If you enjoy today’s story, please consider
subscribing to the channel, where a new, original sci-fi audiobook is uploaded every
Thursday morning. Thank you for listening. Welcome w Moon
by P.E. Rowe Julian Hartsock. “Welcome w Moon.” Precipice: The Autobiographical Ramblings of Julian
Hartsock. (Chapter) A & A Publications, 2123. Openness (Intellect) — (Hartsock,
Julian Q.) 97th Percentile: Intellect—(OI) is the psychometric score
assigned to an individual’s proclivity toward and ease of e
ngaging with abstract ideas.
People exceptionally high in Intellect tend to be extremely intelligent and readily able to
solve problems that require mental modeling of their environment and the objects therein,
as well as adept at negotiating obstacles and problems to be overcome. People exceptionally
high in Intellect tend to be comfortable with highly technical concepts and systems. They also
readily map real-world scenarios onto useful representations or models, seldom struggling
to loc
ate local phenomena within larger, more complex systems both in the real world and
in abstract or symbolic representations thereof. A score in the (97th) percentile, coupled with
the distribution profile of psychometric measures herein, suggests a supremely intelligent,
creative thinker with the capacity to excel in any field where the application of human
cognitive capital is still desirable. Concern arises in the incongruence between the objectively
measured Generalized Intelligence score
(G) and psychometric score (self-reported) Intellect (OI),
which suggests the subject may compensate for his peerless intelligence with a tendency toward
humility for the purpose of social acceptance. Though this tendency may be mitigated in
the company of other high IQ individuals, the potential exists for false modesty
to manifest as a failure to reach his maximum potential because of the fear of
social alienation that may come with it. False modesty? Boy, would dad be pissed.
MM³ picke
d that out of my responses somehow, and I’m not entirely sure why. The discrepancy is
the difference in self-report of how smart I think I am versus what their IQ tests measured.
Apparently, I’m smarter than I think I am, which means I might be even smarter than
that—or at least wise enough to know that the value of intelligence is limited. Or maybe
there are a lot of puffed-up intellects at the top of the bell curve dramatically overvaluing
their own intelligence and dragging me down! Imag
ine what they’d have thought of me if
they’d recorded me at (95), as Gladstone et al. did. They might have come right out and
said it: Julian Hartsock is playing stupid. As a teenager, this was a problem. Cry me a
river, right? The poor super-genius struggled to fit in. Boo-fricken-hoo! Show me someone who
did fit in as a teenager, and odds are good you’ll be showing me an utterly ordinary adult. The
trouble with being marked out so dramatically as different from such an ordinary person is
the
perception that other people usually project onto me—that because I was extraordinary, therefore,
I must somehow look down on people who aren’t, which was never the case. But the idea that
I was still overcompensating long after my teenage years? Honestly, this was the one place
I would place a bold, red question mark on the methodology of the evaluators and/or their tools.
I remember vividly when I was eleven having this very conversation with my dad about modesty.
“Yeah, you’re very s
mart, Julian. That’s great. But you can’t dunk a basketball or play guitar
like Vidovic,” he said. “If I ever catch you slacking off or playing dumb, though, you’re
going to hear about it. A seven-foot-tall man doesn’t fit in any easier if he slouches.
He just gets a bad back for his troubles. And the best musicians don’t mess up notes on
purpose to make lesser musicians feel better about themselves. Own your potential, son. Stand
as tall as you can. You owe that to everybody.” That’s verba
tim, and I did my best to live it.
False modesty? Faulty methodology more like. Possibly. Life is complicated.
Intellect? Well, that was something I was supposedly awash in during my “college years.”
And I use that verbiage, I guess, to identify the very narrow window I sorta felt like I belonged at
Caltech with some of those people there—loosely. For a little while there it was fun. And I
suppose it’s like this for a lot of young people—finding their way, exploring possible
futures, making
mistakes, blowing opportunities, realizing others, blazing new trails. How many
more coming-of-age buzz words could I possibly cram into a single paragraph about becoming an
adult? I suppose that’s fitting, though. It’s tough not to become cynical about that phase of
life when you’re journeying through a landscape awash in inspirational clichés and motivational
memes. There was a poster in the back stairway to the old brick building where they stashed
the Math TAs offices that read: “Reach
For The Stars,” which I suppose NASA could get away with,
but only just. I always wondered who the hell went down there and hung that thing up—what they
were thinking? How, oh, how am I going to inspire the top 1% of the top 1% of the world’s future
mathematicians? Reach for the stars, people—every time you climb these dingy steps—Reach!
I thought about things like that when I was eighteen, in between my two masters degrees.
And for a couple years, I laughed at that cringey poster that someb
ody had probably put up a decade
before and nobody had bothered to take down. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, NASA called me.
At the time, I had no ambitions in space, which isn’t to say I didn’t have interest
in talking to NASA. I’d read of lots of interesting and useful applications for magnetics
in the aerospace industry. I didn’t have anything better on the schedule for the summer yet,
so I figured, I might call them back. They weren’t offering me an internship to sit in some
government
office complex in Maryland with a bunch of other math nerds modeling some obscure,
totally unexciting system. They were calling me, and calling very persistently at that,
because they wanted me to go to the Moon. I figured somebody out at Caltech had nominated
me for the program on that dingy old poster, a four-week NASA summer seminar at Gideon-Jackson.
I knew it wouldn’t have been Lawrence, because he was decidedly against my leaving that
summer, I think because he worried he’d lose me b
efore I even began my PhD in earnest.
“The lure of space,” he’d called it. Sign me up.
It’s funny how life shakes out. I can’t account for the randomness
of it, not even in a mathematical sense. I sat and ran calculations on the trip. At the
time, the cost of sending me to the moon, even if I’d been dead weight, was phenomenal. And
NASA—the moribund government—somehow thought it was a good investment to send me to the moon for
four weeks. To summer camp. I thought about it in monetary terms
. I had opportunities that summer.
And the opportunity cost of turning down those other offers, financially, was high. But there
was no monetary value that compared against what it would cost to buy that trip to the moon.
It was a thousand to one. Plus, it pissed off Lawrence. All I had to do was pass the physical.
At the time, they were still lifting cargo and people with the old Nidura Heavy, which was
a minor concern, as every space flight was, but when I made the decision to go, I also m
ade
the decision to accept the risk. So, when my group got shuttled out to the launch pad, I was
stoic about the experience. You’ve surrendered all control by that point. No sense in worrying.
But there were sixteen other passengers on my flight, and most of them were not
okay—throwing up in the green rooms, hands tremoring, an awful lot of prayers from
an awful lot of atheists, presumably. Picture a bus full of math nerds getting shot into orbit.
I guess NASA had done the trip enough time
to know to have plenty of barf bags kicking around.
I got belted in beside this little physics prodigy from Oregon named Garza with curly
brown hair. She wasn’t noticeably pretty but cute in her way. She had this weird, swishy way
of talking that was a little bit amusing and made it difficult to tell whether everything she said
was sarcastic or not. I thought she was joking with the techs strapping us in for take-off.
“Don’t puke in your space helmet, Garza,” I joked back at her, observing he
r tremoring hands.
“I hear that breakfast sausage is a bitch to get out of the hair once it settles in there.”
“How are you so cool about this, Hartsock?” she asked me.
We hadn’t introduced ourselves, just read each other’s nameplates. She was in
the high school cohort, so we hadn’t been in the orientations together, but we were seated
according to weight distribution, so she was beside me. I did remember seeing her praying
in the bus, so I decided to tease her about it. “I’m Julian,” I said
. “God loves me,
Garza, and you’re sitting next to me, so you can relax about the ride. These
government employees are totally competent.” “You’re funny,” she said. “Really funny.”
Again, I couldn’t tell for the life of me whether she was being sarcastic.
“My name’s Freddy, by the way,” she said. “You call me Garza like that, and it
feels like I’m joining the Army or something.” “Space Force, you mean?”
She shook her head. “Man, they never stop calling me. That recruiter in Bend. I had to tel
l
him like six times, relax, man, I’m only sixteen. I can’t even sign for another year, and I’m going
to college first. How’s Caltech, by the way?” I tried to turn my head, but I couldn’t
see her, which made it even more difficult to tell how serious she was being. It
seemed like a funny conversation to me. “Which one of those questions would you like me
to take first, Freddy?” I asked her. “You talk a lot when you’re nervous?”
“How can you tell?” “Wild guess. Freddy’s short for something,
I
assume, or just sounds a little cuter than Fred?” “Frederica. My God, I told my mother she’s
going to regret naming me Fred when she gets older and I gotta take care of her, and then
she tells me she’s going to get a robot to do all that. ‘Go to space, papita,’ she says to
me. If you think I look nervous now, I’d hate to see how she’s lookin’ right now. I always
wanted to go, since I was a little kid, right? Up until this very moment. Holy shit. They’re
really going to blast us into spac
e, Julian.” “That’s the idea, Freddy.”
“Man, and you’re like not even the least bit nervous.”
“Nah. God loves me, like I said.” “Well, we got a ride all the way to the moon
if we make it, so I expect you to tell me about Caltech. Maybe I’ll see you there in
a couple years. That’s one of my schools.” “I’ll write you a recommendation if you
don’t puke in your helmet on the way up.” “For real?”
“Sure,” I told her. “Something inspiring about being great at overcoming her
fears to achieve goals.
Doesn’t puke in space helmet. Top quality young talent.”
“Oh, I see, you’re a smartass, too, Hartsock. We’re gonna be friends, all right.”
We had a decent ride together. Freddy was a fun companion. I’d never really been to high school,
and even when I was around teenagers when I was one, I always felt self-conscious about being so
different. Being around Freddy was easy. I felt like myself and I could tell she was just being
herself. I don’t think she could have helped herself if she wanted t
o—she was so excited about
the trip, the whole moon thing, a lifelong dream. Me? I would say my attitude toward
the trip was more curious as to what I was doing there. Bemused, maybe.
It didn’t take me long to figure out what I was doing there once we arrived.
The Gideon-Jackson outpost sat in a crater about eight hundred meters across just
outside the Sea of Crises. In total, the government’s main lunar outpost there was
the size of a modest corporate campus in terms of working office space
and population, but from an
organizational standpoint, my impression was that the place was a mess. Unlike a corporation, which
had a common mission, this outpost had a million different projects going in a million different
directions, most of which were poorly planned, underfunded, impractical, and unlikely to yield
a definitive product. There was a lot of science going on there as well. At least, that was my
general impression. But that first impression was borne out decades later, when
I visited
the mining stations established in that era while sourcing metals for the Allegis Array.
After we landed, our flight group was escorted into the base down a long stairwell by a base
coordinator who looked overworked and overwhelmed by the arrival of our group. And there were three
such sub-groups making up the nearly fifty young guests I would classify as interns, all of
whom were there for different reasons. Garza, I think, was being recruited, not for the Space
Force as she sus
pected but for NASA itself. This trip was a semi-annual event that the
researchers had foisted upon them by Washington, porked into some oversized spending
bill, ostensibly for the purposes of advancing scientific outreach in space.
We got seated in the cafeteria there for three hours while we waited for the other
two landing groups to arrive. They had cups of fruit punch laid out on the table, a few chess
sets, and tablets affixed to the tables on metal strings with information about the va
rious ongoing
projects in the station. It was bizarre. I did feel like a kid at summer camp. Fruit punch.
Seriously, NASA brought a bunch of high-end young talent to the moon only to sit us in the
cafeteria on day one and serve us fruit punch. We had no reference for the trip beyond what NASA
had told us of it. But, from what they told us, the event had quite a prestigious history, with
participants at all three levels going on to major positions in the corporate and industrial sectors,
bo
th in space and on Earth. And the trip itself, according to the long list of distinguished
participants, had been formative for many of them, as it proved for me. It was supposed to be this
buttoned-down thing, though. Everyone looking to impress, on their best behavior, four
weeks to write their ticket back to space. So what the hell was I doing there, I wondered.
Chess was all well and good, but after a half hour or so of sitting there aimlessly, it
got pretty boring, and what the hell’s t
he point of being bored on the Moon? Our travel
group was a pretty creative and lively bunch, and we were more fascinated with the
low-G environment than the chess board, so it didn’t take long for one of the high school
boys to figure out a way for everyone to be less bored. He took off his overshirt and stuffed it
inside one of his socks, and by the time that coordinator came back with the second group an
hour later she found a group of sixteen of us, barefoot, in our undershirts, playing
dodgeball in
their lunar cafeteria, with the tables turned on end and the magnetic lunch trays strewn all over
the floor because they made for excellent shields. She had no idea what the hell was going on.
She thought they were getting a rocketful of space nerds, and yeah, sure, we all were, but
the NASA people found out fast that this crop was different. The program coordinator just about
lost her mind, which she must have figured would be an adequate deterrent for any further wayward
be
havior. But what she didn’t notice when she was screaming at us was that the second group she’d
just escorted down was standing there behind her wide-eyed, smiling from ear to ear, every last
one, to a person thinking, damn, that looks fun. We placated that coordinator, putting the
tables back and introducing ourselves to the second group of lunar novices like proper
scientists. A few of us even helped her pour some more fruit punch for them. The second she
left, though, it turned into a th
irty-person Group-1 versus Group-2 lunar dodgeball throwdown
the likes of which was never to be replicated in our silver satellite’s staid history.
Garza actually turned out to be a little demon. Ultra-competitive, with a fierce
arm. Apparently, she’d been playing softball since she was a kid and did not like losing.
The Gideon-Jackson outpost’s director came down with the coordinator when she escorted the final
group of interns an hour later. By that time, half of us had stripped out of our
flightsuit
bottoms because we were soaked in sweat, and we’d dented one of the tabletops when
Adrian DeMarco tumbled into a heap after tripping over Garza while avoiding a throw. The
Director, Judie Kulfitz had come down to give a presentation with an android named Thomas, who did
the lion’s share of the basic outdoor maintenance on the roof and crater’s surface. I think they
thought we would think it was cool, like we’d never seen an android before—or maybe not one
so advanced. Who knows
what they were thinking. Kulfitz didn’t react in the least to their
lunchroom getting trashed. The third group was dumbfounded. We’d been on the moon for
a little over three hours and had already destroyed their lunchroom. And the director went
on with her holographic presentation like all that was standard operating procedure. “Settle down,
everybody,” was about the harshest thing she said. Her first slide was a projection of the signage
over the archway leading down to the research levels
that read “Welcome to the Moon,” which,
for some inexplicable reason, set off this almost unstoppable cascade of laughter from our group.
I don’t know if it was something about the air that made us all hypoxic and giddy after bouncing
around playing dodgeball for two straight hours, but it seemed a ridiculously funny thing
to us—like labeling the Moon as though we didn’t know we were on the Moon. And somebody got
Garza going and she had this really high-pitched wheezy laugh that set off on
e of the two African
outreach attendees, and he had about the deepest, funniest penetrating belly laugh you could ever
hear. Joshua Okine-Baba damn near shook the room when he laughed. That poor director didn’t know
what to do except roll through her presentation like absolutely nothing out of the ordinary
was happening, but we could all sense it. When she’d finally gotten through that painful
presentation about how proud they were of their lunar outpost and how welcoming a work environment
it was, they sent in our mentors. Everybody milled about while they served us snacks. My mentor
came over and introduced himself as Dr. Todd, explaining that he was working on a mass driver
design, and I immediately knew what I was doing there. Suddenly, the whole thing made a little
more sense, a bit like the football and basketball programs at big colleges paying for the entire
athletics department across the university. I didn’t know exactly what it was going to be, but
I knew that at
some point in the first week they’d slyly introduce a difficult problem in the design
they’d been struggling with, and like a dumb, young sucker, they expected I would unwittingly
start working on it like it was a middle-school science experiment and help NASA solve their
multibillion-dollar lunar driver problems for a T-shirt and a glass of fruit punch.
“Ready to do some moon math, Julian?” Dr. Todd asked me as his opener. “I’ve heard
an awful lot of good things about you.” “Wouldn’t it sti
ll just be math?” I said.
Freddy was still hanging close enough she caught the exchange. She started giggling again.
“Don’t you do jokes,” Dr. Todd asked me. “Jokes?” I replied.
And I stood there deadpan. Just cold. Even as Garza began to
wheeze away, I stood there like a statue. “Okay then,” Dr. Todd said, nodding awkwardly.
Glorious. Then, they walked us all down as a group,
through the archway leading down to the labs. It was painfully awkward. Nearly fifty people
not so athletically incli
ned to begin with, some of us still getting our moon legs under us,
all bouncing down this ramp together with half as many NASA engineer and scientist mentors.
There we were, lumbering down this causeway, trying not to fall over one another, and
suddenly, Joshua Okine-Baba pipes up with that booming voice of his, “Welcome to
the Moooooon!” And damn near a hundred people nearly fell over ourselves laughing.
Those poor NASA bastards had no idea what had hit them. The most infamous four weeks in
the history
of the Gideon-Jackson outpost had only just begun. They announced their intentions to
break the three flight groups back into the educational divisions—high school,
college, and post-grad, before breaking off to get oriented to our particular labs.
“See you later, Garza,” I said to Freddy. “Don’t let the government exploit your
genius without getting something in return.” “A trip to the moon isn’t
something?” she asked me. “That’s how they get you, Freddy. I’m going to
miss th
at silly laugh of yours while I’m solving NASA’s magnetics problems.”
“I’ll miss your attitude, Mr. Big Shot,” she said, smiling at me.
“They got me working in the laser lab.” “I’ll sneak down to see you when I get a chance.”
I spent most of my time the first few days at Gideon-Jackson with Dr. Todd Nazarian and two
other program participants, mostly learning about different design proposals for the mass driver
NASA aspired to build. Their goal with the driver was to be able to deliver mined
metals back to
Earth’s orbit directly on-demand. Their hope was that this would attract corporate outfits that
would then pay NASA in perpetuity per kilogram. The two proposed corporate launch engines at that
time were only planning to lift to lunar orbit, where they would have to collect, package, and
re-launch from there. I didn’t understand it at the time, because my ambitions weren’t in space
yet, but NASA was hoping to regain a dominant foothold after lagging behind the expanding
corp
orate sector for decades, and the moon was their best strategic opportunity. A mass driver
like that could deliver decades of funding while also guaranteeing raw materials to build out
serious infrastructure in low Earth orbit. Dr. Todd’s problem wasn’t building a functioning
driver. It was aiming the thing reliably regardless of the orientation of the lunar body.
Most of the month, the driver would be oriented sub-optimally, and there was a shorter window
of a few days, when they could theo
retically deliver cargo straight back to Earth. They
had some creative but clunky designs that were widening the optimal window, but these presented
all kinds of engineering challenges and dangers, potentially self-destructive forces—all manner
of obstacles to overcome. It was a fun little puzzle that sort of reminded me of Jules Verne’s
epic story of Barbicane trying to shoot the moon, loading up his cosmic-scale cannon down
in Seminole territory. And up here, Dr. Todd was playing reverse-
Barbicane, struggling
to shoot the Earth from the Moon with his titanium cannonballs. And, truly, some of the designs they
were modeling struck me as equally ridiculous to the original Barbicane design—a ten-story cannon
packed with a preposterous payload of TNT. Dr. Todd’s problem was solvable, I knew. I
figured if I cared to, thought about it intensely, and slept on the matter for a few weeks, I could
solve it. I had little doubt. But at that point, and at NASA’s payrate, I didn’t care to
.
That first week, I didn’t cross paths with Freddy much during the day, although, we had a few
fun evenings together, sneaking off to the bubble turrets on the upper deck to catch a glimpse
of the stars. They had the inner lights set to Florida time, but for the first couple weeks
out there, it was dark all the time outside, which made for some interesting show-and-tell
from the astronomical observatory team up there. There were a few other participants whose
company I enjoyed. Not so much
in Dr. Todd’s lab, but there was a Chem-E from Cornell, Jordan Bell,
working on his dissertation on various in-situ plant designs for producing oxidizer from lunar
surface material. I didn’t know chemistry all that well, nor engineering at the time, so it
was interesting talking with him. But the only real friend I made on the moon was Joshua.
Joshua Okine-Baba’s family ran the largest terrestrial mining corporation in West Africa,
and he was not shy about stating openly that he was here to
ensure that his children could make
the same claim in outer space. I also didn’t know anything about mining, so he educated me about
the differences between terrestrial and lunar operations, as well as the complications that
came along with getting an operation started in space. The toughest obstacle, especially for
an African corporation, was still getting out to the moon. The initial expense, as things were
then, would mean heavily leveraging the Okine Corporation and likely getting in l
ine with
either the Russians or Indians to literally get the company off the ground before even
beginning to figuratively get the company off the ground on the lunar surface. But Joshua
was very determined—the moon, the asteroids, even if he had to go to Mars—the Okine name would
be a big name in space in the coming century. One night at dinner he asked
me about my future in space. “Oh, I don’t know,” I told him and Freddy.
“We Hartsocks have always been farmers.” “You don’t strike me as a
farmer, Julian,” Freddy replied. “Maybe I’ll just solve the Hamamatsu problem and
build Joshua and his family a space elevator.” Joshua’s eyes got wide as he pointed
at me. His mouth was full. He sat there nodding for a few seconds.
“Sure, Julian. You do that,” Freddy said, shaking her head.
We’d just had a presentation the day before—the materials problem. They were still
talking about graphene. I was being sarcastic about the space elevator, probably because I was
still frustrated over h
aving to sit there for an hour nodding politely while they talked about
graphene—the math just wasn’t there for that. It was never going to work. I told them as much in
the Q & A, but they dismissed these as ordinary engineering struggles to be overcome. “On the
moon maybe,” I’d told them, “but never on Earth.” Joshua smiled and laughed. “I’ll
ride your elevator, Julian. One day.” He even told me I could build it
in Ghana. His family had the land. “Florida,” I told him. “Same as Barbicane.”
“Who’s Barbicane?” Freddy asked me. “Some crazy guy who shot the moon,”
I told her. “And here we all are.” Though things seemed to settle a bit over the
first couple weeks, at least superficially, with us guests quietly working alongside our
mentors by day, hardly a day went by without some ridiculous prank occurring somewhere
on the outpost. None of these pranks were even remotely malicious. Most of them could be
categorized as innocent fun. My favorite was when the trio working on lunar
locomotion made
a chandelier out of chairs from the lunchroom, which they affixed to the ceiling over the
archway, three stories up—somehow—using a plunger as its anchor. It had lights taken from
supply that were supposedly replacement bulbs for space helmets, and somehow, they found a
circular ball bearing ring that allowed the chairs and lights to slowly spin. Hilarious
and ridiculous and harmless. Even Director Kulfitz reacted sensibly to that one, simply
telling the group that all was
well as long as she got her chairs back in the lunchroom the
following day. And however they got it up there, that group got it back down again without much
ado or anyone noticing them doing the work. Zero work hours lost, no harm done, everybody laughed.
But the genie that had been let out of the bottle on day-one was truly out. I had the sense that the
NASA directors, Kulfitz and her three underlings, were desperately trying to figure out how
to hang on to the illusion of control. Four nak
ed imperials vainly trying to cover up.
Freddy and I never really went in for the pranks, but we were constantly skipping out during
the supposedly mandatory bunk hours to go up to the turrets, or we would take our lunch
out to the archway, which apparently ruffled a few feathers. We figured we weren’t making
chandeliers out of the furniture and hanging them to the ceiling by plungers, though; thus
our delinquency seemed relatively petty. So the permanent residents up there looked the
other
way on us two. I think they were all just waiting for summer camp to be over so they
could go back to being a serious outpost again. When our last week finally rolled around,
a lot of the projects were culminating. Dr. Todd and I continued to ignore the elephant in
the room. He never explicitly asked me to show my cards on his mass driver problem, which I
was fine to keep unsolved. I had a concept, but I didn’t see the point in doing any work to
model or test it, not under those circumstan
ces. The Lunar Locos, as we were calling the transport
group—those same three guys who’d built the chandelier—they got to test drive their miniature
rover models out on the surface that week. That group and the geologists were the only ones
allowed to go outside, as they’d gone through all the suit training and aquatic orientation down
in Key West. They came back inside with stories of heavenly glory, especially as the sun was coming
up, and depending on where you were walking, you could or
ient the blinding sun behind
a mountain and the Earth would be out there floating in the black like a gleaming blue
marble. Freddy was beside herself with jealousy. I started poking around, seeing what I could do
to figure out what sort of security measures they had to keep all that gear on lockdown,
if any. And it turned out, to my shock, there was no security—none. It was simply the idea
that everyone up on Gideon-Jackson had already been vetted by NASA, and their operating theory
was th
at everyone would always follow the rules, because if you didn’t, you wouldn’t ever get
to go back to space. It was a fine theory if the people up there cared whether they
went back to space again. At the time, I did not. And, I figured, if we got caught
and got into trouble, Freddy was still in High School. I would just tell NASA I pressured
her into it and all would be fine for her. I told Freddy the same and assured her we
wouldn’t be caught. I did a little research on how the suits oper
ated, read some, watched some
videos, and then I woke her up at 3:30 two nights before we were set to blast off back to Earth.
She was nervous again. All shaky hands and wide eyes. But she was a good little cat burglar—silent
and sneaky, all-in on the mission. A moonwalk was as much a lifelong dream for her as going to
space in the first place, and once I put the possibility out there, she couldn’t see going back
to Earth having been so close. Just get up, put on the suit, and step out the a
irlock. So that’s
what we did. There wasn’t even a key-lock on it. Just a push-button activation on either side of
both doors. It made a bit of a clunking noise, but we’d gone up and observed it enough to know
it wasn’t likely to rouse anyone at that hour. Then, suddenly, there we were, out on this
incredible unearthly landscape that just took the breath away, unbounded by the infinite
above us, the blue, blue Earth on the horizon, the gleaming white of the surface at
our feet. Growing up
in a cornfield, it was something I never figured I’d be doing.
We bounced around outside for a little while before Freddy looked off toward the
ridge of hills that made up the short horizon near where the Earth was hovering.
She wanted to see it from the shadows, in blackness. I knew it was a couple kilometers
to the hills, a much longer bounce than either of us had time for on a single tank of oxygen, and
I wasn’t looking to get into too much trouble. Then Freddy pointed to the rover, parke
d beside
the airlock, charged, all green, and it just seemed impossible that it could be that easy.
“Would they really?” I asked. “Only one way to find out,” she said.
And again, yes, they had no security on the rover. Of course. It’s not like anyone was out
here to steal it. Only people who were supposed to drive the rover would drive the rover.
She unplugged it and hopped behind the wheel. I brushed her to the seat beside
the steering wheel—like an old Earth car. “I grew up on a farm,” I to
ld
her. “I’ve driven before.” In truth, I knew her driving would make her
look far more complicit if we got caught. She didn’t protest, and off we went, roving
to the ridgeline. Me and Freddy Garza, my little lunar partner in crime.
I followed the tread marks out of the flat and into the small hills surrounding
Little Gideon Crater, and just as we suspected, as we drove behind the top end of the bluff, there
in the little valley, shielded from the sunlight, the grand and glorious backdrop o
f the black sky
came alive above us. Stars, the most perfect pure black so surreal the eyes could barely process
it, and in all that was the Earth. It was about the most beautiful sight I’d ever seen.
“Oh, my God, Julian,” Garza kept saying to me. I drove us down to the valley floor,
around the fuel station where the chem group processed their rocket fuel, among other
things. There was a solar collection station, an industrial battery, and a trio of
storage tanks for rocket fuels and oxidiz
er. We’d talked about staying on the tracks
so we didn’t give ourselves away, but it looked like the area was well trodden enough
that nobody would notice another two sets of footprints out there. We walked back behind
the hill again, out behind the outstation, staring up at the Earth, holding hands.
It was something to share. At one point, I pulled her toward me
and lowered my head, clunking my helmet against hers, making a joke.
“What are you doing, Julian?” “I couldn’t help myself, Garza.
I’d kiss you,
but I forgot we got these clunky helmets on.” “Funny,” she said. “Mr. Supergenius and me.”
“I do like you, Freddy,” I told her. “A lot.” “I like you too, Julian. It’s a
funny place to find out about it.” We only had a few minutes out there, because
we had to get back before the early birds on the station got up. I can’t speak for Freddy, but
I was giddy with disbelief on the ride back. That we’d somehow done something unthinkable. The
thought we were about to get away with it
had us laughing and joking the whole ride back.
I looked over at her thinking that the first thing I was going to do when we got our helmets
off was to kiss Frederica Garza for real, and I could see it in her eyes, too, that same thought.
Of course, they were waiting for us inside the airlock door. Kulfitz herself, Dr. Todd,
and Arenis—Freddy’s mentor. I’m not sure they have a word in the English language
for how furious they were. Livid to the tenth power. Todd could hardly speak.
Arenis p
ulled Freddy away by the arm before she even had a chance to get her suit
off, which almost set off a proper scuffle, because I objected to him putting his hands on her
like that, and the way he was yelling at her about ruining her future, poor Garza had a meltdown.
It was an ugly scene. I was glad Dr. Todd and Kulfitz were there to calm things down.
Anyway, they separated Freddy and me from that moment to interrogate us about
what the hell we’d been thinking. I think it was the moment that
broke through
to the NASA people, at least up there, that something had changed. Maybe it was
generational, maybe it was something in the water on our flight out there, but I could
really see it in their eyes from that moment on, the realization that space wasn’t enough anymore.
If all of us were willing to treat them like a joke, maybe it wasn’t just an anomaly.
I apologized to Todd for the stunt, figuring that would be an olive branch at least,
but he didn’t want to hear it. He wanted to
talk about the project—the mass driver.
“I can see it in your eyes, Julian, damn it! I know you have ideas.”
“What makes you so certain, Todd?” “Oh, please, Julian. Every time we talk about
the magnetics and the drive line, you get a look on your face like we don’t know what the hell
we’re doing. Clearly, you have a different idea.” “You know, I don’t know who you think I
am or even how you NASA people thought to recruit me—which of my professors recommended
me or whatever—but I’m not a mira
cle worker.” “I recruited you, Julian, not your
professors. I read both your articles, and then I called Lawrence and talked
with him about you, because I could see it wasn’t his work, even though he was the last
author. You may be a special kind of smart, but you’re also a special breed of stupid. What
did you think you were doing up here, anyway?” “Your work maybe, Todd. Or the government’s.”
He shook his head at me. He was disgusted. “What do you want, Julian, a
cut? Is that what you wan
t?” “I read the agreement I signed. I thought this was
summer vacation. I didn’t sign up to be exploited. Maybe I’ll lease the government the patent rights
for a couple billion a year, though. Do you really expect me to lay the groundwork for a launch
system that will keep NASA afloat for a generation and just give it to you? Hundred-billion-dollar
concepts don’t grow on trees, Todd.” “They also don’t get built without large
organizational capacity and engineering expertise. We’re talking a
bout what could be
done for humanity. What we do in the next ten years could change our trajectory in
space for centuries, Julian, and you could be a part of that. That’s not nothing.”
I was thinking about a snarky remark. Something about building a space elevator instead. And I was
thinking about the design I had in mind for NASA’s lunar driver, a set of massive electromagnetic
bodies fixed in stationary orbit above, redirecting the payload after it had been fired,
rather than the clunky d
esigns that attempted to aim the gun itself. I was visualizing the
interlocking and opposing magnetic fields working to deflect a payload at those speeds. That was the
first sense I had of it. Hamamatsu. The first hint of a vision. It could work. A space tower. Not
an elevator, a tower from the ground to orbit, something for Joshua and the Okines to drool over.
His family and every other industrial empire on Earth—freight volumes no one had ever dreamed of.
I thought about how long it would
take to design a model for Todd’s mass driver. Based on that
concept, a semester maybe. Then Hamamatsu. All that in those brief moments.
Todd was just staring at me, indignant, thinking I was blowing him off.
“Don’t you have anything to say?” he asked me. “This was my fault. I talked Freddy
into it. It was my idea. All of it.” “Julian Hartsock. All attitude, no
gratitude.” Todd shook his head at me and went to get a coffee and cool off.
That morning, there were rumors that Kulfitz had talked
to her superiors at NASA about
prosecuting us. Borrowing a moon rover was an interesting charge. I thought about what
jurisdiction we might get prosecuted under. It was ridiculous. Zero damage had been
done. Nothing stolen. Nothing broken. I wasn’t really concerned about them doing
anything to me, but Freddy? I’d definitely underestimated the impact our little stunt might
have on her future if they chose to be assholes about it. The more I thought about it, though, the
madder I got. Sure,
we wouldn’t have been in that position if we’d followed the rules, but they had
a choice as well. And I could see, plain as day, they were going to squeeze her, put the pressure
on and then leave her eternally grateful when they let her off easy. She’d be the most loyal, most
talented little NASA flack for as long as they could squeeze something useful out of her.
She was a wreck when I finally did see her, later that day in the cafeteria. She was
sitting alone. She could barely look up at m
e. “I don’t want to see you, Hartsock,” she
told me. “I’ve got to think about my future.” “What about Caltech? I
thought that was your future.” “Only to get me to space. Now I already
messed that up unless I fix this.” “That’s bullshit, Garza. This whole
deal up here has been bullshit.” “Maybe for you, Julian! Maybe for you. Not
for the rest of us. Some of us still care.” “I do care, Freddy. I do. I
care about a lot of things.” “You knew what this meant to me,
and you didn’t care about th
at.” “Freddy?”
“I don’t want to talk to you, Julian.” I stood there for maybe another
thirty seconds. Freddy was just staring down at her lunch tray, crushed.
That night, I was sleeping, and I woke to a tug on my arm and a voice whispering my
name. “Julian. Julian. You must come and see.” It was Joshua.
“Hmm?” I was half asleep and not fully understanding,
probably because he was whispering and didn’t want to wake half the bunk room. I
vaguely remember him saying something about lodging a fo
rmal complaint. I do
remember him laughing as he said it. “Okay, okay,” he finally
whispered. “You sleep, Julian.” The rumor that they were talking to Florida
about prosecuting Garza and me was apparently what triggered the events that unfolded that
night. Joshua, the Lunar Locos, and one of Freddy’s friends from the laser lab already had a
final prank planned before my little misadventure with Garza. One of the Locos had been working
on a pixel-based delivery system for concrete. It was s
omething that could only work well in
space. Essentially it was a little pea-shooter that expelled wads of wet concrete about the
size of a spitball to a laser-guided target on a grid. You could use it, in theory, to assemble
a structure from a distance like a long-distance 3D printer. Not a lot of practical use, but a
fun little project, and he’d been working with the chemists to formulate a functional mixture
for the concrete from ground-up lunar regolith and used water-based hydraulic fl
uid. Well, they’d
gotten the unit to work, and they had plans for a funny little picture on one of the vacant bunker
walls—some silly-looking emoji or something along those lines. Instead, I, and everyone else in
the bunks, woke to a furor the following morning. Kulfitz was going berserk. We all followed the
sound of Kulfitz howling as her three program coordinators looked on, her shrill voice
echoing down through the archway. “We don’t deserve to be disrespected like this!” I heard
her sh
out from the top of the ramp. “This entire program—” her voice cracked and then tailed off.
Then, from the top of the ramp we could see, those Locos boys and Joshua had gone out there and spit
a layer of concrete over the top of their beloved archway, erasing the “to the” in the lettering
of “Welcome to the Moon.” And somehow—they must have mixed in some paint or chalk or something
into the concrete,” because there was a big white rounded “W” right in the middle of the
archway that kinda loo
ked like a big butt. At first glance, it seemed pretty funny and a few
of us were grinning, trying not to call too much attention to our presence or how amusing it seemed
to us. She looked up, though, and the mere sight of a smile set off Kulfitz again, who erupted
into tears with rage, and her three directors all started screaming at us like we’d desecrated their
holy icon atop the lunar church of the all-sacred science. They were spitting mad—calling us
the most disrespectful collection o
f rude, ungrateful, arrogant sons-of-bitches they’d ever
even heard of at NASA, in academia, in life. It was one of those surreal moments when an entire
crowd of people suddenly all realizes at the same moment that whatever it was they were doing
had gone way too far—both us and the directors. At that very moment, Joshua appeared in the upper
tier above the ramp leading down to the archway, and I swear he could have been a theatrical
actor, because he launched into a scene, that at first wa
s entirely baffling, comically
ludicrous, and simultaneously the most absurd and courageous thing I’d ever witnessed.
“Oh, my friends,” he shouted, pointing up at the archway, beaming. “The Owosu!”
And he launched into a long monologue about the significance of the symbol,
how he had been feeling so homesick, how generous it was for his new friends here
to put that symbol—the sign for welcoming and unity among his people—there above us over the
archway in our last few days together. That we
would welcome a boy from a small village in
Africa to this lunar outpost to study his trade. Up till that moment he mentioned his village,
even I couldn’t tell that he was bullshitting everyone. But we’d talked a lot over that month.
I knew where he came from—just outside Kumasi, the second largest city in Ghana, which had a
population of nearly seven million at the time. We’d actually had this very conversation once
before. He was making fun of me for knowing next to nothing about Africa—s
omething he learned was
true of almost all Americans from his older sister who’d gone to Stanford. She had been constantly
flabbergasted by our baseline level of ignorance about the world’s fastest-growing continent.
She’d come home each summer and tell Joshua, “They’ll believe anything you tell them about
Africa.” And here was Joshua now, hugging people, laughing, smiling, telling everyone how they’d
never believe this back home in his village, how we’d put the Owosu on the
moon to make h
im feel welcome. After maybe a minute of this, Kulfitz looked
up at it, shook her head, and just said, “Somebody needs to take that down before you
go.” She looked up at the arch again and then back down to the floor. “Please.”
Joshua had been so convincing, I’m not even sure anyone besides me knew he was
full of it in the moment. He came over to me as everyone was filing out from the archway. He
gave me a giant hug, smiling from ear to ear. “The Owosu?” I asked him, looking
up at NASA’s ho
ly archway. Joshua shook his head in disbelief and started
laughing quietly, doubling over on my shoulder. “It kinda looks like a big butt,”
I said, looking up at the symbol. “It is a butt, Julian,” he
whispered. “It is a butt.” He told me later that day that Owosu was just
the surname of one of his childhood friends he’d pulled out of his ass on the spot
to make the story sound more convincing. And who would us Americans be to say any
different? The Owosu. I had a sense then that Joshua O
kine-Baba would not be stopped
in this life. Not on Earth. Not in space. Jordan, the Chem-E from Cornell, helped those
Locos boys work up a solvent that loosened all that concrete before it had a chance to properly
set, but not before we’d taken about a thousand pictures of the sight. Joshua and I took a
classic one together right under the archway. Then it was just another twenty-four hours of
quiet, awkward energy from everyone on both sides. Everybody afraid to look at each other.
I didn
’t ask why, but Freddy got switched out of our flight group. I don’t remember talking
to her the rest of the time on the moon, or even back in Florida for that matter.
On the flight back, everyone laughed about our coup, as though we’d all been in on the joke in
the moment. We laughed about how gullible they’d been to fall for something like that, shaking our
heads, and maybe some of us even believed it. A bunch of NASA program directors, that oblivious,
that stupid. I’m not sure I knew it t
hen, but I know it now. They just wanted an excuse to
walk out of that room the same way we did. And Joshua gave it to them, so we could all quietly
slink away and go our separate ways, saving face. We landed in the water, off the coast of Cape
Canaveral, just as they did in the old days, the glory days, back when NASA was NASA. We all
had to clear through an outgoing medical exam, which was in a dusty but bright old building.
I vividly remember seeing flies in the window, not mosquitoes or
some other tropical insects
that were inevitable in Florida, but house flies. Then, we all got flown in our three shifts
to the airport, each flight group together. Our group was out under an awning, waiting
for the bus to come in, while the second group was coming out of the medical exams. We
could see them pop out into the waiting area, just inside the glass. I have a vivid memory of
Freddy Garza sitting there behind that window, unwilling to look out at me, turning away.
Then, Joshua a
ppeared inside the waiting room. As soon as he saw Joshua, one of the
high school boys in our group said, “We should moon them.” The very thought of it, a
month prior probably would have given this busload of space nerds a panic attack to a person. Two of
the girls, sorta stepped away from the bus stop, disowning the rest of us as we debated, probably
for thirty seconds or so before the airport shuttle approached. In the moment, it seemed like
it was now or never, and for fourteen dumb kids
after a trip like that, it was a fitting end.
“Welcome to the Moooooooon!” we all shouted loud enough for half the building to hear.
Rumor has it that somewhere in a corridor at NASA headquarters they’ve got a
print of our naked asses hanging up. And maybe it was fitting. That reaction, those
times. Even at eighteen, I remember thinking that at some point in the past, some gentleman
of means walked off a wooden dock thinking that the East India Trading Company’s days were
numbered, that its
time, justifiably, had passed. Still, I think about our generation washing over
theirs, the arrogance of our contempt for them. Even still, they must have known something.
Every single one of the people I met up there became a player somehow. Okine Astronautical
was the first major contract A & A signed as we neared completion of the first Space Ladder.
By the time the Osaka Space Lift was completed roughly thirteen years later, the Okine family
had processed twice as much metal as all the
other off-Earth foundries combined, including
nearly the balance of the OSL metal itself—enough in volume to rebuild every skyscraper in North
America and East Asia four hundred times over. A big part of that unprecedented productivity
was the fact that Joshua personally hired those Lunar Locos boys, who, among them,
accounted for half the patents on lunar heavy machinery in the following twenty years.
I kept an eye on most of those kids throughout their early career journeys—the chemists
and geologists, the flight geeks, even the astronomers. Garza, though, I never did cross
paths with her again. She didn’t come to Caltech. I hope I wasn’t a factor in that decision, but
it wouldn’t surprise me if I was. She did end up at NASA for a few years before breaking off and
settling at Hatton, working on reactor design. When I think about intellect—self-rating my
own intelligence, a dumb idea to begin with—I can’t help but think that the stupidest
thing I ever did was not kissing Fr
eddy Garza before we put our space helmets on.
I’ve lived a lonely life. I don’t have a lot of shared magical moments—meaningful
human experiences. That sure was one, that night. Maybe the biggest.
I don’t tell the story often, though people ask often enough for it to
be annoying. “When did you think of it, Julian? When did you know you were going to change
the world?” I usually slough off the question by saying there wasn’t a genuine eureka moment
that I knew I could crack Hamamatsu, but, w
ell, I guess that was it, sitting there at that table
with Dr. Todd. I guess I don’t want to relive that moment over and over again. Every time I do, I’m
flushed with embarrassment and regret. The brazen stupidity of youth. I think of the way things got
out of control—the way we all behaved. Just like Todd said. All attitude and no gratitude. The
things I know now that I didn’t know then—like the herculean effort it was for them to even get
packets of powdered fruit punch to the moon; how m
uch it must have cost NASA to replace that table
we dented; the fact that the plunger those Locos boys stole for that chandelier was an absolutely
essential accessory for flushing the fuel storage lines. They didn’t even have terrestrial toilets
up there. Or even that it was a damn near perfect certainty that NASA had cameras on nearly
every last inch of the Gideon-Jackson outpost streaming to their internal server 24/7. I
think about those four weeks, and I cringe. Then, inevitably, I thin
k of where we are now,
how tiny and old and sad that initial space infrastructure was—for decades collecting
dust while languishing on the cusp of the greatest expansion in the history of humanity.
People know the names Okine and Hartsock now, but almost no one knows the name Dr. Todd
Nazarian, the man who brought me to the moon, a man without whom the footprint of the
human race in space would be monumentally different and smaller by a hundred-fold.
By his best days, though, it was well pa
st time for a new group of explorers to bring a
new attitude. With an OI in the 97th percentile, I was just smart enough to not know
any better. But more than anything, I never played stupid nor purposefully
missed my notes, and I never slouched. Welcome w Moon This has been an original story written
and read by P.E. Rowe. Thank you for listening & I hope you enjoyed the story.
If you’re enjoying the channel and you enjoyed today’s story, I’d humbly ask
that you leave a like on today’s vid
eo, as it helps the channel to grow and
reach more sci-fi fans like you. I’ve just added a new topic poll for next month
that’s live now and will be open through April 11th, so please head on over the community tab,
which will be linked in the pinned comment below to get your vote in now if you’re so inclined.
Last month’s surprise winner was “Mysterious Microscopic Obelisks are Everywhere!” That topic
was a regular reader’s suggestion about a recent new finding of strange genetic fragments
floating
all over the human body, and I’m excited to share the story from that poll next week. So if you have
a topic you’d like to see turned into a story, no matter how weird and crazy you might think it
is, please leave it in a comment and we’ll see if we can get it into the next topic poll.
If you don’t have a suggestion yourself, but you’d like to participate in future polls,
be sure that you’re subscribed to the channel and have the notifications bell turned on so you
can get notifi
ed when the topic polls go up. I say it a lot, because it’s true. I’m a huge
fan of the stories that come out of the polls. Recently I revisited the very first of these topic
poll stories, Mouse of Small things. I mention it here because in the coming days I’ll be releasing
a craft talk on that story over on my Mechanics of Fiction Channel. I’ll link that video in the cards
here as soon as that is complete, so if you’re a fiction writer yourself or even if you’re just
interested in hearing
about the thinking that goes into these stories, I invite you to join
me. I’ll be linking the story itself as well. Next Thursday, as I mentioned,
we’ll be back again with the topic poll winner on the “Mysterious
Microscopic Obelisks.” The Misfits, Episode 20, will be coming up on April
18th, the following week as well. I hope you’ll join us for those
stories when they come out. Thanks for listening, this has been
PE Rowe and we’ll see you next time.
Comments
Please stop by the community page to vote in our next topic poll! https://www.youtube.com/@RoweLit/community Thanks for listening 😃🚀
The best author I’ve ever discovered online, or on YT. Which doesn’t come close to describing the joy these tales bring.
Another amazing story. The painful nature of first love, and regret, but seasoned with the sheer exuberance of youth, and the creativity that often accompanies it. Made me think of my own distant teenage years! thank you for sharing your remarkable talent with us.
Pure Future Nostalgia. I looked upon the exact word that describes the smile that happens when you remember something about your childhood/teen days/experiences. That’s what/how I feel about the story. Thanks again.
This was one of my favorite origin stories. I laughed out loud at the conspicuous absence of mosquitoes in Florida. Once again, well done Mr. Rowe!
Hooked on Rowe! Small tip- TNT detonates; you need a propellant that deflagrates. Don’t ask me how I know. 🙈 This story hits home.. 🤕
This is your 80 year old fan again. I. LOVED this story. A favorite.
Again, your Universe expands my friend. Within and without, before and after, as it ever was.
Top notch Rowe. I will replay it for my chickens later.
Another great story. I think we all have a story from our youth that shares the same sentaments as this story does.
Of course, now I want a follow-up on Freddy Garza. Independent of Julian; I'd hate to be caught being that romantically naive. Great story that captures the spontaneity of the young in the telling thereof, while still holding the fear of consequence and the cautionery perspective of time.
WELCOME TO THE MOOOOOON!!!
I get the feeling that some of this - the interaction between scientists and brainy kids - is semi autobiographical. The advice from the father about not hiding your intellect is very good.
Mate, you had me crying with laughter at the beginning, and tearing up at the end. The maestro plays again!
This one definitely made me laugh the hardest out of all of them so far
Thank you for using "foist". People don't appreciate that word enough.
I love Julian stories!❤
Amazing story. Keep up the good work Mr. Rowe! Awaiting the next one!
My favorite character!
Since Inertia(wow, "wich one of the AI's will I encounter?" "Imagine they're Lions. Which Lion do you think is the one to get out first?" - amazing) and Crusher Tanning, you've been on fire! One hit after another! I admit; the Misfits are really growing on me 😊. Welcome Moon was pretty intense. You're really refining the emotional aspect and state of each character. You really allow us to "read the room", like we're really 'there'. Yes, the helmet. The regret. Life is really precious and yet, the Meaning of it is becoming too foggy for Humanity to perceive. P.E. what is Galactic Van Life... what does the Van stand for?