Kangaroo Too Read online

  Spend long enough in any of those off-world environments and your body will start adapting. The biggest problem is you’ll start losing the core density in your bones. It’ll grow back if you move to a higher gravity environment, but there is a point of no return: if you lose too much bone mass, you’ll never get it back to its previous strength, and you won’t be able to walk or even stand in one gravity for the rest of your life without mechanical assistance.

  People have tried to address this problem technologically ever since living the rest of your life off Planet Earth became possible. A lot of rich folks who wanted new real estate funded research into robotic exoskeletons and gene therapy treatments and biotech implants that promised to either restore or make up for bone loss due to extended stays in low gravity. None of those potential cures has panned out yet. So anybody who leaves Earth has to decide, within no more than two years at the outside, whether they want to stay there for good.

  The Moon is close enough to Earth, and still within range for minimal-delay communications, that rotation between the two places makes sense for most people. Industrial workers on farside tend to swap out every six to nine months; nearside’s spaceport and space elevator and tourist trap staff usually have longer rotations. Being able to see the Earth is a pretty cool thing. Having nothing but gray rocks and the black void of outer space for scenery all the time is less exciting for most people, even if it’s just a short tube ride back to nearside.

  A few years ago, the Medical School of Earth’s Leland Stanford Junior University—commonly known as just “Stanford University”—received a significant endowment to fund a new research and teaching hospital on the Moon. This was a big deal in the news: not only was it the first private medical institution on the Moon, its charter also included a commitment to treat anyone living there, and that promised to be a big step up from the government-funded and small-scale medical clinics that had previously been established during the colonial period.

  Stanford’s hospital on the Moon, nicknamed “Lunar General,” expanded quickly, and over the years even declined a number of opportunities to collaborate with other medical groups. One idea that made it through their gauntlet of disapproval and actually broke ground was a retirement community attached to Lunar General. In retrospect, it seems obvious—or at least that’s what all the pundits say now. The elderly are looking at end of life anyway, and their bodies are deteriorating already. Why not put them in one-sixth gravity, where some of them will actually be able to move around without canes or walkers or wheelchairs?

  There’s currently a very long waiting list to get into the Silver Circle retirement community. Even with the high price tag, it’s a one-of-a-kind living situation with obvious advantages and enormous novelty value. If you’re old and sick, there are worse ways to spend the last of your money than going to the Moon.

  Jessica Chu got both her M.D. and her Ph.D. degrees at Stanford University. That’s her connection, and how we’re going to get access to both Lunar General and Silver Circle: she’s going to work her Stanford contacts to get us on site, and then we’re going to sneak into Gladys Löwenthal’s room.

  My job will be to follow Jessica around, posing as her personal assistant—that’ll be a laugh and a half—and then, once we’re in private with Gladys, to open the pocket and retrieve the precious metals we stowed there before leaving Earth. I don’t know where Gladys is going to hide twenty bars of solid gold in a nursing home, but hey, that’s her problem.

  Something’s going to go wrong. That’s one of the lessons I learned during my field agent training, and it’s proven out during my actual missions: at least three unexpected things are going to happen during any given operation. It’s just a fact of life. “Variations.” The best you can hope for is that nobody dies or gets seriously injured who isn’t supposed to.

  I don’t have a high enough security clearance to see everything in Jessica’s and Gladys’s personnel files, and the parts I can access don’t tell me how they might have known each other back in the day. The curiosity is killing me. Jessica clearly isn’t going to tell me, so I guess I’ll just have to ask Gladys when we get there.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Earth—United States—Washington, D.C.

  12 minutes into my medical training

  “Use the buttons,” Jessica says.

  “What buttons?” I ask, turning the tablet over in my hands.

  She grabs the tablet with one hand and points with the other. “There. Up, down, select.”

  I shake my head while trying them out. “This is ridiculously slow.”

  “Get used to it,” she says. “You can’t use any implanted tech that civilians wouldn’t have.”

  We’re in her section of the office, a medical area including a diagnostic bed, a wall of equipment and supplies, and a work desk. Right now we’re standing next to the exam bed and she’s showing me all the medical equipment I’ll be expected to know how to operate while I’m posing as her assistant.

  Jessica Chu, my “Surgical and Medical Intervention Practitioner,” is all business, all the time. I’ve never asked, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that were her middle name. Jessica All-Business Chu.

  “It’s really a shame,” I say. “A lot of people could really benefit from having nanobots in their blood—”

  “Don’t say that word.”

  “I’m not going to say it in the field.”

  “You’re in the field right now,” Jessica says. “Start practicing so it comes naturally. We don’t know what our schedule will be like up there. You might be tired, you might be exhausted. Make this normal so you don’t accidentally say something you’re not supposed to.” She picks up another instrument. “This is a noninvasive temporal probe.”

  “It detects time?”

  She places it against the side of my head. “It goes here, against the temporal bone in your thick skull. Activate by pushing the button, then wait for the scan to complete.” I feel her push the button, and a trilling electronic sound emanates from the instrument. She pulls it away from my head and taps at the screen of the tablet I’m holding. “You’ll see three different diagnostic visualizations.”

  “Groovy,” I say, trying to make sense of the mess of symbols and colors that fill the tablet display. Jessica actually likes looking at raw data, because her brain works differently than most human beings. “What am I looking at here?”

  She points at the first chart, then moves her fingers on the tablet to enlarge one part of the display. “Read that number, in the green area.”

  “Forty-seven.”

  “Normal range is between thirty and forty,” she says. “Higher numbers indicate more brain activity.”

  I can’t stop myself from grinning. “So I’m smarter than the average bear?”

  Jessica frowns at me. “Brain activity does not necessarily imply cognition.”

  “But you just said—”

  “Your brain is unusual,” she says. “This isn’t news. Your weird brain is why you can use the pocket. We don’t know the root cause of that weirdness. We can only measure its effects.”

  “So what exactly does this probe detect?”

  “Electrochemical activity. If a brain is working more or less than expected, we want to know what it’s doing or not doing. Given the age of most of the patients we’ll be examining, I expect a few of them will read low, and we’ll want to schedule them for more in-depth brain imaging.”

  “Okay, time out. Why have we literally never talked about my brain weirdness before?”

  “Why would we need to talk about it?”

  “Because it’s my brain!”

  Jessica frowns. “You’re not a medical professional. You don’t have the background to discuss these issues—”

  “My brain!” I point at my head. “I’m the patient here. I have rights!”

  Jessica folds her arms. “You are a clandestine operative for the United States government. You’re in the military chain of command. You don�
�t have the same rights as a civilian.”

  “I want to see that paperwork.” I was a minor when I joined the agency, but lots of Earth teenagers enlisted to fight the Independence War against Mars. Nobody cared too much about the fine print at the time.

  “Oh, so you’re both a lawyer and a doctor now?”

  I don’t have a good comeback for that. We scowl at each other for a moment. I hear footsteps in the hallway outside. Then Paul walks in through the open doorway of the Surgical area, holding a large envelope. Perfect timing. I hope he wasn’t eavesdropping on us.

  “Your infil transpo,” he says, dropping the envelope on the instrument tray next to the exam bed and turning right around to walk out again. The front is printed with a colorful photograph of a happy mixed-race family standing in front of what looks like a large missile. “Bon voyage.”

  Jessica picks up the envelope and frowns. “What is this?”

  Paul stops, halfway to the door, and turns around. “Two tickets for tomorrow morning’s rocket to the Moon, plus train passes from here to Florida. Pack light.”

  “No,” she says, raising a finger for emphasis. “We are not taking a Saturn 5000. We are not going on a ridiculous tourist trap ascent.”

  “You are a VIP,” Paul says. “This is one of the hottest tickets in the Solar System. Stanford University’s Medical Group insists on treating you to this once-in-a-lifetime, historic opportunity.”

  “Stanford should be spending their money on other things,” Jessica snaps. “We can take a regular shuttle. Hell, we can take a US-OSS personnel flight.” She pronounces the acronym you-sauce. “It’ll be faster and won’t have any screaming children aboard.”

  “You are a civilian,” Paul says, calmly and evenly. “There is no plausible reason you would be traveling on a military transport.”

  “I’m a reservist. Maybe I’m involved in a research project with US-OSS,” Jessica says. “Something to do with low gravity and body adaptation.”

  Paul shakes his head. “Please tell me how much longer you would like to complain about this before I can leave and get back to work.”

  Jessica purses her lips and balls both hands into fists. She must know that she’s never going to win an argument against Paul.

  “I will just point out one more thing,” she says, stealing a glance at me. I raise my eyebrows innocently. “If Kangaroo and I are traveling in and amongst a civilian population, especially one with a high percentage of tourists and vacationers, we will be expected to make small talk about our personal lives.”

  “Is there a problem with your legends?” Paul asks. We’ve already received our cover story identities, including detailed personal backstories supported by agency-generated fake documentation, planted online in all the right places.

  “Are you concerned about your ability to stay in character as a gruff and impatient practicing physician who, underneath her poor bedside manner, has a heart of gold?” I ask.

  Jessica turns to me and extends a finger. “Not helping.” She turns back to Paul. “The less exposure we have to random civilians, the better. Get us on a private spacecraft. Charter a flight. I’m sure we can find a service—”

  “Stanford is generous,” Paul says, “not extravagant. They’re not going to pay for a private spacecraft for just two people. I’m sorry, Surgical, but you will have to suffer the indignity of traveling aboard a replica of one of the most famous spacecraft in history.”

  Jessica grumbles as Paul turns and walks out of the room.

  “It won’t be so bad,” I say. “Remember that cruise I was on last year?”

  She squints at me. “The cruise that was hijacked and nearly crashed into Mars?”

  “Well, yeah. But aside from that. They had a great seafood buffet.”

  “I’m pretty sure we’re not getting haute cuisine aboard an antique rocket.”

  “Come on, look on the bright side.” I point at the clearly fake photo on the front of the ticket envelope. “You can pretend you’re one of the first humans in space. Didn’t you want to be an astronaut when you were a kid?”

  “No,” Jessica says. “I wanted to be a hospital administrator.”

  “That’s a weird aspiration for a kid.”

  “I was a weird kid.”

  I hold up the tablet, which still shows my brain scan. “Speaking of weird—”

  “Forget it,” Jessica says, taking the tablet away from me. “You need to go pack.”

  * * *

  There are lots of different ways to get to the Moon these days. But Jessica and I are in a bit of a hurry, so no weeklong space elevator ride for us; and we’re posing as civilians, so no speedy military transport options. Fortunately, there is a booming tourism industry on the Moon, and it spikes in the last year of every decade for literally historic reasons.

  The first manned Moon landing happened in July of 1969, so any year with a number ending in “9” is the something-and-tenth anniversary of that event. Once humanity established permanent Lunar colonies, there was a regular influx of lookie-loos—somewhat pejoratively called “niners,” since they don’t tend to visit at any other time—who want to gawk at the piles of peculiar debris, which our brave ancestors left behind on their first tentative forays into outer space, and take part in the various celebrations of that first giant leap for Mankind.

  All of the Apollo landing sites were preserved as historical areas long ago, the Lunar Museum of Human Spaceflight was one of the most successful crowdfunding efforts in history, and there’s an entire United Nations working group dedicated to Lunar tourism. People care a lot about the Moon. Maybe because you can look up and see it on just about any night, sometimes during the day, and it’s a big, bright reminder that there are people living off the Earth.

  Being able to actually see some of the structures on the Moon with a telescope or a decent pair of binoculars is an awe-inspiring thing, especially when you’re a young boy living in an orphanage and your prospects of getting out of the building—much less off the planet—are vanishingly slim. Just knowing that some people were able to escape the world of their birth means that it’s possible. It’s something to strive for. It’s not just ancient history or science fiction; it’s real, and it’s attainable.

  At least, that’s what all the commercials say.

  The “Saturn 5000” that Jessica and I will be riding up into space is not an exact replica of the original Saturn V spacecraft from the Apollo era. If it were, the tour company wouldn’t be able to fit more than three people aboard, and that’s hardly cost-efficient. They’ve reproduced the exterior look of the original—a tall, pointed, hundred-meter-tall cylinder, painted in black and white with small protruding fins and the letters “USA” emblazoned in bright red next to a twentieth-century vintage American flag. The engine bells at the business end of the rocket are different than the originals, since this new spacecraft is using a mini-ionwell for thrust—much more efficient than the old chemical propellants, and also frees up more interior space for passengers.

  This rocket isn’t going to fire in stages like the original Saturn V, so it won’t shed large pieces of itself on the way up until the only bit actually going to the Moon is the tiny crew capsule at the top. It’s a little mind-boggling to realize that every one of those Apollo missions involved a huge expenditure of resources just to send a little tin can to the actual destination, but I guess we had to start somewhere.

  The crew capsule at the top of our Saturn 5000 is supposed to be a mostly accurate historical re-creation, but each one of the three available seats cost a small fortune. There was no chance that Jessica or I would be able to secure those accommodations, even if they hadn’t been reserved months ahead of time. Stanford was only willing to spring for two basic, economy-class seats for its VIPs, but as the travel agent pointed out, these were already very scarce and expensive.

  So it’s a little surprising how many children are on this rocket.

  The rocket’s interior is divided into doughnu
t-shaped levels, with a transparent elevator tube running through the center and rings of seats around that. The seats face outward, and the entire interior wall is actually a display surface. Right now it’s playing various historical footage from the Apollo missions, which appear as squares—that was how vid screens looked back then—floating on top of the view outside the rocket. According to the promotional materials, all these walls will become fully “transparent” during launch, thanks to hidden holo-cameras built into the exterior, so every passenger will have a clear view of the Earth dropping away below us.

  I really hope none of these kids throws up.

  Because honestly, how many of them actually wanted to come on this trip in the first place? It seems unlikely that the wailing infant three levels above us, or the crying toddler partway around the circle to my left, or the preschooler farther down to my right—I’d guess she’s five years old and singing what she believes is the old American national anthem—would have been able to persuade their parents or guardians to shell out the small fortune this flight must be costing their family. Perhaps the parents think it’ll be an educational opportunity. I really hope they get their money’s worth. I can turn down the volume in my ears, but everyone else is suffering in order to give their kids this once-in-a-lifetime experience.

  Jessica has broken out a pair of wireless earbuds and is preparing to put them in. I elbow her arm to interrupt. I don’t want to be stuck on this voyage to the Moon with nobody to talk to, and more importantly, nothing to distract me from these noisy children.

  “We didn’t get to finish our earlier conversation,” I say. “You know. About my B-R-A-I-N?”

  She frowns at me. “You know we can’t talk about that here.”

  “We can discuss the general scientific—”

  “We can’t talk about that here,” she repeats.

  I take a second to judge her mood and my own desire to argue this out right here and now. “Fine. How about the rest of my medical briefing? We were interrupted before you could train me on the new equipment. Can we talk about that?”