172 Hours on the Moon
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Synopsis
It's been more than 40 years since NASA sent the first men to the moon, and to grab some much-needed funding and attention, they decide to launch an historic international lottery in which three lucky teenagers can win a week-long trip to moon base DARLAH 2 - a place that no one but top government officials even knew existed until now. The three winners, Antoine, Midori, and Mia, come from all over the world, and they have only one thing in common: They aren't especially interested in space travel. But just before the scheduled launch, the teenagers each experience strange, inexplicable events, one of which contains a direct warning not to travel to the moon. Little do they know that there was a reason NASA never sent anyone back there until now - a sinister reason. But the countdown has already begun, and as soon as they set foot on the moon...everything goes wrong. Strap yourself in for this chilling adventure from a young Norwegian author on the rise. You'll want to keep your lights on long after you've heard the last chapter.
Release date: April 17, 2012
Publisher: Hachette Audio
Print pages: 368
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172 Hours on the Moon
Johan Harstad
“Gentlemen, it’s time,” Dr. said, eyeing the seven men in suits seated around the large conference table. They were some of the most powerful people in the country, together in the largest meeting room at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C. It was nearing eleven o’clock at night.
They would have to make a decision soon.
“So, what’s it going to be, then?” Dr. asked impatiently.
The cigarette smoke in the room was thick and impenetrable, making the atmosphere even gloomier. All rules forbidding smoking in government offices had fallen by the wayside as nerves came to a head.
“Well,” one of the seven began, chewing on his pencil, “it’s an incredibly risky proposition. You must know that. Is it really worth it?”
“People had already completely lost interest in the moon missions before the last launch in 1972,” another one said. “Why do you think they’d be on board with us going back?”
“It could be done,” a third said. “We could tell them there’s a good chance of finding large amounts of tantalum seventy-three at the moon’s south pole.”
The room was suddenly buzzing, the tension starting to crescendo.
“You don’t want to go back to the south pole, trust me.”
“Of course not.”
“It’ll kill you.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“If you ask me, I say leave the whole place alone.”
“Gentlemen,” Dr. interrupted, “do you have any idea how important a discovery tantalum seventy-three would be? Most current technology is dependent on this material. People would be throwing money at us.”
“So we’re going up there to search for natural resources? I thought—” one of the other men said.
Dr. interrupted him again. “No, we’re not.”
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff cleared his throat. “Let me put the cards on the table for you, gentlemen. We are not going to the south pole of the moon, and whether or not tantalum seventy-three is found on the moon is completely immaterial.”
Confusion spread through the room.
“I presume some of you are familiar with Project Horizon?” he continued.
The man who had spoken first asked, “You mean the research done in the late fifties? The plans to build a military base on the moon? I thought that was scrapped.”
Dr. shook his head. “The base isn’t military.” He looked at the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. “It’s just a research station. Isn’t that right?”
The chairman didn’t answer. He gave the man a friendly look. “It’s called DARLAH 2. It was constructed in the seventies under the name Operation DP7.”
“But why… in the world… why haven’t any of us heard of it before?”
“All information concerning DARLAH 2 was classified top secret until just recently. For security reasons.” He paused for a second, pondering whether or not he ought to say any more.
Dr. beat him to it, explaining, “DARLAH 2 was built from 1974 to 1976. But the base is in the Sea of Tranquility, where, as you know, Armstrong and Aldrin originally landed in sixty-nine. None of the other landings occurred there.”
“Why was it built?” one of the men who had been quiet up until that point asked.
“We found something,” Dr. replied.
“Could you elaborate?”
“We don’t know what it is. The plan was to continue our studies and station personnel on the moon, but as you already know, after 1976 we lost most of our funding. And as I hinted, finances weren’t the only reason the moon program was terminated. The truth is that… what we found up there is not the type of discovery for which one receives money for further research. We would have been asked to leave it alone. So we pretended it never existed… and, anyway, the signal disappeared.”
“Until it showed up again last fall,” the chairman of the Joint Chiefs added.
“The signal? It? What the hell is it?” one of the confused men exclaimed. Dr. looked at the man who had spoken, then leaned over and pulled something out of his briefcase. He set a folder on the table and pulled out a four-by-six photo.
“This picture was taken on the moon by Apollo 15’s James Irwin. The astronaut in the photo is David R. Scott.”
“But… who’s the other person in the background?” one of the men asked.
“We don’t know.”
“You don’t know? What the hell is going on here?”
“There’s a proper time for everything, gentlemen. All the information you’re asking for will be made available once we’ve unanimously voted to proceed with the plan—which, may I remind you, the president himself is in full support of. Now, can we discuss how we’re going to explain the fact that we’ve had an unused base sitting up there for forty years without anyone finding out about it?”
“Unused? Are you trying to say that no one has ever stayed at this base before?” one of the astronauts in the room asked. “What about the people who built it?”
“They were never inside. The modules were assembled on the surface by machines, not by people.”
One of the men already on board with the plan stood up, smiling confidently: “We’ll say we’ve spent forty years testing it, making sure it works perfectly.”
“And does it?” someone else asked.
“In principle, yes,” replied the man, whose smile wasn’t quite so confident anymore.
“In principle isn’t good enough, is it?”
“It’ll have to do. We have to go back within a decade, before someone else gets there first.”
Several of the men present still seemed skeptical, if not stunned.
“But who are you going to send up there? What are they going to do?”
“The first expedition will accomplish three simple things. One: They’ll test the base and make sure it’s working the way it’s supposed to. Two: They’ll research the possibility of mining rare Earth metals that will give the United States a huge advantage in the technology manufacturing market. And three—this is the most important of all, gentlemen—they will attract media attention, which will consequently secure sufficient financial support to continue our research and… get rid of any potential… problems.”
“Problems like what?” someone asked.
Dr. held his hand up in front of him as if to stop the words. “As I said, we’ll get to that. The idea is to turn the whole thing into a celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the first manned mission to land on the moon. We’ll build new, improved versions of the classic Apollo program rockets from the sixties and seventies. That’s guaranteed to make people feel nostalgic.”
“But no one under the age of forty-five even remembers those Apollo missions.”
Dr. waited a long time before speaking. He was a very intelligent man, and having to explain every detail to these ludicrous excuses for public figures was grating on his nerves. Fortunately, he had played this conversation out in his head many times, and he had an answer for anything they might ask, including the perfect idea for getting the entire world interested in a new mission. “Gentlemen, what if we send some teenagers up there?”
No one responded. They all just sat there, waiting, assuming he was joking.
But he wasn’t.
“You want to send kids? Why in the world would you want to put kids on the moon?” someone asked.
Dr. smiled patronizingly and replied, “If we select three young people, teenagers, who get to accompany the astronauts, we’ll get a whole new generation excited about space exploration. It will be nothing less than a global sensation.”
“But… just a minute ago you were telling us there’s something… unknown up there. And none of you seem able to say what it really is or what potential consequences we’re facing. And you want to send untrained, innocent teenagers up there as, what, guinea pigs?”
“The benefits outweigh the risks,” Dr. replied. “The probability of anything happening is small in the specific area of operation, and the astronauts will have the opportunity to set up important equipment and perform the necessary studies. For the sake of simplicity, I think it’s best to look at this as two missions in one. The first—our part—is to research the potential mining of tantalum seventy-three—”
“I thought you said we would not actually look for tantalum at all?”
“We won’t.” Then he went on. “The second part will be the teenagers’ mission, which will be little effort for them. The media attention will be automatic. They’ll portray this as a glamorous space version of a trip to Disneyland. And, best of all, my preliminary inquiries indicate that some major corporate sponsorship is almost guaranteed, which will likely provide the money we need for a second mission.”
“There’ll be a second mission as well?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“You want kids to go on the second one as well?”
“No.”
Dr. held up two thick envelopes marked TOP SECRET. “Teenagers on the moon, gentlemen, is the solution we’ve been looking for. The door opener.”
“But how will you decide who gets to go?”
Dr. smiled again, even more slyly, and replied, “We’ll hold a lottery.”
“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” Mia Nomeland said, giving her parents an unenthusiastic look. “No way.”
“But Mia, honey. It’s an amazing opportunity, don’t you think?”
Her parents were sitting side by side on the sofa, as if glued together, with the ad they had clipped out of the newspaper lying on the coffee table in front of them. Every last corner of the world had already had a chance to see some version of it. The campaign had been running for weeks on TV, the radio, the Internet, and in the papers, and the name NASA was on its way to becoming as well known around the globe as Coca-Cola or McDonald’s.
“An opportunity for what? To make a fool of myself?”
“Won’t you even consider it?” her mother tried. “The deadline isn’t for a month, you know.”
“No! I don’t want to consider it. There’s nothing for me to do up there. There’s something for me to do absolutely everywhere except on the moon.”
“If it were me, I would have applied on the spot,” her mother said.
“Well, I’m sure my friends and I are all very glad that you’re not me.”
“Mia!”
“Fine, sorry. It’s just that I… I don’t care. Is that so hard for you to understand? You guys are always telling me that the world is full of opportunities and that you have to choose some and let others pass you by. And that there are enough opportunities to last a lifetime and then some. Right, Dad?”
Her dad mumbled some sort of response and looked the other way.
Her mother sighed. “I’ll leave the ad over here on the piano for a while, in case you change your mind.”
It’s always like this, Mia thought, leaving the living room. They’re not listening. They’re just waiting for me to finish talking.
Mia went up to her room in the attic and started practicing. When it came to her music, she never slacked off. She’d been playing the guitar for two years, and for a year and a half she’d been a vocalist in the band Rogue Squadron, a name with a nod to the seventies appropriate for a punk band that sort of sounded like something from another era, maybe 1982. Or 1984. Even though she didn’t always care about getting every last little bit of her homework done, she made sure she knew her music history better than anyone.
Her latest discovery was the Talking Heads, a band she had slowly but surely fallen in love with. Or, rather, that she was doing her best to fall in love with, because she could tell it was good. She still struggled a little when she listened for a long time. And she wasn’t quite sure if the music was post-punk or rock or just pop, and that made the whole thing even more complicated. But it had such a cold, electronic eighties sound, she knew it would be a perfect fit for her if she could just get into the music.
She kept practicing her guitar for an hour and wrote a draft for a new song that worked off a riff she’d stolen from songs she was totally sure no one had heard. It would be okay to show up with that at her band’s rehearsal tomorrow. After she’d played through it five times and was pretty sure she remembered the chords, she set her guitar down, plugged her headphones into the stereo, and pressed play. Music from the band she had decided to start liking filled her ears. She lay back on the bed and closed her eyes.
“What are you listening to, Mia?” her dad asked, raising one side of her headphones. He was trying to smooth over the negative vibe from earlier in the day.
“Talking Heads,” she answered.
“You know they were really popular when I was young.”
Mia gave him a look but didn’t respond.
“You know, it’s an amazing opportunity, Mia, the moon. I—we—just want what’s best for you. You know that.”
She groaned but tried to smile at him anyway. “Dad, please. Just drop it, okay?”
But he wouldn’t drop it.
“And for your band, have you given that any thought? Don’t you guys want to be famous? I don’t think it would hurt Rough Squadron in terms of publicity if the vocalist were a world-famous astronaut.”
“Rogue Squadron,” she corrected.
“Anyway,” he replied, “you know what I mean.” And then he left, shutting her door carefully behind him.
Mia lay down on her bed again. Was there something to what he said? No, there wasn’t. She was a musician, after all. Not some astronaut wannabe. She turned her music on again, and vocalist David Byrne sang: “I don’t know what you expect staring into the TV set. Fighting fire with fire.”
It was almost May, but the air was still chilly in Norway. The trees lining the avenue were naked and lifeless with the exception of a couple of leaves here and there, which had opened too early. Two weeks had passed since Mia’s parents had suggested their silly idea to her.
Now she was standing outside school, scraping her boots back and forth over the ground as she waited for Silje to come back from the bathroom. Lunch break would be over soon, and around her other students were scurrying back into the building for fear they’d be late. But Mia was not in any hurry. The teachers always came to class a few minutes late anyway. They sat up there in the teachers’ lounge eating dry Ritz crackers and drinking bitter coffee while they trash-talked individual students.
Mia felt her school was the kind of place where the teachers, with a few decent exceptions, should have gone into pretty much any profession other than teaching. Janitorial work, for example. Or tending graveyards. Something where they didn’t need to interact with living people. Most of them had just barely squeaked through their teaching programs about a hundred years earlier. They had almost infinite power here, and they did their best to remind the students of that every chance they got—because they all knew that this authority disappeared like dew in the sunlight the second they left school grounds and headed out into the real world, where they were forced to interact with people their own age.
Silje came out of the bathroom. She and Mia were the only ones who hadn’t gone back inside yet.
“Cool boots,” Silje said.
“I’ve been wearing them all day,” Mia replied drily. “Didn’t you notice?”
“Not until now. Where’d you get them?”
Mia looked down at her worn, black leather boots that laced up just above the ankle. “Online. Italian paratrooper boots.”
“Awesome,” Silje said.
“Well, should we go in?”
“What do you have now?”
“Math,” Silje said.
“I have Deutsch. With ‘the Hair,’ ” Mia said with a sigh.
They went back in and took the stairs up to the second floor.
“Are we rehearsing tonight?” Silje asked right before they went their separate ways.
“I think so. Leonora’s going to call me as soon as she knows if she can.”
“Let me know, okay? I can be there at seven. Not before.”
“Seven’s fine. Hey, I wrote a new song yesterday.”
“You did? What’s it called?”
“ ‘Bomb Hiroshima Again,’ I think. I haven’t decided yet.”
“Cool,” Silje said with a laugh. “See you later.”
Mia continued on to the third floor and walked into the classroom. The teacher wasn’t there yet, so she skimmed through her German book to figure out what in the world she was supposed to have read the night before.
The Hair came sailing into the classroom with an inflatable beach ball shaped like a model of the moon in her hands. Mia rolled her eyes. Oh my God, not her, too.
But, yes, the Hair—this tiny lady with the freakishly big hair—had caught moon fever. She disappeared behind her desk and started blabbering on in German about how exciting the whole thing was and how great it would be if one of her students ended up being selected.
Mia rolled her eyes again. It was a known fact that the Hair had been at this school too long. She only taught German and home ec. And then there was her big secret, which everyone knew but which she thought was well kept: The Hair had never been to Germany. She had only ever left Norway once, to go to Sweden. And that was back in the summer of 1986 or thereabouts, and she had come home again after four days.
But maybe the fact that she was now standing in front of them with that inflatable moon under her arm wasn’t as strange as one might think. The whole world had come completely unhinged this winter. The newspapers, the radio, the TV, and the Internet were flooded with moon mania every day, from trivia and data spouted by experts and professors and astronomers to competitions where you could win all sorts of stuff just by answering a few simple questions about space travel. Meanwhile, millions of teenagers were busy logging on or standing in long lines at registration desks in malls or grocery stores in just about every single town in the whole world to make sure that their names had been entered.
For safety reasons, NASA had decided that the three young people who would be chosen to go must be at least fourteen and that they couldn’t be older than eighteen. They would also need to be between five feet four inches and six feet four inches tall, undergo a psychological examination performed by a certified practitioner in their hometown, and pass a general physical examination in order to obtain a medical “green card.” All applicants should have a near and distant visual acuity correctable to 20/20 and a blood pressure, while sitting, of no more than 140 over 90. And then there were all the tests and training they would be put through in the unlikely event that they were among the selected few.
While these requirements restricted the number of candidates somewhat, millions of names had been submitted for the big drawing, and as the days and weeks went by, people were close to bursting with excitement. Gamblers put money on which countries the lucky three would come from and on whether the winners would include more boys or girls. Talk show hosts invited experts to speculate about nonsense like the effect of seeing Earth from space on people so young. And then there were the debates that were as numerous as they were endless about this moon base that no one had ever heard mention of before now. What was it? Why was it there? What did it do? Could people really trust that it had been built with peaceful intentions?
The Hair reached the end of her speech and switched into broken Norwegian, which often happened whenever she spoke German for too long. “But listen to this. Someone representing NASA—yes, the NASA—called our school to check in with our students about signing up for the lottery. As I’m sure you’ve heard, any school with one hundred percent participation by their eligible students will be entered in a sweepstakes for a grant for technology upgrades. The representative from NASA said that a whopping ninety-one from your grade have already signed up and asked us to encourage the rest of you to do so as well. But only five of you from my German class have taken advantage of this incredible opportunity.”
No one said anything.
“Well done, Petter, Stine, Malene, and Henning.”
The four students who’d signed up smiled at her smugly.
“And Mia, what a nice surprise. Congratulations.”
Mia stiffened completely and said, “I didn’t sign up for anything.”
“Well, according to NASA, you did.”
Mia leaned over her desk and said loudly, “Well then, they must have made a mistake! I totally didn’t sign up for that stupid-ass lottery.”
“Calm down, Mia. It’s nothing to be self-conscious about.”
“I’m not embarrassed about it. It’s just not true. And even if it were, NASA shouldn’t be releasing that kind of information to anyone.”
The Hair waved her hand dismissively and winked at her, as if they were both in on some secret. “Evidently it was a condition of the sign-up procedure that you give NASA permission to reveal your name as a participant in the lottery. But we don’t need to dwell on this. It’s up to each individual to decide if he or she wants to consider doing it or not.”
“What’s your point?” Mia railed, rage welling up inside. “I told you I didn’t sign up for that thing. What the hell would I do in space, anyway? Don’t you think I have better things to do? Screw the moon!”
“We don’t use language like that in my classroom, Mia!”
“No, we don’t talk at all in your classroom. You just go off on hour-long monologues about whatever bullshit you feel like!”
The teacher stood and pointed to the door. “You’re excused from the rest of the class, Mia. I don’t want you here. You can wait out in the hall.”
Mia didn’t protest. She brushed her German . . .
They would have to make a decision soon.
“So, what’s it going to be, then?” Dr. asked impatiently.
The cigarette smoke in the room was thick and impenetrable, making the atmosphere even gloomier. All rules forbidding smoking in government offices had fallen by the wayside as nerves came to a head.
“Well,” one of the seven began, chewing on his pencil, “it’s an incredibly risky proposition. You must know that. Is it really worth it?”
“People had already completely lost interest in the moon missions before the last launch in 1972,” another one said. “Why do you think they’d be on board with us going back?”
“It could be done,” a third said. “We could tell them there’s a good chance of finding large amounts of tantalum seventy-three at the moon’s south pole.”
The room was suddenly buzzing, the tension starting to crescendo.
“You don’t want to go back to the south pole, trust me.”
“Of course not.”
“It’ll kill you.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“If you ask me, I say leave the whole place alone.”
“Gentlemen,” Dr. interrupted, “do you have any idea how important a discovery tantalum seventy-three would be? Most current technology is dependent on this material. People would be throwing money at us.”
“So we’re going up there to search for natural resources? I thought—” one of the other men said.
Dr. interrupted him again. “No, we’re not.”
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff cleared his throat. “Let me put the cards on the table for you, gentlemen. We are not going to the south pole of the moon, and whether or not tantalum seventy-three is found on the moon is completely immaterial.”
Confusion spread through the room.
“I presume some of you are familiar with Project Horizon?” he continued.
The man who had spoken first asked, “You mean the research done in the late fifties? The plans to build a military base on the moon? I thought that was scrapped.”
Dr. shook his head. “The base isn’t military.” He looked at the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. “It’s just a research station. Isn’t that right?”
The chairman didn’t answer. He gave the man a friendly look. “It’s called DARLAH 2. It was constructed in the seventies under the name Operation DP7.”
“But why… in the world… why haven’t any of us heard of it before?”
“All information concerning DARLAH 2 was classified top secret until just recently. For security reasons.” He paused for a second, pondering whether or not he ought to say any more.
Dr. beat him to it, explaining, “DARLAH 2 was built from 1974 to 1976. But the base is in the Sea of Tranquility, where, as you know, Armstrong and Aldrin originally landed in sixty-nine. None of the other landings occurred there.”
“Why was it built?” one of the men who had been quiet up until that point asked.
“We found something,” Dr. replied.
“Could you elaborate?”
“We don’t know what it is. The plan was to continue our studies and station personnel on the moon, but as you already know, after 1976 we lost most of our funding. And as I hinted, finances weren’t the only reason the moon program was terminated. The truth is that… what we found up there is not the type of discovery for which one receives money for further research. We would have been asked to leave it alone. So we pretended it never existed… and, anyway, the signal disappeared.”
“Until it showed up again last fall,” the chairman of the Joint Chiefs added.
“The signal? It? What the hell is it?” one of the confused men exclaimed. Dr. looked at the man who had spoken, then leaned over and pulled something out of his briefcase. He set a folder on the table and pulled out a four-by-six photo.
“This picture was taken on the moon by Apollo 15’s James Irwin. The astronaut in the photo is David R. Scott.”
“But… who’s the other person in the background?” one of the men asked.
“We don’t know.”
“You don’t know? What the hell is going on here?”
“There’s a proper time for everything, gentlemen. All the information you’re asking for will be made available once we’ve unanimously voted to proceed with the plan—which, may I remind you, the president himself is in full support of. Now, can we discuss how we’re going to explain the fact that we’ve had an unused base sitting up there for forty years without anyone finding out about it?”
“Unused? Are you trying to say that no one has ever stayed at this base before?” one of the astronauts in the room asked. “What about the people who built it?”
“They were never inside. The modules were assembled on the surface by machines, not by people.”
One of the men already on board with the plan stood up, smiling confidently: “We’ll say we’ve spent forty years testing it, making sure it works perfectly.”
“And does it?” someone else asked.
“In principle, yes,” replied the man, whose smile wasn’t quite so confident anymore.
“In principle isn’t good enough, is it?”
“It’ll have to do. We have to go back within a decade, before someone else gets there first.”
Several of the men present still seemed skeptical, if not stunned.
“But who are you going to send up there? What are they going to do?”
“The first expedition will accomplish three simple things. One: They’ll test the base and make sure it’s working the way it’s supposed to. Two: They’ll research the possibility of mining rare Earth metals that will give the United States a huge advantage in the technology manufacturing market. And three—this is the most important of all, gentlemen—they will attract media attention, which will consequently secure sufficient financial support to continue our research and… get rid of any potential… problems.”
“Problems like what?” someone asked.
Dr. held his hand up in front of him as if to stop the words. “As I said, we’ll get to that. The idea is to turn the whole thing into a celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the first manned mission to land on the moon. We’ll build new, improved versions of the classic Apollo program rockets from the sixties and seventies. That’s guaranteed to make people feel nostalgic.”
“But no one under the age of forty-five even remembers those Apollo missions.”
Dr. waited a long time before speaking. He was a very intelligent man, and having to explain every detail to these ludicrous excuses for public figures was grating on his nerves. Fortunately, he had played this conversation out in his head many times, and he had an answer for anything they might ask, including the perfect idea for getting the entire world interested in a new mission. “Gentlemen, what if we send some teenagers up there?”
No one responded. They all just sat there, waiting, assuming he was joking.
But he wasn’t.
“You want to send kids? Why in the world would you want to put kids on the moon?” someone asked.
Dr. smiled patronizingly and replied, “If we select three young people, teenagers, who get to accompany the astronauts, we’ll get a whole new generation excited about space exploration. It will be nothing less than a global sensation.”
“But… just a minute ago you were telling us there’s something… unknown up there. And none of you seem able to say what it really is or what potential consequences we’re facing. And you want to send untrained, innocent teenagers up there as, what, guinea pigs?”
“The benefits outweigh the risks,” Dr. replied. “The probability of anything happening is small in the specific area of operation, and the astronauts will have the opportunity to set up important equipment and perform the necessary studies. For the sake of simplicity, I think it’s best to look at this as two missions in one. The first—our part—is to research the potential mining of tantalum seventy-three—”
“I thought you said we would not actually look for tantalum at all?”
“We won’t.” Then he went on. “The second part will be the teenagers’ mission, which will be little effort for them. The media attention will be automatic. They’ll portray this as a glamorous space version of a trip to Disneyland. And, best of all, my preliminary inquiries indicate that some major corporate sponsorship is almost guaranteed, which will likely provide the money we need for a second mission.”
“There’ll be a second mission as well?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“You want kids to go on the second one as well?”
“No.”
Dr. held up two thick envelopes marked TOP SECRET. “Teenagers on the moon, gentlemen, is the solution we’ve been looking for. The door opener.”
“But how will you decide who gets to go?”
Dr. smiled again, even more slyly, and replied, “We’ll hold a lottery.”
“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” Mia Nomeland said, giving her parents an unenthusiastic look. “No way.”
“But Mia, honey. It’s an amazing opportunity, don’t you think?”
Her parents were sitting side by side on the sofa, as if glued together, with the ad they had clipped out of the newspaper lying on the coffee table in front of them. Every last corner of the world had already had a chance to see some version of it. The campaign had been running for weeks on TV, the radio, the Internet, and in the papers, and the name NASA was on its way to becoming as well known around the globe as Coca-Cola or McDonald’s.
“An opportunity for what? To make a fool of myself?”
“Won’t you even consider it?” her mother tried. “The deadline isn’t for a month, you know.”
“No! I don’t want to consider it. There’s nothing for me to do up there. There’s something for me to do absolutely everywhere except on the moon.”
“If it were me, I would have applied on the spot,” her mother said.
“Well, I’m sure my friends and I are all very glad that you’re not me.”
“Mia!”
“Fine, sorry. It’s just that I… I don’t care. Is that so hard for you to understand? You guys are always telling me that the world is full of opportunities and that you have to choose some and let others pass you by. And that there are enough opportunities to last a lifetime and then some. Right, Dad?”
Her dad mumbled some sort of response and looked the other way.
Her mother sighed. “I’ll leave the ad over here on the piano for a while, in case you change your mind.”
It’s always like this, Mia thought, leaving the living room. They’re not listening. They’re just waiting for me to finish talking.
Mia went up to her room in the attic and started practicing. When it came to her music, she never slacked off. She’d been playing the guitar for two years, and for a year and a half she’d been a vocalist in the band Rogue Squadron, a name with a nod to the seventies appropriate for a punk band that sort of sounded like something from another era, maybe 1982. Or 1984. Even though she didn’t always care about getting every last little bit of her homework done, she made sure she knew her music history better than anyone.
Her latest discovery was the Talking Heads, a band she had slowly but surely fallen in love with. Or, rather, that she was doing her best to fall in love with, because she could tell it was good. She still struggled a little when she listened for a long time. And she wasn’t quite sure if the music was post-punk or rock or just pop, and that made the whole thing even more complicated. But it had such a cold, electronic eighties sound, she knew it would be a perfect fit for her if she could just get into the music.
She kept practicing her guitar for an hour and wrote a draft for a new song that worked off a riff she’d stolen from songs she was totally sure no one had heard. It would be okay to show up with that at her band’s rehearsal tomorrow. After she’d played through it five times and was pretty sure she remembered the chords, she set her guitar down, plugged her headphones into the stereo, and pressed play. Music from the band she had decided to start liking filled her ears. She lay back on the bed and closed her eyes.
“What are you listening to, Mia?” her dad asked, raising one side of her headphones. He was trying to smooth over the negative vibe from earlier in the day.
“Talking Heads,” she answered.
“You know they were really popular when I was young.”
Mia gave him a look but didn’t respond.
“You know, it’s an amazing opportunity, Mia, the moon. I—we—just want what’s best for you. You know that.”
She groaned but tried to smile at him anyway. “Dad, please. Just drop it, okay?”
But he wouldn’t drop it.
“And for your band, have you given that any thought? Don’t you guys want to be famous? I don’t think it would hurt Rough Squadron in terms of publicity if the vocalist were a world-famous astronaut.”
“Rogue Squadron,” she corrected.
“Anyway,” he replied, “you know what I mean.” And then he left, shutting her door carefully behind him.
Mia lay down on her bed again. Was there something to what he said? No, there wasn’t. She was a musician, after all. Not some astronaut wannabe. She turned her music on again, and vocalist David Byrne sang: “I don’t know what you expect staring into the TV set. Fighting fire with fire.”
It was almost May, but the air was still chilly in Norway. The trees lining the avenue were naked and lifeless with the exception of a couple of leaves here and there, which had opened too early. Two weeks had passed since Mia’s parents had suggested their silly idea to her.
Now she was standing outside school, scraping her boots back and forth over the ground as she waited for Silje to come back from the bathroom. Lunch break would be over soon, and around her other students were scurrying back into the building for fear they’d be late. But Mia was not in any hurry. The teachers always came to class a few minutes late anyway. They sat up there in the teachers’ lounge eating dry Ritz crackers and drinking bitter coffee while they trash-talked individual students.
Mia felt her school was the kind of place where the teachers, with a few decent exceptions, should have gone into pretty much any profession other than teaching. Janitorial work, for example. Or tending graveyards. Something where they didn’t need to interact with living people. Most of them had just barely squeaked through their teaching programs about a hundred years earlier. They had almost infinite power here, and they did their best to remind the students of that every chance they got—because they all knew that this authority disappeared like dew in the sunlight the second they left school grounds and headed out into the real world, where they were forced to interact with people their own age.
Silje came out of the bathroom. She and Mia were the only ones who hadn’t gone back inside yet.
“Cool boots,” Silje said.
“I’ve been wearing them all day,” Mia replied drily. “Didn’t you notice?”
“Not until now. Where’d you get them?”
Mia looked down at her worn, black leather boots that laced up just above the ankle. “Online. Italian paratrooper boots.”
“Awesome,” Silje said.
“Well, should we go in?”
“What do you have now?”
“Math,” Silje said.
“I have Deutsch. With ‘the Hair,’ ” Mia said with a sigh.
They went back in and took the stairs up to the second floor.
“Are we rehearsing tonight?” Silje asked right before they went their separate ways.
“I think so. Leonora’s going to call me as soon as she knows if she can.”
“Let me know, okay? I can be there at seven. Not before.”
“Seven’s fine. Hey, I wrote a new song yesterday.”
“You did? What’s it called?”
“ ‘Bomb Hiroshima Again,’ I think. I haven’t decided yet.”
“Cool,” Silje said with a laugh. “See you later.”
Mia continued on to the third floor and walked into the classroom. The teacher wasn’t there yet, so she skimmed through her German book to figure out what in the world she was supposed to have read the night before.
The Hair came sailing into the classroom with an inflatable beach ball shaped like a model of the moon in her hands. Mia rolled her eyes. Oh my God, not her, too.
But, yes, the Hair—this tiny lady with the freakishly big hair—had caught moon fever. She disappeared behind her desk and started blabbering on in German about how exciting the whole thing was and how great it would be if one of her students ended up being selected.
Mia rolled her eyes again. It was a known fact that the Hair had been at this school too long. She only taught German and home ec. And then there was her big secret, which everyone knew but which she thought was well kept: The Hair had never been to Germany. She had only ever left Norway once, to go to Sweden. And that was back in the summer of 1986 or thereabouts, and she had come home again after four days.
But maybe the fact that she was now standing in front of them with that inflatable moon under her arm wasn’t as strange as one might think. The whole world had come completely unhinged this winter. The newspapers, the radio, the TV, and the Internet were flooded with moon mania every day, from trivia and data spouted by experts and professors and astronomers to competitions where you could win all sorts of stuff just by answering a few simple questions about space travel. Meanwhile, millions of teenagers were busy logging on or standing in long lines at registration desks in malls or grocery stores in just about every single town in the whole world to make sure that their names had been entered.
For safety reasons, NASA had decided that the three young people who would be chosen to go must be at least fourteen and that they couldn’t be older than eighteen. They would also need to be between five feet four inches and six feet four inches tall, undergo a psychological examination performed by a certified practitioner in their hometown, and pass a general physical examination in order to obtain a medical “green card.” All applicants should have a near and distant visual acuity correctable to 20/20 and a blood pressure, while sitting, of no more than 140 over 90. And then there were all the tests and training they would be put through in the unlikely event that they were among the selected few.
While these requirements restricted the number of candidates somewhat, millions of names had been submitted for the big drawing, and as the days and weeks went by, people were close to bursting with excitement. Gamblers put money on which countries the lucky three would come from and on whether the winners would include more boys or girls. Talk show hosts invited experts to speculate about nonsense like the effect of seeing Earth from space on people so young. And then there were the debates that were as numerous as they were endless about this moon base that no one had ever heard mention of before now. What was it? Why was it there? What did it do? Could people really trust that it had been built with peaceful intentions?
The Hair reached the end of her speech and switched into broken Norwegian, which often happened whenever she spoke German for too long. “But listen to this. Someone representing NASA—yes, the NASA—called our school to check in with our students about signing up for the lottery. As I’m sure you’ve heard, any school with one hundred percent participation by their eligible students will be entered in a sweepstakes for a grant for technology upgrades. The representative from NASA said that a whopping ninety-one from your grade have already signed up and asked us to encourage the rest of you to do so as well. But only five of you from my German class have taken advantage of this incredible opportunity.”
No one said anything.
“Well done, Petter, Stine, Malene, and Henning.”
The four students who’d signed up smiled at her smugly.
“And Mia, what a nice surprise. Congratulations.”
Mia stiffened completely and said, “I didn’t sign up for anything.”
“Well, according to NASA, you did.”
Mia leaned over her desk and said loudly, “Well then, they must have made a mistake! I totally didn’t sign up for that stupid-ass lottery.”
“Calm down, Mia. It’s nothing to be self-conscious about.”
“I’m not embarrassed about it. It’s just not true. And even if it were, NASA shouldn’t be releasing that kind of information to anyone.”
The Hair waved her hand dismissively and winked at her, as if they were both in on some secret. “Evidently it was a condition of the sign-up procedure that you give NASA permission to reveal your name as a participant in the lottery. But we don’t need to dwell on this. It’s up to each individual to decide if he or she wants to consider doing it or not.”
“What’s your point?” Mia railed, rage welling up inside. “I told you I didn’t sign up for that thing. What the hell would I do in space, anyway? Don’t you think I have better things to do? Screw the moon!”
“We don’t use language like that in my classroom, Mia!”
“No, we don’t talk at all in your classroom. You just go off on hour-long monologues about whatever bullshit you feel like!”
The teacher stood and pointed to the door. “You’re excused from the rest of the class, Mia. I don’t want you here. You can wait out in the hall.”
Mia didn’t protest. She brushed her German . . .
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172 Hours on the Moon
Johan Harstad
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