The Cassandra Project (25 page)

“I still don’t know why I had to stay up here,” grumbled Bucky. “After all, every Moon landing we ever had, two went down and just one stayed behind to pilot the ship. That’s
you
.” Ben Gaines smiled. “Two went down. That’s
them
.” “But you don’t need me up here,” continued Bucky. “I don’t know the first damned thing about running the ship.” “You don’t know the first damned thing about landing on the Moon and taking off from it.” Then came the final argument. “It’s
my
expedition, damn it! I’m paying for it, so I should go to the surface if I want to.” Gaines chuckled. “There’s the hatch. Feel free to leave.” “Maybe I should fire you for insubordination,” said Bucky with a smile.

“Be my guest.” Gaines returned the smile. “I’m tired of driving this thing anyway. You take over.” “Oh, hell, I guess you can stick around.” Bucky laughed, and Gaines joined in. He looked at the numerous dials and readouts on the control panel. “Have they landed yet, do you think?” “Soon,” said Gaines. “Maybe another twelve or fifteen minutes.” “Good. I’m getting tired sitting here doing nothing.” “Well, we couldn’t send them until we’d picked their landing spot.” “It seems so inexact,” complained Bucky.

Gaines frowned. “They’ll land within a few hundred yards of the descent modules.” “I don’t mean the landing is inexact,” said Bucky. “I mean we still don’t know why Myshko and Walker went down there in the first place. Do you see anything else?” “Not a thing, Bucky.”

Bucky paused, staring out through the port. “Where the hell is the lander?” “You can’t see it right now,” Gaines said. “We’ve got the wrong angle.” “Damn! I should be down there!”

“You’re starting to sound like a broken record,” said Gaines.

“They stopped making records before you were born,” growled Bucky. “What do you know about it?” “Hey, I still collect vinyl,” said Gaines. “Not every record was transferred to CD or MP3 files. Especially old comedy records, topical ones.” “You really collect them?”

Gaines nodded. “Mort Sahl, the original Second City, Stiller and Meara—almost none of them made it to CD. Same goes for a bunch of old Broadway shows that weren’t big enough hits to get revived. There’s really quite a large market for that stuff.” “You live and learn,” said Bucky. Suddenly, he grinned. “Here I thought I was putting you down, and you made a fool of me. I
like
that in an employee.” “So I get to orbit the Moon once or twice more before you fire me?” “Maybe even three times.” Bucky turned his attention back to the panel. “Have they landed yet?” “Bucky, take a nap. I’ll wake you when they’re there.” “Shut up.”

“Okay, then—go to the bathroom. By the time you get back in all your gear, they’ll have landed.” “I liked you a lot better five minutes ago,” said Bucky.

“Ditto,” said Gaines.

“You wouldn’t talk to me like that if we were back on Earth,” “Sure I would.”

“You’re a good man, Ben. I chose the right pilot.”

“You didn’t choose me at all,” said Gaines.

“Maybe not, but I chose not to fire you a couple of minutes ago. That counts for something.” They kidded and teased each other for another ten minutes, and finally they got the message they’d been waiting for.

“We’ve touched down in Cassegrain Crater.” It was Marcia Neimark’s voice.

“Everything okay?” asked Gaines.

“No problems of any kind.”

“You want to talk to the boss?”

“Sure—but it makes more sense for him to wait until we have something to tell him.” “Can you see the modules?” asked Bucky.

“Yeah. We’re a good distance away, but we can see them.” “Is there anything else?”

“Negative.”

“Can you see any reason why they might have gone down there?” “Not yet, Bucky. But give us a chance to look around a little. We’ll be climbing down out of the lander in a couple of minutes.” “Make sure you set up a video camera on one of the landing legs so we can see what’s happening.” “Of course, Boss,” she said.

“Just making sure.”

“Bucky, that’s the fifth time you’ve made sure today.” “Sorry.” He was grateful that she couldn’t see his guilty smile.

“Okay.” Bassinger took over as the voice on the speaker. “Are we all set for a Moon walk?” “Help me secure my helmet, and I am,” said Neimark.

A moment later, they’d set up the video camera, and Bucky was able to watch them descend to the surface.

“It’s a shame the people back home can’t see this,” said Gaines. “But we can’t transmit this until we’re on the near side of the Moon.” “Just as well,” said Bucky. “I’d like to know precisely what we’ve got before we start announcing stuff. We don’t want to get ahead of ourselves.” “Well, I don’t think there’d be any problem showing them walking on the surface,” said Gaines, “as long as we don’t show what they’re walking
toward
.” “We’re not entirely
sure
what they’re walking toward,” said Bucky, staring at the screen.

“Oh, come on, Boss. What do you expect to find? A Russian base?” “Save the sarcasm, Ben.”

“Okay. Sure. But we can show them walking, right?” persisted Gaines.

“Ask me when we’re in a position to transmit it.”

Bucky learned forward, concentrating on the two images on the screen. Like Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin half a century before, they seemed suddenly unfettered by gravity, even by the weight of their assignment. They jumped up again and again, then trotted in huge strides that would have lifted them over high hurdles had there been any.

“My God, I feel reborn!” exclaimed Neimark.

“We haven’t had any gravity in the ship for a couple of days, but it’s not the same thing!” Bassinger could barely contain himself. “I never want to go back!” “Use up all your oxygen, and you
won’t
go back,” said Bucky. “What can you see?” “Bunch of rubble,” said Bassinger.

“That’s
all
?”

“Bucky,” said Neimark, “try to be patient. Give us a chance to get to the modules.” “How close are you?”

“Maybe a quarter mile.”

“I thought you were supposed to land closer.”

“Oh, come on, Bucky—we’ve traveled 250,000 miles and landed maybe five hundred yards from our target. You can’t get much more accurate than that.” “Okay, okay.” Bucky looked at Gaines. “I knew I should have gone down with them.” Then he leaned over the mike again. “Just get on with it. I want to know what’s over there.” “There’s probably nothing, Bucky. Except the descent stages.” “Just take a look, okay? There had to be a reason for the initial landings.” “We’re moving as fast as we can, Bucky,” said Bassinger. “Just give us a few minutes, and we’ll settle it once and for all.” “Go ahead,” said Bucky. He turned to Gaines. “I hate waiting.” Gaines grinned. “I would never have guessed.”

“Can you blame me? I’ve bet my fortune and my reputation that there’s
something
out there, something that the government doesn’t want us to know about. Now we’re so close . . .
Damn!
I just
hate
this hanging around!” “Stop yelling, Bucky,” said Neimark. “You’re hurting my ears.” “Sorry,” said Bucky with a singular lack of sincerity.

“Tell you what,” she continued. “Count to two hundred, and by the time you get there, I’ll be able to tell you what we’ve found. If anything.” Bucky immediately began counting.

“To yourself,” added Neimark.

He nodded to no one in particular, and began counting again, moving his lips soundlessly. Finally, he reached two hundred and looked at the screen, hoping to see something—but the video camera remained stationary, and the two figures were much smaller.

“Okay, Bucky,” said Neimark. “I am about fifty feet from one of the descent stages.” “Okay. Good. What else can you see?”

“The other descent stage.”

Bucky was running out of patience. “Damn it. What else?” “Nothing, Boss.”

“Nothing at all?”

“Negative. We’ve got two descent stages from lunar landers. Phil is taking photos of them from every possible angle. They’re about two hundred yards apart. And they’re in beautiful condition.” “Why did they land there, Marcia?”

“Please!” said Neimark. “No yelling! It’s hard on my ears.” “Sorry,” he said, and this time he meant it.

“Okay, taking a bunch of close-ups right now,” announced Bassinger.

“All right,” said Bucky, suddenly resigned. He’d been right. He’d scored a victory over the president of the United States. But suddenly it was tasteless. “All right, Marcia. Make sure you get close-ups of any ID.” “Will do.”

“Well,” said Bucky. “At least I was right about the landings.” “Looks like you were,” agreed Gaines. “Marcia, we’re about to lose contact with you. Catch you on the next orbit.” “We’ll have all the photos we need by then,” she replied.

Then they were out of range, and Bucky turned his attention to Earth. “How soon before I can speak to Jerry?” “Not long,” said Gaines. “I’ll let you know.”

Bucky studied the video of Neimark and Bassinger jumping around as if they’d been suddenly freed from confinement, then watched it again, and a third time, rapt with fascination and a sense of resentment that he wasn’t down there with them.

“Okay,” said Gaines. “Jerry’s trying to get through.” “Put him on.”

“Video or audio?”

“Both.”

“Hey, Bucky!” said Jerry excitedly. “Do you read me?” “Loud and clear,” replied Bucky. “We’ll be sending you a video transmission in a couple of minutes.” But Gaines was nodding at him, signaling that it had already been sent. “Hold on, Jerry. Ben tells me you should have it.” “Wait one, Bucky.” He could hear voices in the background. “They’re telling me we got it. Give us five minutes, and we’ll know what you sent. I assume it’s not just Moon rocks?” “A fair assumption.”

“If you don’t mind my saying it, you look awfully smug,” said Jerry.

“You’ll figure out why soon enough.”

Jerry spoke to someone off camera. “We’ll have it decrypted and enhanced in about three more minutes.” “So how are the Giants doing?” asked Bucky.

“I assume you’re not about to give me a hint of what’s on the video,” said Jerry. “Okay, New York or San Francisco?” Bucky smiled. “I had in mind the giants of industry.” Jerry chuckled. “Well, the only one who counts is enjoying himself immensely by teasing his spokesman.” He paused. “I wish I was on that ship right now.” “The ship? Or the Moon?”

“Either one. Ever since I was a kid . . .”

“Yeah, the whole world wanted to be Neil Armstrong.” Suddenly staid, unflappable Jerry Culpepper let out a war whoop as he looked at something off to his left. “I’ll be damned! You found the descent stages!” “You knew we would,” said Bucky happily. “It was the rest of the world that doubted it. Marcia Neimark and Phil Bassinger are next to them right now, taking close-ups. We’ll transmit them on the next orbit.” “So far everything’s been encrypted, including this conversation,” said Jerry. “Let me know when you want everything released to the world.” “Now’s as good a time as any,” said Bucky. “Can you patch me through and send the visual and audio of what I say next out to everyone—media, computers, everyone?” “Not a problem,” said Jerry. “Wait for my signal.” It took two minutes, then Jerry said, “You’re on in ten seconds.” Bucky counted to fifteen on the assumption that the adrenaline he was pumping was making him count too fast, and then stared into the camera that was transmitting his image back to Earth.

“This is Morgan Blackstone,” he announced, “and I am speaking to you in orbit around the Moon. I know a lot of you have decided that I’m some kind of publicity-seeking nutcase, and that, of course, Neil Armstrong was the first man to land on the Moon.” He paused for effect, then a huge smile spread across his face. “Well, I’m here to tell you that the nutcase has found proof that Sidney Myshko was the first man on the Moon, predating Neil Armstrong by more than half a year, and that Blackstone Enterprises back on Earth is about to transmit videos taken from orbit that will confirm what I said. When we finish our next orbit of the Moon, which gives the administration time to tell you that these are phony, we’ll be transmitting still photos taken from just a few feet away from the abandoned descent stages. I’ve told our team on the Moon to make sure that any identifying codes are clearly visible.” Another huge grin. “This is the publicity-seeking nutcase signing off.” “Somebody in Washington’s not going to love you,” said Gaines with a smile as he broke the connection.

“I know.”

“Then why antagonize them so?”

“To keep them busy while we accomplish our mission,” answered Bucky.

Gaines frowned. “But we’ve already proven you were right, that Myshko and Walker really did land on the Moon . . . so what are you talking about?” “You’re brighter than that, Ben,” said Bucky. “Use your brain.” Gaines was silent for a moment. “I still don’t understand,” he said. “We
found
the descent stage. We
know
Sidney Myshko landed. We’ve accomplished our mission.” “We’ve
justified
our mission, Ben,” said Bucky. “We haven’t
accomplished
a damned thing. With a little luck, that comes next.” Gaines shook his head. “I don’t follow you.”

“Think about it. We know Myshko and Walker landed on the Moon. There’s no longer any question about it. We know that the government has kept it secret for half a century. There’s no longer any question about
that
, either. Now we come to the real purpose of this mission, and with luck we can accomplish it before Marcia and Phil run out of air.” Gaines stared at him. “Boss, it was a stunt. A couple of guys who wanted to walk on the Moon. What else could it be?”

The population conference got off to a bad start. Everybody seemed to recognize the severity of the problem, and that in itself constituted good news. The major powers understood the threat to peace presented by uncontrolled growth. But there were vast gaps in the proposals on how to deal with the issue. Cunningham’s advisors were pushing for a combination of approaches, mostly aimed at spurring economic development. History demonstrated that population growth tended to level off with prosperity, and it did so without widespread abortions. But it meant making liberal education available, putting money and sound management into the economies and managing them rationally. No one had ever succeeded in dealing with the problem on a large scale. In fact, nation-building had at best a weak track record. Even with the unified efforts of the major powers, Cunningham couldn’t see its happening. And they were by no means unified. Some wanted, for example, simply to ignore the more desperate areas of the planet and concentrate on keeping weapons out of the hands of militants. That was another blind alley.

Later that afternoon, he’d be meeting with his conference representatives. He sighed. They needed a plan. He had nothing. And neither did they.

—

He was still agonizing when Ray showed up, looking rattled. Kim offered to get him a cup of coffee, but he passed on it. She closed the door, leaving them alone. “Bad news, looks like, George,” he said. “The networks are announcing that Blackstone is going to be transmitting pictures from the Moon. He must have found something.”

Cunningham was tired. After the frustrations of the conference, Bucky’s Moon flight just didn’t seem that serious anymore. “What did he find?” he asked.

“They’re not saying. They just made the announcement a few minutes ago. They’re going to start broadcasting in”—he checked his watch—“six minutes.”

“The son of a bitch lives to play to his audience, doesn’t he?”

“I’d say so, yes.”

He picked up the remote and turned on the TV. CBS was running a crawl stating that there was breaking news from the Moon, while three or four of their newspeople chattered about what it could be. NBC had its news anchor going on about the
Myshko
and speculating on whether there had really been other landings. ABC was interviewing physicist Michael Shara in his office at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Fox had a team on the ground at Flat Plains.

ABC’s Mark Cassidy broke off his conversation with Shara and looked up into the camera. “ABC has breaking news. Taking you now to the Moon—”

Shara’s bright functional office was replaced by Blackstone, seated inside the cramped spacecraft, wearing his customary self-satisfied grin. Except it had an additional dimension this time. He looked like a guy holding four aces. “This is Morgan Blackstone,” he said.

—

When it was over, Cunningham simply stared at the screen, which had reverted to Shara’s office, where the physicist and his interviewer were talking about what they’d seen. But Cunningham turned off the sound. “I don’t believe it,” he said. Laurie Banner had shown up at the office door, and the president turned toward her. “There’s no way this could be a mistake, is there?”

She made no attempt to answer but only stood shaking her head. “Mr. President,” she said finally, “you really don’t know any more about this, right?”

“No, I do not,” Cunningham said. “Of course I don’t.” He was still not certain why he’d allowed himself to get so caught up in this. He’d thought at first that he simply didn’t like Blackstone, didn’t want to see him come off as the guy who knew the truth when nobody else did, not even himself. He felt ridiculous. A president left out of the loop. He could, of course, pretend that he
had
known and had simply been keeping a closely held government secret all this time. He’d have to work, though, to come up with an explanation for that.

Nobody trusted the government anymore. And no matter how this played out, confidence in
him
was going to be undercut. Did he want to be an idiot or a schemer?

“You’re assuming the descent modules are really there,” Laurie said.

“What are you talking about, Laurie?”

“I assume all we’re going to have is pictures being sent back by Blackstone.”

Ray chimed in: “Right. It could all be a prank. Designed to elicit a statement from you. Then he yells, ‘April fool.’”

“Sure,” Cunningham said. “What are the odds of that?”

Ray looked over at Laurie. The science advisor kept her eyes straight ahead.

She had made her reputation in quantum mechanics. Cunningham had never been able to grasp precisely what that was about. Something to do with a single particle going through two holes at the same time. He’d brought her into the White House because she had a talent for explaining complicated ideas in simple English. But she’d never been able to explain the two holes. At least not to the president’s satisfaction. She’d also been a Nobel Prize finalist two years before. “What do
you
think?” he asked her. “Any chance of a hoax?”

She turned those dark brown eyes on him. “Physically, sure. But—” She hesitated. “I believe I’ll leave the politics to you, sir.”

“That son of a bitch Nixon,” he said. “Why in hell would he do something like this? It makes no sense.” He turned back to the screen. The first pictures were showing up. An astronaut stood out on the lunar surface, posing beside something that looked very much like a descent module. It was the same color as the dark gray moonscape.

“They did what they could to hide them,” said Laurie. “They’d have been hard to spot from orbit.”

The camera swung away, and the vehicle passed out of the picture. They were looking across open ground. Then the second descent module appeared. There was no commentary by Blackstone, or by the astronauts. The pictures were sufficient.

The president grumbled something. Then: “All right, Ray. I don’t think we have to worry about keeping a lid on this any longer. Somebody out there must know something. Find him. Or her. Check with anyone you can locate from the Carter administration. I don’t care what it takes. Find out what this is about.”

The voters were going to demand some answers, and he’d better damned well come up with some.

ABC was running his comment from the Beverly Hills fund-raiser: “While you’re at it, you might check with Mr. Blackstone to see if he knows what’s going on in the Bermuda Triangle.”

His press secretary called. “Mr. President,” she said, “they’re all over us. I think it would be a good idea if you talked to the reporters.”

They’d already run the daily press conference that morning. “I know, Helen.”

“Do we have any answers, sir?”

“We’re a little short there.”

Helen had started as a journalist herself. She’d had a remarkable career with CBS over a six-year period and had come on board at Cunningham’s request when he took office. He was aware that Jerry Culpepper had hoped to land the appointment, but he was too laid-back. Helen was dynamite. “They’re already piling in here,” she said. “I won’t be able to stall them long. What do you want me to tell them, sir?”

Ray was shaking his head. Stay out of the pressroom until we know what’s going on. But he couldn’t send Helen in there to make it up as she went along. He couldn’t imagine anything that would scream
gutless
more loudly at the reporters. “I’ll be down in fifteen minutes,” he said.

—

The descent modules were, of course, the only story in town. Where was a good congressional scandal when you needed one? Everybody was speculating about the hidden missions. Chris Matthews wondered about aliens. Mike Huckabee suggested there’d been some sort of freelancing by astronauts anxious to be first on the Moon, and that afterward their silence had been bought. Chevy Johnson, on SyFy, claimed that if you looked closely at the pictures collected by Blackstone, you could see footprints in the regolith that were definitely not human. One of the televangelists proposed that the astronauts had gone down to the surface because they’d felt the presence of God. But they’d kept it quiet because they hadn’t wanted to be laughed at in this society which, he said with sad emphasis, had abandoned the Lord.

Everybody was asking where Cunningham had been through all this. Diane Brookover of
The New York Times
, interviewed on
NBC Special Report
, shook her head. “How could we possibly have done something like this and the president didn’t know about it?” The fact that it had happened fifty years ago seemed to go unnoticed.

Ray had people calling everyone who might have an answer. Responses never varied. Two CIA chiefs knew nothing. Two former heads of NASA denied it was even possible. One former NSA director pointed out that “we don’t spy on ourselves.”

People were still calling back when Cunningham got up and headed for the pressroom. “Don’t do it, George,” said Ray. “Best right now is simply to issue a statement. Tell them we’re investigating and will have more as the situation develops.”

Cunningham nodded, signaling he’d heard. “Let me know,” he said quietly, “if we get anything.”

—

This wasn’t the first time, of course, he’d faced the media under trying circumstances. A strike against Somali pirates during his second week in office had gone wrong and eleven hostages, including five kids, had died. That one still kept him awake at night. Always would. And there’d been the FEMA lack of response when the quake hit South Carolina. Cunningham had put one of his staunchest supporters in charge, a guy he’d always thought competent but who, he realized belatedly, thought public relations was the solution to everything. And then there’d been the Ethiopian massacre.

The pressroom wasn’t big enough to accommodate everyone. Reporters were standing in back, and the crowd had spilled out into the passageway. The place was buzzing when he came through the side door, but it immediately fell silent. He took his place at the lectern. “Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “I guess we all recognize that this story keeps getting stranger.

“At the moment, I don’t have any kind of definitive statement to make, other than to admit that the images Morgan Blackstone sent back from the far side of the Moon are as puzzling to me as they are to everyone else. I don’t know what this is about, or how those vehicles could have gotten there, or why the United States might have landed twice on the Moon in 1969 and kept it secret. We’re conducting a thorough investigation in an effort to get some answers. And we
will
, I promise you, find out precisely what happened. In the meantime, we’ll have to wait to see what Mr. Blackstone has.” He looked into the TV camera at the back of the room, then down at Stan Huffman from the A.P., and smiled. “Keep in mind that I don’t have any answers. Having said that, the floor is open to questions.” Huffman’s hand went up. “Stan?”

“We understand you have no answers, Mr. President, but you must have a theory. Assuming these flights actually happened, and it looks now as if Blackstone was right, and they really did, do you have any conceivable explanation, any idea at all,
why
NASA might have done this?”

“None whatever, Stan. I haven’t heard one from anybody else, either. It’s why I’m still not entirely sure I’m buying in.”

“Follow-up please, Mr. President. You’re suggesting Blackstone faked the pictures.”

“I’m not suggesting anything, Stan. I just don’t know. I feel as if I’m living in an episode of
The Twilight Zone
.”

Bill Kelly of
The
Washington Post
was next. “Are there any plans to have NASA send something to the Moon to confirm that the pictures we’re getting are valid? That those descent modules are really there?”

“Not at the moment, Bill. I think we can be confident that Bucky Blackstone would not perpetrate a fraud on the American people. No, I’m pretty sure that he found precisely what he says he did.” Rick Hagerty, of Fox News, caught his eye. “Rick?”

“Is there any kind of hidden vault that presidents have to keep secret information, and make it available to one another? Stuff that nobody else can see?”

“Is that a serious question?”

“Until these last few days, Mr. President, it wouldn’t have been. But yes, is there anything like that? And if there were, would you be willing to tell us that it exists?”

“The answers to your questions are no and yes.” He looked around the room with the boyish grin that had been so effective with voters. “There’s no hidden vault. Look, everybody, I’m sorry to admit this, but I doubt many residents of the White House have been that good at looking beyond their own terms in office.” He hadn’t yet finished the sentence before he knew it was the wrong thing to say. But there was no breaking off, or calling it back. At least, they’d have to concede his honesty, and for a politician, that was a major benefit. Maybe worth the headline he’d just created.

Meredith Aaronson, from NBC, got the next question. “Mr. President, why has NASA sat back while a private company went to the Moon? Is our space program dead?”

“No, Merry,” Cunningham said. “Maybe we don’t need a government-funded system anymore. We built this country on individual initiative, and I think we owe Mr. Blackstone a debt of gratitude for the action he’s taken.”
And a good kick in the rear as a bonus.

The press conference, he thought, went extraordinarily well.
The Florida Times-Union
even sympathized with him. “I’m not supposed to do that,” Danny Link said, “at least not publicly. I’m assuming that, when you find out what it’s about, you’ll release the information.”

That will depend.
“Of course, Dan. I mean, anything fifty years old can’t possibly involve national security.”

—

Ray was happy with the outcome. “Considering what you had to deal with, you did about as well as you could, George. I suspect, though, that you won’t be getting many invitations to the annual ex-presidents’ barbecue.”

Cunningham grinned. “I love barbecue.”

Ray sat down. “Got a minute, George?”

“Sure. What’s going on?”

“We heard from Milt while you were in there.”