Welcome w Moon

“You may be a special kind of smart, but you’re also a special breed of stupid.”

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 engaging 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 locate 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 picked 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! Imagine 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 smart, 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 verbatim, 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 somebody 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 before 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 made 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 her 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 tell 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 space, 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 to—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 suspected 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 various 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, both 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 the 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 behavior. 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 thirty-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 one 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 still just be math?”

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 inclined 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 that 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 corporate 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 theoretically 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 line 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 having 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 naked 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 circumstances.

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 orient 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 that 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 operated, 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 airlock. 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, parked 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 told 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 of 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 oxidizer.

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 pulled 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 miracle 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 want?”

“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 about 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 designs 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 me.

“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 that.”

“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 formal 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 something 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 fluid. 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 shout 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 looked 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 of 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 was 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—something 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 him 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 holy 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 Okine-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 then, 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 appeared 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 Freddy 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, well, 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 much 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 think 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 past time for a new group of explorers to bring a new attitude. With an OI in the 97^th 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.