My dad glanced at my mom, then at me, and walked to the door to look through the peephole.
His shoulders sagged. “The police,” he said.
My mom looked to the balcony, but we were five floors up.
There was nowhere to go.
Dad slowly opened the door, and a short, pale man in a suit stepped between the police. “Mr. Stephens, may I come in?”
He had a suitcase with him and he flowed into the room as if he belonged there. “I’m a representative of the Yggdrasil Corporation.” He set the suitcase down on the coffee table and opened it to reveal a variety of legal documents. “We are a public/private partnership between certain arms of the US government. Our aim is to figure out exactly what this starship is and what we can learn from it.”
As that sunk in he removed several of the legal documents and placed them carefully on the glass top of the coffee table. He waved us all to sit, as if we were in his office or something, rather than him being in our hotel room.
“We followed this invitation here because we’d like to offer to pay for your trip to Ecuador. In addition, we’re offering you training to deal with zero gravity and teach you what little we know about space and what life aboard a starship might be like. We’ll show you how to use spacesuits, and even take you up to space. The three of you will become astronauts.”
He smiled when he said that.
My dad may not have done well in school and barely graduated, but he frowned in suspicion. “And what you want in return?” he asked, folding his arms.
The representative smiled again. “A quick man, Mr. Stephens. To the point. We want you to tell us everything you can about the All Tree. We’ll give you communications equipment. Every little thing you can tell us helps us advance science, and your country, a great deal. In return, we’ll give you a stipend, as well as training.”
Much to my embarrassment, my dad didn’t know what the word stipend meant. He frowned again.
But the representative pushed one of the contracts toward him. “Would two hundred thousand dollars be acceptable? There’s a possibility of larger bonuses when you return from your trip.”
That… was an extraordinary amount of money. For three weeks of our time.
“We… haven’t even agreed to go, yet, as a family,” Dad said, the faintest crack in his voice.
The man smiled politely and placed a pen down in front of us. “Well, I’ll leave you to discuss it.”
“Damien!” My mom gasped, grabbing Dad’s shoulder tight.
“I’ll be right outside the door,” the representative assured her. “But I’ll need an answer within the hour. There will be other families who will be coming into the program, not just you. It is okay if you turn us down, but we need that answer fast so that we can set things in motion right away. Three weeks isn’t a lot of time to accomplish what we have in mind.”
As the door shut we all stared at each other.
To be honest, I was still terrified about what my parents would say next. They looked somberly down at the carpet.
“Well?” I asked.
They’d been watching the news and the TV. They knew about the contest. They knew what this all meant.
“Two years is a long time, Kadie,” Dad said quietly.
“And that money is a lot of money,” Mom replied.
I didn’t want to jinx anything. I sat and looked at them both.
“Things like this, they just don’t happen to people like us.” My dad shook his head in awe.
“But it happened. Can we let it just go?” Mom asked.
“It would change everything,” they said together.
And then they looked at me.
“And you? You want to? You really want to go?”
Every molecule in me vibrated, threatening to rip me apart from barely concealed excitement.
“Are you kidding me?” I stared at them both. “You see the books I read? You know the comics? You think I watch shows about the space program because I’m bored?”
I remembered reading about an astronaut saying that when he’d gotten to space and looked back at the entire world, everything changed because he could see the entire freaking world was just there in front of him: tiny and fragile and so small.
I wanted to experience that. I wanted to see amazing wonders. Things with my own eyes that almost no one else had ever seen.
“Yes. I want to go. A thousand times yes. Hell yes.”
And that right there, that, was how I became an astronaut.