Erika stood and walked around the room. “My father’s word isn’t that complicated. It’s my humble honor to spread it.”
The interview lasted for an hour altogether. Carrie and I stayed to watch the sermon, and I snapped more photos as she talked. I could tell she loved speaking to the crowd, and they loved listening.
Chapter 23
Karen Anderson felt the acceleration push her back into her seat as the Golden Luna pulled away from the Skywheel. Months of preparation had passed, and they were finally on their way to the moon.
The moon, she thought. Who would’ve thunk?
The crew of five were all strapped in, as the computerized navigation system controlled everything. The humans on board had nothing to do except wait and (for Karen at least) to pray.
“Dear Lord,” she whispered with her eyes closed and her head bouncing around as the Luna thrust faster and faster. “Please bless this ship and the crew, and let us find whatever it is you want us to. I have faith in you, and your judgement.”
She hesitated, wanting to add another, more personal thought, but it felt wrong. At this moment, she needed to worry about the mission, not herself.
No matter how hard it was.
“Amen,” she finished.
She opened her eyes and looked ahead to the viewscreen in the front of the ship. Nothing much had changed since their departure, but she knew the Skywheel was already thousands of miles behind them.
It would take a little over two days before they could be inserted into lunar orbit. The last two days that anybody would have to wonder what was happening on the far side of the moon.
The aliens were still broadcasting some indecipherable message back to their home. That much was clear.
The moon was tidally locked to the Earth and had long ago lost its ability to form its own rotation. It now rotated once in approximately twenty-eight days, identical to the time it took to orbit the Earth. As a result, the far side of the moon could never be seen from Earth. Only the dozen Apollo astronauts who flew to the moon fifty years earlier had seen it.
Now, the group of five on board her ship would see it, and three of them would land, if it was possible, to visit the aliens.
She still found it impossible to believe, but she pushed that to the back of her mind. In the preparation leading up to the flight, she’d scanned a thousand ideas of where the aliens came from and what they were doing. But, the truth was that nobody had a clue.
Karen knew nothing about Erika Sabo. Although the internet was available to her, it wasn’t something with which any of the astronauts spent their time. There were way too many other priorities that needed their attention. The mission was costing more than a billion dollars, and they would only get one chance to make it a perfect shot. If they failed, another ship might be available in a year, but it would be staffed with a whole other crew.
She needed this to go perfectly.
And up to now, it had. However, there was a glitch in the process, and she was the only one who knew it.
She tried not to think about it. Instead, she visualized the flight path. The Golden Luna was aimed at where the moon would be in two days. To be more precise, the ship was aimed five hundred miles above the moon’s surface. The moon’s gravity would capture the ship and sling-shot it around and around in an elliptical orbit that would settle down to orbit less than twenty miles above where the alien signal originated. The first few times around, the crew would run detailed scans to find out what was below. Then, a lunar landing module would be released, allowing three of them to float down to the surface.
Only if it appeared safe, of course. There were a lot of things that could cause a mission to abort, primarily if it seemed the aliens were hostile.
Nobody quite knew exactly how they would tell, but everybody believed they would know somehow. Mission Control would make the final decision.
Karen was one of the three astronauts that would glide their way down to the surface. She would meet the aliens.
Except.
Except for the glitch.
“Nobody asked for this,” she said. “Certainly not me.”
She closed her eyes and tried not to let a tear squeeze out of the corner of one of them. She wished she could talk to David, but he was somewhere, maybe a million miles behind her. She’d lost track of where he was after she’d been aboard the Skywheel.
He’d know what to do. He always did.
But I don’t need him, she thought. I can figure this out.
The acceleration continued to push her down into her seat. It would stop soon, when the ship reached its cruising velocity, and then she’d float away, as if the ship were standing still.
At twenty-six, Karen was the youngest person ever to go into space. She wanted others of her generation to be proud of her and to look at her accomplishments to show that you can do anything you set your heart on.
Now, she was going to blow it.
As she thought again of the aliens and what they might look like, the thrust of the engines stopped and as expected, the force no longer held her like super-gravity, and she was floating free.
In the ten months she’d been either training or working on the Skywheel, and now on the Luna, she’d been the subject of countless medical tests. NASA was careful not to let anybody who had any possible issues go to the moon. There was no doctor on board, no hospital, nothing much past a fancy first-aid kit.
Every test showed her to be healthy and ready to blast to the moon.
Every test.
Including the blood test they undertook every month.
She passed with flying colors. On top of that, it’d been that same ten months since she’d been with David. That last argument was the last time they’d slept together.
Which meant it was impossible for her to be pregnant.
Karen had no idea why they had pregnancy tests on board the Luna, but they did. She chalked the first result up as a false positive, but two in a row? And her body was telling her the same thing.
It was impossible. She knew that. Regardless, she had to come to terms with the fetus she was carrying in her womb.
Chapter 24
The next night, Erika was scheduled to go onto The Tonight Show. James Arlender was guest host. I’d heard of Arlender of course. Who hasn’t? He’d grown his reputation and career as a comedian by skewering religion. Any religion. He wasn’t biased against Judaism, but since most Americans were Jewish, that was his target more often than Islam, Hinduism or Buddhism. He was an equal opportunity offender.
I wondered why Erika would have chosen to have her first national television broadcast with him. There were a hundred other hosts who would have made more sense.
“I have to reach my audience,” she said when I asked her. “All my audience. Some of them are fans of his, so he’s got the people I need to talk to.”
By this time, I was convinced she didn’t need anyone’s help to reach an audience, so I shrugged and carried on.
I was still taking photos of her. Earlier that day I’d sorted out the best I had taken as part of the Time interview and emailed them off. I should have been on a plane back to Minnesota.
Part of me already knew I’d never book that flight.
Instead, I kept hanging around her. I took more photos as she answered phone calls, wrote an article for her web site, organized a meeting of her closest advisors and stopping only occasionally for a quick sandwich or a piece of fruit.