172 Hours on the Moon Read online

  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.

  NADOLSKI

  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.

  PAPER

  Mia was at the bus stop waiting for a bus that was already ten minutes late. Summer had already arrived, and it should have been a warm, sunny afternoon, the kind of day where you hung out on the beach with your friends until Norway’s subarctic sun finally set around midnight and everyone stole home. Instead it was pouring rain, and her black hair was plastered annoyingly to her face. Mia was shivering in her thin jacket and mindlessly drumming a rhythm with her leg as she sat on the bench.

  Her band Rogue Squadron had been around for almost two years now — one year and eight months, to be precise — but it still hadn’t gotten anywhere. Sure, the band members were young; there weren’t many people their age who’d been doing it as long as they had, but still. Mia must have written forty songs in that time, coming up with most of the chords and riffs. And all the lyrics. They had recorded a demo months earlier, but they had never sent it anywhere. Their Facebook pages were receiving a moderate number of hits at best. Their only gig had been one concert the previous year at Metropolis, which hosts a lot of underground music performances as part of Fantastic Underground 10. Things weren’t going that well for Rogue Squadron. Something had to be done.

  Mia spotted the bus winding its way through traffic. She stepped out onto the sidewalk and held out her hand to signal to the driver that she wanted to get on. She’d always hated having to do that — it looked totally ridiculous. What was the point? She was standing at the bus stop, wasn’t she? But if you didn’t hold out your hand and keep it there, stiffly, until the bus pulled to a stop, the bus driver would just drive right by.

  Mia waved her arm a few times to be sure the driver had seen her. The bus stopped, and she used her left hand to shake the water out of her hair as she climbed on and set her coins on the tray in front of the driver.

  “One youth fare to Madla,” she said.

  He looked at her, tired and uninte
rested. “Do you have ID?”

  That was bus drivers’ favorite sentence. There was money to be made asking questions like that. Maybe he could get one more person to pay the full adult fare. Never before in the history of the world was there a time when kids under sixteen had to lug around their IDs.

  “Do you have a license to drive this bus?” Mia replied.

  “Of course.”

  “Can I see it?” Mia asked.

  “No. You’re the one who needs to show ID if you want the youth fare. That’s just the way it is, little lady.”

  Mia realized she was almost enjoying this. A little spat with the driver, delaying the bus and making all the passengers glare at her a little, suited her just fine right now. The driver finally gave up, took her coins, and returned her change.

  “Take a seat,” he mumbled.

  “Drive safely,” she replied, and winked before plodding down the center aisle and finding a seat in the very back of the bus.

  Leonora, Silje, and Kari were waiting outside the rehearsal space when Mia walked up. They too were wet from the rain.

  “Thought you’d drowned,” Kari said irritably when Mia reached them.

  “The bus was late. And there was a little argument about my fare.”

  “I don’t know why you can’t just bring your school ID or something,” Leonora said.

  “Well, what would be the fun of that?” Mia laughed, unlocking the door.

  Their rehearsal space was in a warehouse in Kvernevik, and they shared it with two other bands that were almost never there. Which meant that Mia and Rogue Squadron had nearly unlimited access to it, and sometimes they spent whole weekends out there, playing until late at night and sleeping on mattresses on the floor. They didn’t care that it was the most run-down rehearsal space in all of Stavanger, its walls imbued with old sweat and desperation from impossible solos and hopeless chords.

  The room was in a subbasement below the actual basement and didn’t have any windows. Daylight was simulated by a string of overhead light fixtures and a floor lamp or two. It didn’t help that Leonora chain-smoked, occasionally making it hard for the various band members to see one another through the haze. Plus, the floor was covered with empty bottles, wires, broken drumsticks, and leftover food.

  They didn’t usually talk much as they plugged in their guitars, tuned the drums, turned on the amps, and adjusted the settings. Mia finished tuning her guitar, moved over in front of her various effect pedals, and caught Leonora’s eyes behind the drums. She gave the drummer a quick nod and then heard “one, two, three, four,” and she dropped her hand to the strings and started into the song “II.”

  It was one of their fastest songs and should have been great for a warm-up. Mia had written it on one of the first days in January, and it was about those two skyscrapers in New York that had been hit by airplanes in a terrorist attack.

  Before the band even hit the last note of the song, Leonora quit playing without warning. The guitars kept going for a couple beats, as if they had to slow down before they could stop. Then there was total silence in the room.

  It hadn’t sounded good. Far from it. It wasn’t that they’d played anything wrong. It just wasn’t working. It felt like an enormous elephant had waltzed into their rehearsal space and sat down on them. The four girls avoided making eye contact.

  “I just don’t think we’re getting anywhere,” Mia finally said. “I don’t know. In a way it’s like … like we’ve been playing the same songs so long we’re starting to get worse.”

  “What do you mean?” Leonora asked.

  “I mean we’ve got to do something more than just sit here going over and over the same stuff. What if we gave a concert soon? Tried going into the studio? Something. I mean, what do we actually want to get out of this? Sometimes I wonder if we’re just playing together because we’re friends, and we could’ve just as easily been doing something different together instead.”

  “Like what?” Silje asked.

  “I don’t know. It’s just that … I want this. This band is the best thing that’s happened to me. You guys are. Sometimes I think this is the only thing I have that’s worth anything. That at least I can think, Okay, no matter what, I’m in a band. But lately, well, it’s like we’re not getting anywhere.”

  Kari seemed grumpy and flopped back limply onto the sofa. “What are you really trying to say, Mia? That we need to practice more? I mean, we’re already here every other day!”

  “It’s not about that,” Mia protested. “But we need to decide what we want.”

  “All right, what do you want, then?” Silje asked, making every effort not to sound pissed off, so she wouldn’t wreck the mood so early in the session. “If you could have whatever you wanted, what would you wish for?”

  Mia thought about it. For a long time. But that was mostly for appearances’ sake. Because she’d already figured this out a long time ago. She thought about this every night when she sat in her room writing songs. She thought about it before she fell asleep, and she pictured how it could be, all of it. Album covers, tours, airports. Hotel rooms.

  “I would wish that we could live off Rogue Squadron,” she replied. “That we would release our music and tour four months a year, at least. That we all lived together in a big apartment that was also our studio, an apartment in downtown Oslo. That we were a band that meant something to people.”

  The other three girls nodded tentatively at what she said.

  “Okay, good,” began Silje, who had always been the most realistic of all of them. “Then …” Silje stopped abruptly. Someone was pounding on the door. They all heard the sound of hands hitting the metal door one floor above them.

  “Who’s that?” Mia asked, looking at Kari.

  “How should I know,” she replied. “I can’t see through concrete.”

  Leonora went out into the hall and let someone in. Mia heard a voice that she immediately recognized.

  Mom, she thought. What in the world is she doing here?

  For a second she was scared that something might have happened to her little brother, Sander. He was only nine and not quite like other kids, but she really loved the weird little guy who always had to wear a helmet when he was outside and who was always hoping winter would come so he could pull a knit hat over his helmet to hide it from view. Had something happened to him? Had someone died?

  She didn’t have time to think anything else before her mother hurried into the room and flung her arms around Mia’s neck. “Congratulations! Oh, to think, my own daughter!” She practically squealed as Mia struggled for air in her embrace.

  “What are you doing here?” Mia asked harshly when she realized that no one was dead. “What do you want?”

  But her mother didn’t hear the disparaging tone. She only heard her own excitement.

  “Mia, you won! You won!”

  “What did I win? What are you talking about?”

  “You’re going to the moon, Mia!”

  As if someone were offering her an armed atomic bomb, Mia instinctively took a step back. Her mother was standing in front of her, holding an envelope in her hand. Mia could plainly see NASA’s logo on the white paper.

  At that moment she hated her mother.

  Hated her for coming here and interrupting them. Hated her for pushing her way into the rehearsal room and embarrassing her and making her look like a little kid. Hated her for never listening. Right then Mia hated her mother simply for being her mother.

  “Did you open my mail?” was all Mia could get out. The other three girls stood there silently.

  Her mother was confused. That wasn’t the response she’d been expecting.

  “No, well, we, uh … your father and I …” her mother began, straining to find the right words, the way she always did when her daughter was mad at her. “Well, we saw that it was, well, uh, you know, that it said NASA on … on the envelope, and then … we wanted to make sure it was true before we drove all the way out here. I’m sure yo
u understand that? Right?”

  “Dad’s here, too?”

  “No, he’s at home with Sander.”

  “Give me the letter,” Mia said tersely.

  “Oh, Mia, honey, this is a wonderful, wonderful opportunity. It’s the experience of a lifetime,” her mother said, handing over the envelope.

  Mia held it in her trembling hands for a few seconds before she crumpled it and flung it at the wall.

  “What part don’t you get, Mom? Huh? What is so unbelievably hard for you to understand? I said I didn’t want to go, didn’t I? I said that a million times! What the hell is there for me to do on the moon?”

  “Mia, honey …”

  “You’re interrupting our rehearsal, Mom. You have to go.”

  Mia’s mother tried to hide that she was on the verge of tears. “We’ll talk about it later, Mia. Right? Have a good practice session.” She walked toward the door, then paused, her eyes on the floor. “You guys ought to clean this place. It’s atrocious.”

  Then she left.

  Mia and the others waited until they heard the sound of a car driving away.

  “Shit. That is without a doubt the craziest thing I’ve ever heard,” Silje exclaimed, staring at Mia.

  “So the Hair was right when she included your name as one of the people who’d signed up for the moon contest?” Leonora asked, surprised, fumbling around in her pack of cigarettes for a smoke. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

  Silje just kept staring at her friend, totally dumbstruck. “Shit! You’ve got to be kidding me! You won?” she said in disbelief. “Do you get how many people signed up for that? There must’ve been over a billion.”

  Mia felt faint. They hadn’t discussed the moon or the lottery since that day in German class. And now? Now she had been selected out of millions of entrants to go to the moon, even though she didn’t want to, and all her friends were going to think she’d lied to them.