The Cassandra Project (3 page)

He called Eastman and told him how much he admired what he’d been doing. “NASA would like to promote this kind of work, Harry,” he said. “We’d like you to support an annual prize, the Eastman Prize, to someone connected with us. For outstanding contributions to special needs kids. Or battered women. Whatever fits. “

“I’d be honored,” Harry said, speaking from Houston, “but the foundation doesn’t really have money to spare. How much would it cost?”

“Just the price of the plaque, Harry. In other words, zero.”

“That’s very kind of you, Jerry.”

“Well, I wouldn’t kid you that we’re being entirely selfless. We expect to get good publicity out of it. And we’ve a few people who’ve been doing the kind of work you have. Not on your scale, but—”

“Let’s make it happen,” he said.

“Excellent. We’ll want you to come in for the first presentation. On our dime, of course.”

Harry laughed. He was lean, with gray hair and the kind of narrow, introspective features Jerry associated with people who’d been through painful experiences and hadn’t quite gotten past them. He wondered how all the time Eastman had spent with damaged kids had affected him. “I’ll be there. When’s it happening?”

—

Jerry asked his deputy, Vanessa Aguilera, to make the call to Kirby. Best was to keep his distance from the project and not let Kirby know he was involved. “Tell him,” he said, “that we wanted to do something special during the opening weeks of the Hall of Fame. And Mary suggested recognizing people associated with the Agency who’ve been doing public service. Something not having to do with space technology. So we came up with the Eastman Award.”

Vanessa was gone about ten minutes, then came back to tell him that Kirby had accepted. “He was excited,” she said.

“Excellent,” said Jerry.

Vanessa had soft brown hair and large blue eyes. She loved her job and was worried, like everyone else, that the organization was going under.
It’s nice
, she was fond of saying,
to be doing work that matters
. If the Agency shut down,
when
it shut down, she didn’t want to land eventually with a lumber company or in an Amtrak office doing accounting or answering phones. “He doesn’t look well, though,” she said.

“How do you mean?”

“Well, he’s pretty old. He’s in a wheelchair, and he was having a hard time breathing.”

“I’m sorry to hear it. Sounds as if he’s gone downhill since last year.”

“He commented that it seems to be a last-minute arrangement.”

Damn. That meant he suspected what was behind the award. Jerry was momentarily surprised that he’d agreed to come if he’d figured it out already. But then Vanessa eased his mind: “He thinks you want to get to him before he passes.”

“Oh.” Maybe they’d caught a break.

“He seems like a nice guy,” she added.

—

The first Harry Eastman Award would be made at the new Hall of Fame, on the last Thursday of the month, which was three weeks away. Jerry handed most of the organizing details over to Vanessa, issued special invitations to people who’d played a major role in NASA’s activities over the years, invited the media, and put together some appropriate remarks for Mary.

He settled back into his normal routine. He oversaw his blog, which was usually written by an intern; contributed to the NASA online presence; coordinated speaking engagements for the Agency’s representatives; made appearances at the University of Georgia and at the University of Central Florida in Orlando.

The LEM story turned into a two-day gag line. Fortunately, it had no traction. Nobody believed there was anything to it. How could there be? Even Warren Cole, when he came by on an unrelated matter, laughed about it. “It’s a pity, though,” he said. “What a story that would have made.”

They were seated in the downstairs dining room. Cole was enjoying a plate of fish and fries, while Jerry, always conscious of his weight, settled for a grilled chicken salad. “You’re really disappointed, aren’t you, Warren?”

“I can’t get disappointed about something I never believed in the first place. Did you find out what they were talking about?”

“Not really. It has to have been a joke.”

“Yeah. Pity. It’s a story I’d have killed for.”

Cole was one of several reporters Jerry used to get stories out. It was always helpful to give someone an exclusive, even if you were planning a formal announcement a day or two later. It was a way of making reporters happy and keeping them on your side.

In this case, though, Jerry had his own motive. “On the subject of Myshko and the LEM,” he said, speaking casually, “did you know who the CAPCOM was on the ground?”

Cole thought about it. Shrugged. “Before my time.” He studied his fish and fries. And shrugged again. “Why, Jerry? Does it matter?”

“No.” Jerry took a large bite of his salad, chewed, and looked out the window. It was a gray, chilly day.

“Then why’d you bring it up?”

“His name’s Frank Kirby.”

“He’s still alive?”

“You got the handout on the Eastman Award?”

“Yes.”

“Kirby will be the recipient that night.”

Cole was prematurely bald, with a ridge of brown hair around his skull. He squeezed his forehead, rubbed his temples. “The story’s dead, Jerry. You’re not trying to bring it up again, are you?”

“Of course not. Though I wonder if he knows how close he came to giving the media the story of a lifetime.”

Cole made a face like a guy with a toothache. “I think I’ll leave it alone.”

Jerry smiled. “I’m in favor of that, Warren.”

“Have you mentioned this to anybody else?”

“No.” Jerry made a science of knowing the media people. Cole would say nothing to anyone. And on the day of the luncheon, he wouldn’t be able to resist. That would open the door.

When they’d finished eating, Jerry picked up the tab.

Morgan Blackstone looked out the window of his office and was well pleased. Off to the left, covering two acres of ground, was Blackstone Enterprises. To the right, thirty floors high and seeming to reach for the sky, was Blackstone Development. Between the two was the least impressive and most important of his businesses, Blackstone Innovations.

It was amazing, he reflected, what one forty-two-inch bosom could lead to. He’d seen the possessor of that bosom on the beach when he was barely twenty years old, talked her into posing nude in his studio (not that he owned one, but he rented a friend’s unused garage), and when no one would pay him what he thought was a fair price for his photos, he decided to publish them himself. He talked some acquaintances into pooling their money—he’d never had trouble raising money—and two months later published the first issue of
Suave
. He’d shared a dorm room with best-selling hard-boiled mystery writer Chuck Bestler’s son, got him to invest, and he in turn got Bestler to write the lead story. Blackstone had paid Bestler with 5 percent of the magazine, and Bestler, seeing gold in them thar hills, got all his friends in category fiction to contribute, at which point the magazine was a hit, and Blackstone, who barely knew one end of a camera from the other, hired a pair of top photographers who had their own stables of forty-two-inch models. And long before his twenty-second birthday, Morgan Blackstone was a multimillionaire.

He’d never liked his name, so he created a new
persona
, dressed like a cowboy (but in cowboy duds created on Park Avenue in Manhattan) and signed all his ads and editorials “Bucky.” The name and image stuck, and he was “Morgan” only on contracts and tax returns from then on. By the time he turned twenty-three, Blackstone was bored with the magazine. He knew there were more important challenges out there, and he never wanted to become the eighty-year-old embarrassment Hugh Hefner had become, a withered old man pretending he was thirty-five and assuming that people still cared about his notion of the Good Life.

There were a lot of interesting little wars going on, and a lot of puppet governments received hundreds of millions of dollars from their dark masters (or, in the case of the United States’ clients, their light masters), and he saw no reason why he shouldn’t supply some of their needs. So he put up a million dollars of his own money, then quickly raised another fifteen million (this time as high-interest loans rather than for pieces of his company) and was soon supplying arms to all interested parties.

When he saw the negative publicity his business rivals were receiving, he sold out his interest before any of them could come to stand on his broad shoulders.

Next came the invention of an engine that would run on water. It didn’t work, but he let Saudi Petrostock, National Dutch, China National Offshore Oil, American Petroleum, Royal Abu Dhabi, and Kuwaiti Oil Resource pool a quick two hundred million and buy it from him to keep it off the market.

He began casting around for his next business, analyzed his successes, and decided he’d pretty much followed “Wee Willie” Keeler’s old dictum from a century earlier: “Hit ’em where they ain’t.” No one had started a successful men’s magazine for a decade and a half before
Suave
, no one had had the chutzpah to supply weapons to warring banana republics in
this
hemisphere, and no one had blackmailed or terrified the auto companies in more than half a century. You had to go all the way back to Tucker, which wasn’t quite the same thing since Tucker’s car actually worked.

So Blackstone cast around for some other place where “they” weren’t, and it wasn’t long before he realized that the average state was a good five billion dollars in debt, and some of the larger spendthrifts, like California and Illinois and New York, were each well over fifty billion in the hole.

How could they raise money in a hurry since the federal government wasn’t about to bail them out? Easy. They’d legalize gambling. There’d be a hue and cry from some of the more religious sections of the electorate, but some politician would point out that even churches hosted bingo games to raise money, and besides, the alternative was bankruptcy. And within a year, spreading money around various state capitals where it would do the most good, he had built luxury casinos in North Dakota, New Mexico, South Carolina, and Wyoming, and was the major stockholder in a fabulous new racetrack in Montana.

And when the dust had cleared five years later, he was no longer a millionaire, or even a multimillionaire, but had risen to the level of billionaire, and figured to amass his second billion in less than a year.

He looked around again, applying the same principle, and tried to determine where they weren’t hitting ’em that year. The landscape was covered with enterprises and innovations, and for the first time, he couldn’t spot his next move.

Until he looked
up
.

Then he knew. There was the biggest untouched target of all. Men had walked on it in 1969, and the stars were ours. A colony on the Moon by 1990, on Mars by 2010, then the moons of Jupiter, and surely by 2030 we’d have found a way around Einstein’s theory and would be on our way
rapidly
to the stars.

Science said it couldn’t be done, that there were laws that governed the universe—but Blackstone knew he came from a race of lawbreakers. Tell a man something can’t be done, and he’ll set about proving you wrong out of sheer cussedness.

Mars, the outer planets’ satellites, the Oort Cloud, the stars, we’d reach them all. But first, the Moon. The government never had any interest in it, except for reaching it before the Russians did. We’d turned our backs on it a long time ago, and it was time to get that colony built. There’d be a mining section, and a low-grav hospital for heart patients (he’d figure out how to get them there, all in good time), and an astronomical observatory, and a refueling point for trips to Mars, and maybe Venus if he could develop space suits that could withstand the heat. Then on to Io and Europa and Ganymede.

And because he knew that this was his last great business venture, because he knew he would spend the rest of his life on it, Blackstone determined not to be just a figurehead but to learn it from the ground up. He spent time in the Public Relations Department, acquired some basic lab skills, even underwent training as an astronaut (though he hated the word and wanted his own term for it, preferably something that incorporated the word
Bucky
or
Blackstone
).

He even considered running for office on a platform of going back into space. Name recognition was no problem; he was a handsome, self-made billionaire, and he and his two ex-wives, both as eye-catching as Miss 42, were featured every week in the supermarket tabloids. But as a senator, he’d be one of one hundred, and he would have to convince fifty very independent—and often very foolish—men and women to vote with him, then hope the House could find 218 members in agreement, and further hope that the president didn’t veto whatever initiative he’d launched. He could run for president, of course, and he was sure he could win, but it would take three or four years of organizing and money-raising. He didn’t want to take three years away from the Moon to organize a political campaign, and while he could pay for the campaign out of his pocket, he didn’t want anyone saying that he bought the presidency.

So, instead of becoming a member of the government, he decided that his best course of action was to
rival
the government, to do what it was too broke or too reluctant or too timid to do, to go back to the Moon and claim it for Blackstone Enterprises (and, incidentally, for the United States of America).

At first, the Congress ignored him, and the press made fun of his ambitious new project. That lasted about six months, until his first successful suborbital flight. By the time a year had passed, a Blackstone ship had made an orbital flight—after all, the technology had existed for half a century—and suddenly Congress decided that he meant business and was in dire need of congressional oversight.

He decided otherwise, only to find himself the object of a scare campaign. He wanted to put missiles on the Moon and fire them at our enemies. The public approved. But he might miss and hit Omaha or Charlotte or Seattle. The public laughed. He had made a secret pact with Hector Morales, the crazed dictator of Paraguay, and had promised to take him to the Moon before his downtrodden masses could rise up and kill him. And put him where? asked the public.

Finally, the government backed off and tried a new approach. “We’re incredibly proud of our dear friend and outstanding citizen Bucky Blackstone,” they announced, “and we’ll do everything we can to help him.”

“You can start by getting the hell out of my way,” Blackstone had answered through his spokespeople.

“We’re on
your
side,” said the government. “We have all kinds of knowledge and experience to share with you.”

“Keep it,” said his spokesman. “And,” added Blackstone, “I’ll bet you a million dollars I reach the Moon before you do.”

And, finally, the government realized that it was not dealing with its notion of a team player, and left him alone. They tried to convince the media to do the same, but even the president’s most fawning sycophants in the press couldn’t resist story after story of the cowboy billionaire who spit in Washington’s collective eye and got away with it.

Everyone at Blackstone Enterprises cheered and congratulated each other. Well, everyone except Blackstone himself. He knew how quickly a winner’s fortunes could change, especially in the financial and political arenas.

They needed something more. Everyone loved the notion of a cowboy’s defying the government, but he couldn’t do it every day, and it would soon become boring if he tried. And he could look ahead and see that he’d be a hero the day he reached the Moon and became the first man to walk on it in more than fifty years—but a month later, unless they found some purple people eaters, it would be a big yawn, just as it was the first time. People just didn’t go crazy with enthusiasm at the sight of some rocks, no matter how far away they came from.

But then came these tiny hints about the Myshko flight. Microscopic hints in the beginning . . . but they didn’t go away.
Something
wasn’t kosher about that mission.

The problem was that it had occurred in 1969. It hadn’t been mentioned in half a century. It didn’t halt or even slow down the Apollo XI mission. It had never been mentioned as anything more than it was: a pre-Moon-landing mission, a mission that reached the Moon but never landed, never even intended to land. If they saw anything dangerous, anything out of the ordinary, no one said anything. If they saw any reason for Neil Armstrong not to take a giant leap for mankind, either they never reported it, or else no one took it seriously, and indeed the Apollo XI mission went like clockwork.

Finally, Blackstone called in Ed Camden, who had been his primary spokesman for a year.

“Have you heard anything more about it?” he asked, lighting a cigar and offering one to Camden, who passed.

“About what, sir?”

“The Myshko mission, of course.”

Camden shook his head. “I’ve spoken to my former colleagues at NASA and elsewhere, and no one knows anything. Most of them think it’s a totally false lead, that your friends in the Pentagon and the White House are trying to divert you from your purpose.”

“They’re doing a damned good job of it,” admitted Blackstone. “I’ll tell you the truth, Ed. All logic says nothing happened because there sure as hell weren’t any consequences, and we live in a universe of cause and effect. No effect? Then there was probably no cause.”

“Well, there you have it, sir,” said Camden.

“It seems so,” agreed Blackstone. Suddenly he frowned. “But damn it, Ed, nobody in the Pentagon or NASA is subtle enough for this to be a ruse. Their idea of distracting me would be to release a description of a four-armed fifteen-foot-tall green man riding a thoat, or whatever the hell Edgar Rice Burroughs called it.” He paused, took another puff of the cigar, grimaced. “
Something
happened on that Myshko mission, something they don’t want us to know about.” Suddenly he got to his feet, strolled over to the window, and stared up at the sunlit sky, wishing the Moon were visible. “But what the hell could it be that didn’t keep Myshko from returning to Earth, didn’t stop any of the Apollo missions, and yet needs a continuing fifty-year cover-up?” He shook his head. “God, it sounds crazy just describing it!”

“That’s why we haven’t uncovered anything,” said Camden. “It
is
crazy.”

“No,” answered Blackstone adamantly. “I’ve always listened to my gut, and my gut tells me something happened, something they don’t want me to know.”

“You?”
repeated Camden, surprised even after all these years at his boss’s ego.

“All of us,” conceded Blackstone. “Everyone.” He paused and stared off into space, as if at something only he could see. “And I’m going to find out what it is.”

“How? We’ve pulled just about every string we’ve got.”

“Culpepper.”

Camden looked around, frowning.

“It’s a man, not a vegetable,” continued Blackstone.

“Oh? The guy from NASA?”

Blackstone nodded. “Jerry Culpepper. He’s a good man.”

“He’s a loyal man,” said Camden. “He spouts the company line.”

“True.”

“Well, then?”

“He’s also a moral man. Eventually, he won’t be able to spout this nonsense any longer.”

“You know that for a fact?”

“I’m a pretty good judge of character,” answered Blackstone. “I offered him a job.”

“
My
job?” demanded Camden.

“Something similar.” Blackstone shrugged off the other man’s obvious concern. “I can keep you both busy.”

“When does he start?”

“He turned me down,” said Blackstone. He relit his cigar. “It was too soon. When he can’t stand the pressure any longer, he’ll come over here. Another month, another half year, certainly less than a year. And when he comes, he’ll confirm what we find out or intuit in the meantime.”