The Cassandra Project (24 page)

“Relax,” said Cunningham. “He knows he’s holding all the aces right now. And he doesn’t have anything to lose. If he goes up there and finds nothing, which is what will probably happen, he’s going to look like an ass. So he’s enjoying it while he can.” “That’s not the point, George. The guy’s not even civil. And my personal feelings aside, I can’t say I care much for the disrespect he’s showing the White House.” Cunningham had not been present during the conversation. He’d expected that Blackstone would be difficult, and he didn’t want Ray trying to handle him while his boss was looking over his shoulder. “I’m tempted,” he said, “to have the IRS start looking seriously at his tax returns.” “I doubt they’d find anything, George.” “I know. But they could keep his accountants and lawyers pretty busy.” “Don’t do it. It’s beneath you.”

The president nodded. “Moreover, it’ll leak, and we’ll get caught.” Ray chuckled. “My thoughts exactly.” Then he grew serious. “You’re not going to call him, are you?” “I was thinking about it.”

“Let it go, George.”

“Look, the guy seriously irritates me. And I don’t like his mistreating my people.” “George, he was just being what he is, a horse’s ass. He
wants
you to call him. That’s what that whole thing was about. To get you to call so he can tell you to—” “I know. I understand that—”

“You call him, you’re just giving him what he wants. Don’t do it.” “You’re right, and I know that. But—” “You’re the one needs to relax.”

“Okay.”

“Good. Now, I think you have some people who’re waiting to meet you.” A Boy Scout troop that was visiting the White House. “Okay,” he said. “Tell them I’ll be right there.”

Bucky was strapped securely into his seat, as were Ben Gaines, Marcia Neimark, and Phil Bassinger.

“All right,” said Gaines, the pilot. “One minute to go.” A pause. “Fifty seconds.” Another pause. “Forty.”

“I have a request,” said Bucky suddenly.

“Let’s take off first,” said Gaines.

“This can’t wait.”

Gaines stared at him. “You’re the boss.”

“I’ve wanted to be on one of these things since I was a kid,” said Bucky rapidly, aware of the clock ticking down. “Could you, just to make me happy, could you say ‘Blast off!’ rather than something like ‘We have ignition’?”

Gaines smiled. “For the man who pays my bills? Sure. I’ve always wanted to say it anyway.” He checked the clock. “Twelve, eleven, ten, nine, eight . . .”

Bucky looked out the window, trying to pick Jerry’s and Gloria’s faces out from the crowd a quarter mile away.

“Blast off!” bellowed Gaines.

The ship trembled. Began to move. Bucky felt as if he had the weight of a small piano on his chest.

“Goddamn it, that was fun!” laughed Gaines.

“Someone should start reporting back,” said Bassinger. “We’re on television all over the world.”

“Marcia’s our most presentable crew member,” said Bucky. He turned to her. “Go ahead.”

“I’d rather not,” she replied. “I have three advanced degrees and ten years at M.I.T., and all they ever ask me is what I think about being alone with three men on the Moon.” She snorted contemptuously. “I grew up with five brothers.”

Bucky smiled. “They know what their audience is interested in. Okay, I’ll talk to them.” He stared at all the buttons, switches, and dials in front of him. “Which do I flick or press?”

Bassinger leaned over and pointed to one.

“Thanks.”

“And remember,” said Bassinger. “You’re on camera, so don’t pick your nose.”

“You’re fired,” said Bucky. “Pack up your gear and get out of here.”

Everyone laughed, and then Bucky opened communications. “Hello, receding world. This is Bucky Blackstone.”

“The takeoff seems to have gone very smoothly,” said a pool reporter. “Everything okay aboard ship?

“It’s beautiful up here!” Bucky felt magnificent. “I’m living every kid’s dream! When I get back, we’re going to have to start selling orbital flights. Everyone deserves the right to see what I’m seeing.”

“But can everyone afford it?”

“Sooner than you think,” said Bucky. “After all, I’m not the government, so I’m not hiring three thousand people I don’t need and paying ten thousand dollars for toilet seats.”

“You’ve just passed out of the atmosphere,” said the reporter. “Does anything look or feel different?”

“Everything’s fine.” Bucky looked out the window at the Earth and then ahead, hoping to see the Moon. But the sky was clear.

“Are you all right, Mr. Blackstone?” said the reporter anxiously.

“Sure. Why shouldn’t I be?”

“You went silent for about twenty seconds.”

Bucky resisted the urge to say he’d been busy pinching Marcia Neimark, if only because he didn’t want her glaring at him for the duration of the trip. “Just looking back at where I came from.”

“Are you ready to tell us what you expect to find on the Moon?”

“Why guess?” answered Bucky. “We’ll know in a few days.”

Another reporter chimed in: “Has anyone got any messages for friends or family?”

Bucky looked at his crew. All three shook their heads. “Nope. They’re too busy keeping us afloat, or whatever the word is. I’m going to hang up now.”

“You mean ‘sign off,’” corrected the reporter.

“On your ship, you sign off,” said Bucky with a smile. “On mine, we hang up.” And he broke the connection.

“It’s glorious!” Neimark’s voice shook with emotion. She, too, was looking down at the home world.

“Look how bright the stars are,” said Bassinger. “You don’t realize how much the atmosphere hides until you see them like this.”

“Okay,” said Gaines. “We’ve got some mandatory tests to run now. Bucky, sit back and relax. Enjoy yourself.”

“I could help,” offered Bucky.

“I don’t want to be too blunt about it,” said Gaines, “but as far as the ship is concerned, you don’t know your ass from your elbow. We’ve been training on it for several weeks. You don’t even know how to unlock the hatch.”

“Don’t sugarcoat it,” said Bucky, amused. “You can talk straight with me.”

They all laughed. “Just relax,” Gaines said. “You’re the guy who’s paying for all this, and the guy who knows what we’re looking for, or at least where we’re going to be looking. Let us underlings get you there.”

“Fair enough,” said Bucky.

The other three spent the next half hour checking gauges and readings, going through routine operations that seemed wildly exotic to Bucky, and, finally, everyone reported that all systems were functioning perfectly.

“Boss,” said Bassinger, “or maybe I should say, Commander Boss.”

“What is it?” said Bucky.

“I hate to interrupt your reverie, but you have the stupidest smile on your face.”

“Just thinking.”

“About what?”

“The truth?” replied Bucky. “I was thinking that if we don’t find a damned thing on the far side, even if there’s nothing there but craters and rocks and dust, it’ll have been worth every penny.”

“Even telling the people you were wrong?” asked Bassinger with a smile.

“There’s nothing wrong with being wrong. As long as you don’t persist at it. Besides, a week later, it’ll be old news . . . and just getting back to the Moon should sure as hell encourage other entrepreneurs to do the same. Why
not
put a colony here? Why do cruise ships have to only cruise the oceans? People have been talking about the Man in the Moon for centuries. It’s time to put a
lot
of men there.”

“Are you saying you don’t think there’s anything up there?” asked Gaines.

“I’m betting a billion dollars that there is,” said Bucky seriously. “But if there isn’t, I’ll still have gotten my money’s worth.”

He’d been awake most of the night, too excited to sleep, but after another hour, he dozed off. He awoke six hours later when Neimark prodded him.

“Are we there?” he asked, confused.

She shook her head. “Not even close yet. But if you’ll look at the navigation display, you’ll see something interesting.”

“Better not be a bird,” said Bucky, blinking his eyes and forcing himself to become alert. He turned and stared out the window at a bright red orb topped by what looked for all the world like whipped cream.

“Mars?” he asked.

She nodded. “Indeed it is . . .”

“It’s gorgeous,” he said, staring at it.

“We’ve got the main scope trained on it.”

He squinted and peered. “I can’t make out the canals.”

She smiled. “We’re forty million miles away. But the colors are startling once you get the scope clear of the atmosphere.”

He nodded. “Just as well I can’t see the canals. I’d hate to think John Carter and Tars Tarkas weren’t riding their thoats around, or that Eric John Stark wasn’t off to some new adventure there.”

“Well, I’ll be damned!” said Bassinger. “The hardheaded businessman is a secret romantic!”

Bucky searched his mind for a caustic reply, but stopped when he realized that Bassinger was right, that he
was
a romantic at heart. Why else would he declare the trip a success a handful of hours into it when the Moon was still three days away?

After that first nap, Bucky slept intermittently during the next two days. He kept staring out the window, thrilled by the sights, reveling in the sensation of weightlessness. Finally, he fell into a deep sleep and woke up almost eight hours later, feeling totally refreshed and unbothered by the confined space in which he found himself.

As the
Sidney Myshko
neared the Moon, he still felt like a kid in a candy shop. He homed in on Mars again and spent a few hours studying and admiring it. Then he started spotting the bigger asteroids.

“We’ll move into orbit in about twenty minutes,” announced Gaines. “I’ve calculated it—well, the computer has calculated it—and this should put us right over the Cassegrain Crater when we’re on the dark side.” He paused. “Have you got
any
idea what we’re looking for?”

“Not since the last time you asked.”

“Could it be metal?” persisted Gaines. “We don’t have to see the exact shape of whatever it is. If we have a hint of what it’s composed of, we can run a spectroscopic analysis of the crater square mile by square mile and see if there’s, I don’t know, some titanium or steel there, something from Myshko’s ship.”

“We’ll know soon enough,” said Bucky.

“Not quite as soon as you think,” said Neimark. “Before we land, we’ll take a number of photos and videos with zoom lenses and transmit them back to Earth. Cassegrain Crater is maybe forty miles across. You could land in it and not see a brontosaur at the other end, let alone something the shape and nature of which you can’t even guess at.”

“I know.” Bucky sighed. “It’s just that I’ve been living with this for months, and I want to know what the hell made Myshko land, and especially what made him keep his mouth shut about it.”

“
If
he landed.”

“He landed,” replied Bucky with conviction. “And I want to know why damned near every photo of the Cassegrain Crater during the sixties was doctored.”

“Just because some unnamed source told that to Jerry Culpepper doesn’t make it so,” said Neimark.

“I trust him.”

“Oh, I believe he was told that, and that he was honest with you. I just don’t know if the source was honest with him.”

“I’m supposed to be the doubter,” said Bucky.

“Nonsense,” she replied. “Scientists are taught to doubt everything.”

“Rubbish,” said Bucky. “They hang on to disproven and discarded theories like religious zealots.”

“Only some of them,” she said defensively.

“And only some religious people are zealots.” He turned to Gaines. “Are we in orbit yet?”

“About ninety seconds.”

“How long before we’re over Cassegrain?”

Gaines shrugged. “I’d guess an hour and a quarter, but the computer can tell you to the second, always assuming we don’t come face-to-face with too much space garbage.”

“Garbage?”

“Meteor swarms, things like that.”

“What about
our
garbage?” asked Bucky, remembering his half-eaten lunch.

“We hang on to it till we’re back on Earth,” replied Gaines. “If we jettisoned it, it would just take up orbit, around the Moon if we got rid of it here, around the Sun if we dumped it in transit, and as it picked up speed over the years, it could collide with some ship a century from now and wipe it out.” He checked his instruments. “We’re in orbit now.”

Seventy minutes later, Cassegrain Crater came into view.

“Doesn’t look all that special, does it?” said Bucky, somehow disappointed that he could not see something wrong, something askew, from that distance.

“We’ll know soon enough,” said Bassinger. “Got all the cameras working.”

“And then we send the stills and videos back to Flat Plains?” asked Bucky. Flat Plains was his operational headquarters.

“Yes. The government—hell, a lot of governments, and probably some advanced labs—will try to grab them, too, but we’ve got them pretty well coded. By the time anyone breaks the codes and actually sees the pictures, we should be safely back on Earth.”

“Yeah,” added Gaines. “If there’s really something down there, who knows? They don’t have to be as big as Tars Tarkas to cause a panic. Even
little
green men will do that.”

“Besides, the boss isn’t into sharing,” said Bassinger with a grin. “Until he makes his millions first.”

“If we find anything but rocks there,” promised Bucky, “you’re going to see just how
into
sharing your boss is.”

As they were speaking, pictures from the Cassegrain Crater were already showing up on the navigational screen. The regolith was flat and gray, featureless save for occasional smaller craters.

Then—

Bucky stared. “Son of a bitch!”

After the Watergate scandal, Eugenio Martinez had established a quiet career selling real estate and had eventually retired to a small town in southern Georgia. “It’s not something I’m especially proud of,” he told Weinstein, referring to his part in the burglary. “I don’t much like to talk about it, but I guess I’ve gotten used to it. What do you want to know that hasn’t already been reported in every newspaper in the country?” He sounded annoyed. Weinstein sympathized. It would have been difficult to refuse to do something if the president of the United States asked for your help. “Mr. Martinez,” he said, “first let me assure you that whatever you have to say to me will be held in the strictest confidence.” Martinez frowned. “They’re not opening this thing up again, are they?” “No, no. Nothing like that. It’s just that we’ve heard a couple of rumors, and we’d like to get a handle on what really happened.” “Oh.” He smiled. “I’m relieved to hear it. What are the rumors?” They were sitting in Martinez’s living room, facing each other across a sleek, square cocktail table. The walls were paneled with mahogany, and curtained windows looked out over a lake. A light rain was falling. “Did you know Jack Cohen?” “Cohen?” He frowned. “I don’t think so.”

“The name doesn’t ring a bell?”

“No.”

Weinstein produced a photo of Cohen, taken during his days at GWU. “You don’t recognize him?” “Nope. Never saw him before.”

“Well, it’s been a long time.” He placed the photo on a coffee table where Martinez could see it. “Let’s try another question.” “Go ahead, Mr. Weinstein.”

“Was there a sixth burglar?”

Martinez laughed. “A sixth burglar? Where on Earth did you hear that?” “Was there?”

“No. Of course not.”

“Mr. Martinez, if you’re hiding anything, I can assure you there’s no need. I can get you a letter from the president himself releasing you from any responsibility for withholding classified information.” “No need to bother. I’m not hiding anything. There was no sixth burglar.” He paused. Looked out as a bolt of lightning flickered against the window. “You wearing a wire?” “No.”

“You mind if I have a look?”

“Go ahead.”

Weinstein stood while Martinez did an inspection. “Okay,” he said finally, “I guess you’re clear.” “So what were you going to tell me that required a search?” They both sat back down. Martinez studied him for several moments, making up his mind. Then: “Just for the record, I’ve never thought of myself as a burglar. We were the president’s operatives.” “The fall guys,” Weinstein said.

“No.
He
took the fall. The big one.” He looked ready to call a halt.

“Was there anybody else at all involved with the break-in other than the people who came to public attention?” “Why are you asking?”

“Look, Mr. Martinez, I’m not supposed to mention this, but it looks as if I have to: The president wants to know. Don’t ask me why. There’s reason to believe someone else was with you inside the Watergate.” Martinez took a deep breath. Picked up the photo and switched on the lamp behind his chair. Held the picture so the light fell on it. “It could be him.” “It could be who?”

“There’s no way I can be sure. It’s too many years ago, and I only saw him that one night.” “When you did the break-in?”

“Yes.”

“So there
was
a sixth burglar. Is that what you’re saying?” “No. That’s not exactly what happened. If this is the same guy”—he stared at the photo—“he’s the reason we were there in the first place.” “Wait a minute, Mr. Martinez—”

“Call me
Eugenio
if you like.”

“Why were you at the Watergate? You were sent in to bug the place, weren’t you?” Martinez took a deep breath. “Maybe I should get that release.” “I can arrange it.”

He got up, walked over to the window, and stared out. The skies were gray. “I guess, after all these years, it won’t matter.” “So what were you actually after at the Democratic National Headquarters?” He was still holding the picture. “This guy’s briefcase.” Weinstein stared at him. “Why?”

“There was a notebook in it. I don’t know what it was about. They never told us.” “So how would you know it when you found it?” “We had a description of the briefcase and the notebook. And the guy it belonged to was with us.” “The sixth burglar.”

“Not really. We kept him outside. In the passageway.” “Do you know how this notebook came to be at the Democratic National Headquarters?” “I’ve no idea.”

“You say you had a description?”

“Yes. We knew what it looked like.”

“Did you know what was in the notebook?”

“They told us it had a couple of pages in a foreign language.” “Which language?”

He shrugged. “I don’t remember. I really don’t. Sorry.” Thunder rumbled in the distance. “We need the rain,” Martinez said.

“Did you find the notebook?”

“No. The police got there too quickly.”

“Why didn’t they get the guy in the hall?” “We’d expected to come up with it pretty quick. Actually, I think what happened was that when we didn’t see it, we told him to take off. They told us to take no chances with him.” “Then what? You went back and looked some more?” “We kept looking until we heard the cops were coming up. There was no way to get clear, so we switched to our secondary mission.” “Bugging the place.”

“Yes.”

“But you did that strictly—”

“To provide a cover story. As we were instructed to do.” “And you, and none of the other guys, ever gave the real reason for the break-in.” He shook his head. No.

Weinstein felt a sense of admiration. “You took all that heat.” “We were told to keep it quiet.” He leaned forward, his eyes locked on Weinstein. “If this story ever comes out, I’ll deny everything.”