap. But you couldn’t ignore the fact that there was something romantic about it, and Simone had loved it.

It had been a few weeks before Christmas. He’d waited for her in the bitter cold by the north foot of the tower. She’d been
half an hour late, and his hands were almost blue when she finally showed up. Luckily she’d let him warm them up in her sweater
while they rode the elevator to the top. Antoine had waited until the other tourists finished looking at the view and disappeared
back down to pull a bottle of wine out of his inside coat pocket. They’d shared the ice-cold bottle of red and then she’d
told him she loved him. But then that must have been in November.

Five months earlier.

Relationships should really come with expiration dates stamped on them so at least people would have a chance to get out before
the whole thing turned totally rancid.

He kept going along rue de Rivoli. Most of the shops were closed for the night, and aside from the incessant, loud traffic,
the long street was pretty much devoid of people. He thought about what she was doing right now. It had only been an hour
since he was sitting on her bed in her apartment on the beautiful avenue de Suffren, but that was all in the past.

Was
he
there yet?

Was Noël sitting in her room? Had Noël just walked in and replaced him?

Was she happy, or was she still thinking about him? Not that knowing would do him any good. Part of him hoped she was sobbing
and miserable, that she was regretting how she’d acted, that she would be run over by a train on her way to school tomorrow.
Part of him hoped she would fall down onto the tracks and that the train wheel would slice her skull in half, that her guts
would ooze out her mouth and her blood would spray up onto the terrified commuters. And then there was the other part of him,
the part that still loved her with all his might. The part that wanted her to have the best life possible, whether with him
or with someone who made her happier than he could.

Antoine painstakingly ran through the last several months to understand why she’d broken up with him. Was it something he
did? Something he said? Or something he didn’t do or didn’t say? He desperately racked his brain for the answer, an obvious,
clear solution that would make him turn around and go back, ring her doorbell and say,
Yes, I’m sorry for what I did
.

But sometimes it’s already too late before you open your mouth.

The boat had simply sailed on their relationship. And it hadn’t
just left port. The whole pier had been torn down, the water drained, and the whole place converted into the world’s loneliest
parking lot.

Suddenly Antoine wished he could just disappear for good and never see Simone or this city or this world again.

“Pardon me. Do you have a light?”

Antoine stopped. A man in his forties in a suit was standing on the sidewalk in front of him, blocking his way. He was fumbling
with a pack of cigarettes.

“Just a sec.” Antoine searched his jacket pockets and found a lighter. He passed it to the man, who lit it.

“You wouldn’t happen to have a cigarette, too?”

“Sure,” Antoine replied, perplexed that the man didn’t just take one out of his own pack.

“Thanks,” he said.

“No problem.”

The man nodded at an enormous billboard over the shop across the street.

“Don’t forget about the deadline, eh?” he said, and started walking away. Antoine didn’t have a chance to respond before the
man disappeared down the street.

Antoine glanced at the billboard. It was black, with an enormous moon half hidden in shadows:

DO YOU WANT TO GO TO THE MOON
?

He’d heard about the mission and that NASA was going to take three teenagers on a trip to the moon; a bunch of people at school
were talking about it. But he hadn’t given it a second thought.

And it was right about then that it hit him:
What were you
just wishing a second ago? You wanted to get out of here. Well … you can’t get farther away than that
.

He’d already decided. He would sign up. As soon as he got home. Damn it, he would go to the moon, as far away as he could
possibly go.

Then she could sit there in her room holding hands with Noël until she got arthritis, for all he cared.

When he finally reached home, he didn’t say anything to his parents, pretended like nothing was up, and forced a smile from
deep down in his gut when they asked how Simone was.

“I was just thinking about Simone,” his mother said. “Maybe you’d like to invite her over to dinner soon? Maybe this Sunday?
We haven’t seen her for ages, and she’s such a great girl. Don’t you think so, Arnaud? Arnaud?”

“Huh? What is it?” he heard his father yell from the living room, his newspaper rustling.

“I was just saying we think Simone is such a great girl, isn’t she?”

“Yes, yes,” his father’s voice said from the living room after a brief pause. “A really sweet girl. You have to take care
of that one, Antoine. You hear me?”

Antoine felt his heart rising into his throat and realized he might throw it up at any moment, bloody and useless.

“Yeah,” he forced himself to say. “Yeah, I’ll ask her.”

Then he went into his room. He powered up his Mac and entered the address:
www.nasamoonreturn.com
.

With a few clicks of his mouse, he found tons of pictures and film clips from the old moon landings in the sixties and
seventies, interviews, and information about the contest. Applicants had to be between fourteen and eighteen to enter, but
of course he already knew that. He also knew he probably would have no problem at all passing the medical and psychological
examinations. After all, he was in good physical condition, and no one in his family had ever been mentally ill or anything
like that. His parents and relatives
were
kind of strange, true, but that wasn’t the same as saying he was likely to suddenly snap and start hunting down his crewmates
with an ax.

NASA’s rigorous three-month training program was another thing altogether. Would he have the stamina to go through with it?
From what he understood, it included daily running sessions, logic tests, stress tests, and a number of flights in the Vomit
Comet, an aircraft that quickly climbed to thirty thousand feet, only to point its nose straight down and dive for the deck,
giving passengers a chance to experience weightlessness for twenty-five seconds at a time. Or nausea for two hours straight,
if they were really unlucky. Then there were the high-altitude flight chambers used to familiarize trainees with the symptoms
of oxygen deprivation, or hypoxia, as it was called. And finally they would have to spend a substantial amount of time in
the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory at Johnson Space Center, where a 202-by-102-foot pool, complete with a mockup of the spacecraft
and landing module, would train them to enter and exit the modules at a depth of forty feet, simulating zero gravity. This
was definitely no joke. Not to mention the hundreds, if not thousands, of pages of theory they would have to read and learn
before they left the ground.

But first he had to apply, of course. And then just wait. The
three winners would be notified in mid-July, he read. They would have to be absent from school from April until June of the
following year for the training and final mission.

The winners would be flown first to New York to appear on
The Late Show
and then to the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, where they would undergo the training before the launch from Kennedy
Space Center in Florida in mid-July. He’d have to postpone a few finals, but that shouldn’t be any problem. Besides, it’s
not like he could have a better excuse.

According to the information, the three winners would spend 172 hours on the moon plus the trip from Earth and back, which
would take just over a week. They would stay at the DARLAH 2 moon base (weird, he’d never heard anything about a base being
built on the moon, and he knew a few things about space travel), and from there they would perform a number of experiments
on the surface. Top-notch astronauts with years of experience would be with them at all times and ensure their safety every
step of the way. And then there would be media coverage, of course. The contest winners would have to be prepared to do interviews
on TV, on radio, and online before, during, and after their trip. They would have to answer questions online, write blogs,
and go on an international press junket afterward.

Antoine looked at the list of cities they’d have to go to: New York, L.A., Chicago, Boston, Washington, D.C., London, Paris,
Berlin, Stockholm, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Sydney, and so on.

Well, it’s not like that would be so bad
, Antoine thought, smiling faintly at the notion that he would get to see the whole world in addition to space.

Sitting there in front of his computer reading the information, it was like Simone had been blown out of his consciousness.
His only thought now was that he had to win. His name had to be selected.

He quickly Googled the statistics. It turned out that only about 8.5 percent of Earth’s population was between fourteen and
eighteen. If it was true that there were about seven billion people on Earth, that would make about six hundred million teenagers
out there. And if you then discounted the teens from various parts of the world who didn’t have access to the Internet — or
any other chances to enter the contest — the number of actual contestants might be as small as three hundred million.

So that was only three hundred million other people he had to beat.

The odds definitely weren’t in his favor. Three hundred million to one. There was pretty much a bigger chance of just about
anything else happening in his life. Like Simone calling him in the next fifteen seconds.

A quick search did not lift his spirits any.

According to one page he found, it turned out that:

The odds of scoring 300 points in bowling was 11,500 to 1
.

The odds of getting a hole in one in golf: 5,000 to 1
.

The odds of being canonized and thus famous for all eternity: 20,000,000 to 1
.

The odds of becoming an astronaut: 13,200,000 to 1
.

The odds of being attacked by a great white shark: 11,500,000 to 1
.

The odds of being killed in a plane crash: 354,319 to 1
.

The odds of being killed by parts falling from a plane: 10,000,000 to 1
.

The odds of winning an Oscar: 11,500 to 1
.

The odds of becoming president: 10,000,000 to 1
.

The odds of hooking up with a supermodel: 88,000 to 1
.

The odds of winning an Olympic gold medal: 662,000 to 1
.

The odds of seriously injuring yourself shaving: 685,000 to 1
.

The odds of being killed by a meteor landing specifically on YOUR house: 182,128,880,000,000 to 1
.

That last one was basically the only one that was less likely than his getting to go to the moon.

Antoine sat there looking at the numbers for a minute. Then he leaned over his keyboard and entered his name, birth date,
phone number, and address.

He thought about it one last time.

Then he hit
send
.

The experienced astronaut eyed the lunar lander with a certain skepticism. Commander Lloyd Nadolski was forty-two. He’d been
with NASA for almost fifteen years and was one of the few astronauts who had completed three missions in space. Now he was
in one of the hangars at Kennedy Space Center, NASA’s launch center located on Merritt Island on the coast of Florida. And
he was not impressed with what he was seeing.

“Well, what do you think?”

He turned to see Ralph Pierce approaching him. Pierce was the lead engineer responsible for constructing the lander
Demeter
. NASA had been working on it for years and had not finished the final version until less than a week ago. Nadolski peered
at the vessel again.

“Can it fly?” he asked, not directing his question to anyone.

“It flies, Commander. I can promise you that. We tested it again last Friday. All systems are working perfectly.”

Nadolski nodded without looking at Pierce and walked around the lander. It had been designed to look like the vehicles that
were used in the 1969 moon landing and the missions of the early seventies. Would it withstand the stresses? Flying was one
thing; being able to rely on it 100 percent in space was another. There was no room for errors up there.

As far as Nadolski knew, the decision to use the almost fifty-year-old design, as opposed to building something newer and
better, had come from the top, maybe from the president himself. At least the marketing department was satisfied. The classic
design looked familiar to a lot of people and would unquestionably elicit memories among the oldest audience members.

Ultimately that’s what it came down to: the audience. And money. NASA’s popularity had been sinking steadily in recent decades
following a couple of serious accidents and some missions that were not exactly audience-friendly. The space agency had sent
astronauts up to repair satellites, solar arrays, and particle detectors. There had been no indications that a manned mission
to Mars was going to happen anytime soon. NASA’s websites were getting as little traffic as a mothballed museum.

Nadolski scratched his head. It was hard to find sense in all this. The questions started nagging at him again, as they had
periodically since he’d heard about these teenagers he was supposed to bring on the mission. Who knew how they were going
to behave? What if they panicked? Messed around with equipment on board without anyone realizing what they’d done? Space was
no place for children.

He shook off the thought. He’d been working at NASA long enough to know that its system of checks and balances was absolutely
top-notch. And this time they had even less room for error. The worst-case scenario was that this mission would be the death
knell for the whole organization.

“Well,” Nadolski said after a long silence, “as long as it goes without a hitch …” He let this statement hang in the air before
adding, “If it doesn’t, I can promise you I’ll come back more pissed off than you’ve ever seen me. Heads will roll.”

Engineer Pierce forced a smile. “Don’t give it another thought. I guarantee it’ll do what it has to do.” He turned and left
the hangar while Nadolski stood there, giving the lander one last look.
You can only guarantee that
, he thought,
because we both know if it doesn’t work, you’ll never see me back here on Earth again
.

Nadolski cautiously kicked one of the wheel struts up by the chassis. It was a kick with almost no force, more like a nudge,
but it was still enough that a little piece of the lander came loose.

Damn it…
.

He bent over, picked up the small, rectangular disk, and decided he’d give it to the evening shift before he went home.