The Girl from GALEOP — Part 1 of 3
Colonel Riverton’s niece survives a disastrous lunar mission.
Author’s note: This story is from an ongoing fiction series about the Galactic and Low Earth Orbit Program.
In this episode, we meet new characters: Colonel Riverton’s niece, Hazel, a junior astronaut, and her brother Edgar, a conspiracy theorist.
After introducing strange what-ifs about the lunar mission, I ended this story on a cliffhanger so I could continue it as a novella.
Hazel’s nervous blue eyes followed the man in the long white coat.
The doctor, a fifty-ish man with large hands, exchanged whispers with the military guard outside of the examination room. Then he returned to his patient, pressed his stethoscope to her back, and listened to her lungs again.
Clad in a navy T-shirt and khaki slacks, the teenager perched on the end of the cushioned platform. She breathed deeply at the doctor’s command. Her bare feet dangled six inches above the cold floor tiles. She wore no makeup or fingernail polish. Her shiny brunette hair fell in layers below her jaw.
She turned her head. Her uncle, Colonel Matt Riverton, leaned against the austere stucco wall, his arms crossed over his royal blue flight jumpsuit. His uniform bore the emblem of the Galaxy and Low Earth Orbit Program. He had not left Hazel’s side since she had been carried off the transport from the Orbital Station.
Her fingers tightened on the lop-eared stuffed rabbit resting on her knees. The toy animal had been her sister Tamara’s favorite playmate when they were little girls; Hazel had promised to take the faded lavender bunny all the way to the moon and back, as a special souvenir.
The doctor removed the stethoscope’s earpieces. “I will refer her to a specialist. She’ll remain in quarantine for the next two weeks.”
“That’s completely uncalled for,” Uncle Matt argued.
The guard opened the door and allowed General Trumaine, a tall, brawny man, and his assistant, a young lieutenant with aloof eyes, to enter the examination room.
“What’s the diagnosis?” barked the general.
“Yet to be determined,” replied the doctor. “Needs more tests.”
Hazel’s uncle declared, “There’s nothing wrong with her. What happened on the mission was a fluke.”
“And where did you study medicine?” the GALEOP doctor demanded.
Colonel Riverton ignored the snarky remark. “It was a panic attack. She only had a week of training before we took her up. She had trouble breathing in these new helmets, and then her oxygen tank was damaged.”
Hazel said softly, “I’m sorry, General Trumaine. I know I let everybody down.”
The senior officer addressed the eighteen-year-old as if she were his own granddaughter: “Miss Riverton, your safe return to Earth was our top priority. As soon as your uncle radioed in the medical emergency, I issued the order to scrub the mission. Now, I want to hear it straight from you. What happened up there?”
She kicked her bare heels against the base of the examination table and twisted the furry ears of the stuffed rabbit. “I was using the ground sweeper.”
“Was it functioning properly?” the general asked.
“Yes. I picked up a reading.”
General Trumaine’s assistant held up a tablet computer and replayed the video of Hazel’s ill-fated lunar mission. There she was, soundlessly moving over the dusty terrain in her pressurized suit. Her hands controlled a long, thin device, the size of a golf club, with a digital panel built into the handle.
On the tablet’s small screen, she detoured behind a boulder. Instantly, her helmet tilted to the sky. The ground sweeper sailed away from her gloves. She stumbled backward and landed on the shoulder pack housing her oxygen equipment.
The general commented, “Miss Riverton, it looks like you were trying to get away from something.”
“I saw a stranger. He frightened me.”
The men shook their heads.
“He took the ground sweeper away from me,” she insisted.
“You dropped it,” the general rumbled. “It’s still up there, along with the American flags from the old missions.”
“He grabbed it,” she said loudly.
“No one else was on the lunar surface,” the doctor said sharply. “Just you and Colonel Riverton.”
“I know what I saw. He was as tall as you, General. He was wearing a different kind of spacesuit. It was black, and the helmet was smaller. He had an emblem on his sleeve, with a picture of a —”
Her uncle stopped her. “You were hallucinating from lack of oxygen.”
The general studied the video. “Miss Riverton, you picked up something when you walked around the boulder. What was it?”
“Uhmm — ” Hazel hugged the stuffed bunny closer.
“It must have been the lens cap,” said Colonel Riverton. “She dropped it when she set up the camera.”
General Trumaine grunted. He seemed to buy her uncle’s story.
The doctor put in, “She needs more exams. I recommend keeping her at the base until the end of the month.”
To Hazel’s relief, the general replied, “That’s unnecessary. Everyone needs to see that Miss Riverton is safe and sound. After the press conference, she will be released to her parents. She can follow up with her own physician.”
A few hours later, the press circus began. The journalists asked her a million times how she felt.
She answered, “Fine. I’m OK,” over and over, as her Uncle Matt, the mission commander, had coached her.
He fielded the rest of the questions. He took the lead chair in the center of the conference table and stared down the news cameras. She looked at him with the admiration she had felt as a child when she watched his GALEOP missions on the television news.
The reporters did not bring up the fact that she had been chosen out of a hundred thousand applicants for this project, the first since the moon missions had been shelved in the 1970s. No one suggested, either, that she had been selected because of her family’s famous name.
At last, a black, four-door sedan conveyed her from the military base in San Pedro to the driveway of her home in Pasadena. She gazed through the car’s tinted windows at the reassuring sight of her parents’ two-story house, with the white wicker chairs resting on the front porch and the hanging baskets overflowing with yellow begonias.
Edgar, her brother, six-foot-four, two hundred and twenty-nine pounds, rushed across the front lawn in camouflage pants and a black-and-white T-shirt that proclaimed, “$50,000 reward for a live Jupiterian.”
As she let herself out of the unmarked government car, he glanced over her gray, zipped-up sweat jacket and blue jeans. “Hey, GALEOP girl. They didn’t let you keep the puffy spacesuit?”
“Really funny, Edgar.” She waited while he snapped shots of the retreating military vehicle with his cell phone. “Are you going to post those photos on your blog?”
“Maybe. So, where have you been for the past month? Obviously, not on a moon mission, because everyone knows that GALEOP is a psyop.”
“You’re a laugh riot.” Her small tote bag slung over her shoulder, Hazel headed for the house, desperate to hide from the prying eyes of the world media.
“Guess what?” Edgar towered over her as he tagged along at her side.
“You’re running a sale on tin foil hats?”
“Seriously. Big announcement this morning. The president tripled the space program’s funding.”
“That’s awesome.”
“What will they do with all that money?” her brother asked. “Conduct more fake lunar trips?”
“Do some research! The moon has valuable resources. Metals. Minerals. We’ll have mining operations up there in ten years.”
As they climbed the porch’s steps, their father, Thomas Riverton, gray-haired and several inches shorter than his son, opened the door. “Hazel, welcome back to Earth.” He pulled her in for a quick hug.
“Thanks, Dad.” She crushed her face into his shoulder. She hoped that her parents would understand why the mission had not gone as planned. As she stepped into the living room, she wondered how much she was allowed to tell them.
Ava, Hazel’s petite, auburn-haired mother, embraced her next. “Are you all right, dear? You look exhausted.”
“She shouldn’t be tired,” Edgar said. “She slept all the way back from the moon. Or wherever she went.”
“They gave her a sedative,” Ava chided him.
Hazel set her tote bag on the carpet next to the couch. She saw that her parents had hung a red “Congratulations” banner above the mantelpiece.
The television was on, with the volume muted. She had returned home in time for the election. The governor’s relaxed face told the audience that he expected to win another four-year term by a landslide.
She turned to the dining room. A celebratory banquet filled the table, even though Thanksgiving was a few weeks away: a roasted turkey, twice-baked potatoes, homemade cranberry sauce, and her mother’s famous triple berry pie.
“Mom, you didn’t have to do all of this,” Hazel protested.
“You haven’t had a real meal since you left for the base,” Ava said. “So, sit down and tuck in. We didn’t tell anyone that you were home yet. You need time to recover before people bombard you with questions.”
“Yeah,” said her brother, “like, ‘When you fell backward on your oxygen tank, why did you crash like a sack of bricks?’ That disproves the theory that the moon has one-sixth the gravity of the Earth.”
Thomas grumbled, “Son, if you insist upon holding views that ninety-nine percent of people feel are hogwash, keep them to yourself.”
Hazel asked, “Mom, where’s Tamara?”
“She’s snowed in at the Denver airport.”
“Aw, noooo.” The young astronaut opened her tote bag and took out the stuffed rabbit. “I wanted to give her this.”
“Oh!” Ava seized the treasured childhood toy. “Look who went all the way to the moon.”
Edgar snorted.
“Be careful,” Thomas said. “It could be contaminated with lunar dust.”
His son laughed so hard that he wrapped his arms around his torso and held his sides.
Hazel gave her brother an annoyed look. She told her parents, “It’s safe to handle. It was in a plastic bag.” She took the stuffed animal from her mother. “I’ll put it in Tamara’s room.”
As Hazel jogged up the carpeted staircase, her family pulled chairs away from the dining table. She overheard her brother say, “Anyone with a brain could tell they were using a green screen.”
Hazel paused outside her sister’s room. Then she turned away with the stuffed rabbit, entered her own bedroom, and shut the door.
Everything was exactly as she had left it. The green-and-yellow floral quilt on the bed. The small desk and the pine chair with the calico cushion, relics of her childhood. Her computer, where she wrote her freshman college papers, was silent and dark.
On the shelf above the desk sat a neglected terrarium, now a glass globe filled with ivory, pearl gray, and dark slate rocks she had collected from the beach.
The emerald drapes were closed. She peeked behind them to make sure that her window was shut.
She opened her closet and beheld a neat row of civilian clothes, similar to the casual outfit she had on. She grieved that, after the mess she had made of the lunar mission, she would never wear a GALEOP uniform again.
Click to read Part 2 of The Girl from GALEOP.
Disclosure: I wrote this story without the assistance of AI. I used Grammarly to check spelling and punctuation before publishing.