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on people? I've never really fallen for the whole UFO conspiracy thing myself.
However, the thing that has always bothered me most is, who, what, and how is
all of this stuff getting done? Are there that many nuts who need attention
out there or is there more to this thing? I don't know.
And how did all the UFO stuff impact religious beliefs? I mean, aliens or
gods? I had asked Tabitha what she thought about it the next morning. She
looked at me with a sour look on her face.
"Anson, don't you have flight hardware manuals that you should be studying?"
she said.
"Really, I need to know," I asked her.
"You're asking about what I believe. Well, I'll tell you." She paused and
placed her hands on her hips.
"I believe that nobody has a clue what really happens after you die. Not the
pope, not the preacher at my folk's church, not some Tibetan monk who has
meditated and pondered all his life no one! I believe that religion is
personal and is for every individual to decide for his or herself. Mostly it's
none of anybody's business what I believe. I believe that public prayer is for
show. It should be done in private and kept between you and your supreme
deity, whoever or whatever it may be. I believe that maybe one day we might
find some of these answers through scientific experimentation and
observation." She paused for air.
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"But, most importantly, and as your mission commander, you better hear me now.
I believe that you have spent most of your life trying to get an experiment
flown in space and to ride along with that experiment. And finally, I believe
that you had better get back to studying your preflight, flight, and
postflight checklists before you get the biggest chance of your life to
really, and I mean really, screw the pooch!"
That was the last we talked about religion for a long time.
That was two nights ago. The following night I had taken her advice and
studied my spaceflight hardware parameters. By the time the sun rose, I was
going over the mission plans, chronology, and
EVA requirements. I had pretty much memorized them in the past few weeks.
Studying never hurts. At six-thirty I got back in bed and was able to get
about an hour of sleep while Tabitha was getting ready.
This was pretty much my routine for last night as well. Except last night,
after studying the mission, I
did a little recreational reading again. Mission commander be damned. This
time I started with the King
James version of the Holy Bible. Actually, I only read my favorite part. You
know the part where the space fighter craft powered by four rocket-based
combined cycle engines comes down to Earth and the pilot sitting in the
cockpit uses the spacecraft's loudspeakers to tell the primitive Earthling
that he must go enlist the devotion of all these various countries. When the
poor primitive admits that he cannot speak all of the languages in those
countries, the alien inside the spacecraft solves this problem real easy.
"No problem eat this," the alien tells him.
A little robot hand comes out of the spacecraft and gives the guy a scroll
with a nanotechnology
spread. Once he eats the scroll and the nanotechnology reworks the primitive's
brain, "lo and behold" he could speak the various tongues of these nations.
Then the alien pilot spins up the turbojets in the engines making the great
rushing sound and then flies off on a pillar of flame from the rocket engines.
Cool!
I never studied the literary history of the theological texts, but those guys
could sure give Heinlein a run for his money. I finally got bored with reading
and found myself at the desk in our quarters scribbling notes.
By the time I had solved the entropy equations for a spinning neutron star and
got to the part where there is some mass/energy missing due to gravity
shielding by the degenerate matter of its interior, a ray of light peaked
through the curtains. I realized that I had better go to bed. Then an hour and
fifty minutes later Tabitha was waking me up from my Einstein/whiteboard
nightmare.
At about T-minus three hours the complete crew complement, including yours
truly, was having a weather briefing inflicted upon us, while a whole bunch of
smart guys were busy outside making sure that the SRB tracking systems were
being powered up. It had taken me forty-four years to get here. I figured
I could wait an hour or two more. On the other hand, I wasn't quite sure I
could make it through this boring weather briefing without falling to sleep
again.
Finally, the countdown was resumed and we left the O and C building for the
launch pad. I still don't know what O and C stands for I assumed it was
operations and checkout, but I wasn't sure. I know it was in the tons of
material I was supposed to have memorized, but I didn't think it would matter
what they call that damn building once I was in space.
The six of us astronauts began the ingress into the flight crew seats. Tabitha
took her place in the front right seat beside Major Rayford Donald, the pilot.
After that were Carla Yeats and Roald Sveld.
She is a Canadian and he is a Norse astronaut both headed for the ISS for a
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few months. Lieutenant
Terence Fines and I sat in the very back. He was a payload specialist also. He
had plans of doing some microgravity experiment involving radar pointing and
tracking state-of-the-art for the next generation national missile defense
system. Most of his stuff was classified like mine.
Just why was my mission classified? Wouldn't the whole world want to know that
humans had learned how to breach the speed of light barrier, thus, enabling a
whole new era of space travel? It was my guess that it was a political move on
NASA's behalf. If this experiment turned out to be a big blunder, nobody would
be the wiser. If it worked, then we could do a better demonstration in a few
months or years and make a big promotion of it. There was also the turmoil of
the energy system and the possible weapons capabilities that these entailed.
And would we want FTL travel in the hands of just anybody in the world right
now? What if some nut decided to fly a spacecraft at ten times light speed
into the Earth?
What would happen? Of course, there was always the fact that DARPA had some
say so in this matter, since they funded the lion's share of the effort. But
really, what would happen if some nut did fly an FTL
missile into the Earth?
Well, actually the spaceship would never interact with the Earth because of
the physics involved. A
couple of guys wrote a paper back in the early part of the decade called
something like "The View from the Bridge" or something similar. The paper
showed that no data (which would include matter) could be transmitted to the
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