Sex on the Moon
didn’t really care. In his mind, he wasn’t in a simulator tucked into a secure building on the JSC campus.
    In his mind, he was sitting in the cockpit of a rocket ship, hurtling toward Mars.
    …
    It wasn’t quite the overwhelming energy rush of a simulated shuttle thruster pushing him back into a leather commander’s seat—but it was pretty damn close. Sitting cross-legged at the edge of the same swimming pool from the week before, half the young population of Clear Lake spread out across the patio in front of him as he told the story—so many eyes and ears and minds focused entirely on him—maybe embellishing a little bit here and there, but keeping to the narrative as much as possible … well, it was a truly pivotal moment in Thad’s life. He could see his own charisma reflected in the eyes of the pretty girls closest to him, and even in the unabashedly awed expressions on the faces of the men.
    “So all in all …” Thad finally wrapped up the story. “I think it was a pretty good week.”
    There was a moment of frozen silence, just like there had been when he’d first proposed the idea of the contest a week ago. And then everyone was applauding at once, congratulating him, wave after wave of handshakes and pats on the back, and even a few kisses on the cheek. Helms gave him a grudging thumbs-up, shaking his angled head in admiration.
    Thad had secured his place at the top of the social food chain. It was a spot he’d never occupied before—and he liked it.
    When the crowd moved away, Helms sidled next to him, dipping his finlike feet into the cool water of the shallow end of the pool.
    “Your contest was quite a success. I think it might end up a weekly thing. But I doubt anyone’s going to top flying the space shuttle.”
    “It was just a simulation.” Thad laughed. “I’ll probably wait till my third tour to try and sneak into the real thing.”
    Helms laughed back—then paused and looked at Thad.
    “You’re kidding, right?”
    Thad slid forward into the pool, submerging himself all the way down to his bright green eyes.

9
    It was a moment every true scientist knew well—although it wasn’t something quantifiable, it wasn’t something you could predict or reverse-engineer or data-map or even really describe—but it was a moment that anyone who had spent time sequestered in a lab or behind a computer screen or at a blackboard, chalk billowing down in angry stormlike clouds, could identify, if not define.
    Thad has his own word for it: serenity . The moment when the act of science organically shifted into the art of science; when even the most mundane, choreographed procedures achieved such a rhythm that they became invisible chords of a single violin lost in the complexity of a perfect symphony. Minutes shifting into a state of timelessness, where the world seemed frozen but Thad was somehow moving forward: content, fulfilled, free.
    The project itself was far from spectacular. Slicing away at a piece of volcanic rock using a tiny diamond-tipped saw while keeping track of every microscopic wisp of volcanic dust—accurately documenting the final weight of the sample that was left behind. The work was painstaking, but the volcanic rock was just a stand-in, like the mocked-up cockpit of the space shuttle. It was supposed to represent something infinitely more valuable. A chunk of the moon, hand-delivered more than thirty years ago by men whose names were enshrined in history books. For Thad, it didn’t matter that the procedure was little more than a dress rehearsal. The process itself had overtaken him, and in that moment he was truly lost in the art of the science. The whir of the diamond saw, the pungent scent of the heated volcanic sample, the swirl of the dust as it billowed upward into a mercury-based measuring machine. He was in that serene place where nothing else existed. And he would have been content to stay there forever.
    “Wow. You did all this by yourself?”
    It took Thad a

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