The Cassandra Project (14 page)

Jerry was prepping for his weekly press conference when Mary came by the office. She delivered an automated smile, no warmth in the eyes, and nodded as if they’d just agreed on something. More bad news on the way. “How’s everything going, Jerry?” she asked.

“Okay,” he said. While she took a seat on the couch, he added some trivia about issues that would probably be raised.

She listened, indicated she agreed with him, made a suggestion about the information they were getting back from the Mars rover. Then she smiled again. “Jerry, I’m not comfortable with this Myshko thing. It’s just waiting out there now that Blackstone has gotten into the middle of it. I still can’t believe he was dumb enough to get involved. It’ll get him the publicity he wants, but that’s purely short-term. In the end, it’ll ruin his reputation. I’ve known him for a number of years. Thought he was smarter than that.”

“I guess,” he said.

“Anyway, he’s made things a lot more complicated. I was hoping we could change the subject, get the reporters talking about something else. But that’s not going to happen. So be ready for it.”

Jerry heard a door close somewhere along the corridor. Then: “I’ll do what I can to sidestep the issue, Mary.”

She shook her head and focused behind him somewhere. “Unfortunately, I’m not sure you’ll be able to keep them at a distance, Jerry. They’re going to be pushing about Blackstone. And they’re going to want to know what
you
think.”

“We’re not thinking of canceling the conference, are we?”

“No. No way we can do that. But I think this would be a good day for you to call in sick. Put Vanessa out there. Let her deal with them.” Jerry didn’t think much of the idea, and he made no effort to hide his feeling. “She’s been a pretty good backup when we’ve needed her.”

This had become a routine strategy lately. Bury Jerry. “Mary—”

“Did any of the reporters see you coming in?”

“No. I was here early this morning.”

“Good.”

“Mary, I don’t think this is the way to go.”

She sat back, and the lines around her mouth hardened. Mary had fought her way up in the hardscrabble politics that ruled the current era. No mercy. Go for the throat. Never lose sight of the next election. It was a world in which public relations was everything. Truth was defined by how many people bought into a given proposition. She didn’t really care what had happened with the Moon flights a half century ago. The only thing that mattered was the effect they might have on NASA at the moment. What impact would result from his going out and standing behind that lectern? “Why not?” she asked.

“Nobody’s going to believe I just happened to get sick today. In the wake of Blackstone’s broadcast.”

“Do we really care what they think?”

“Isn’t that what this is all about? Mary, I can handle it.”

She shook her head slowly. Not rejecting what he’d said but apparently wondering how they’d reached this point. “All right. But you’re going to be walking a fine line in there. Just try to get through it without making things worse. Do you have some announcements to make?”

“Yes.” He held up some index cards. “We have some new pictures of the Kastelone Galaxy—”

“The what?”

“The Kastelone Galaxy. It’s actually
two
galaxies. Colliding. We’ve got some spectacular pictures. They’re both bigger than the Milky Way.”

“What else?”

“Three more exoplanets with oxygen atmospheres. The scientists think they’re living worlds.”

“Okay. That’s good.”

“And there’s more evidence that the Sun is a double star.”

“Really?” Finally, her features softened. “There’s another
star
in the solar system?”

“It’s a half light-year out, and it’s too dim to see with the naked eye. But yes, it’s there.”

She shook her head. “I’ll be damned. I’ll tell you what we could
really
use right now, though.”

“What’s that?”

“A message from Alpha Centauri.” She took a deep breath and turned her gaze toward a window. “Where are the aliens when you need them?” Jerry could hear birds singing. The truth was that the stories were not new, except for the second sun. He was just resurrecting them and would add a few details for the press. “All right,” she said. “It’s against my better judgment, but go ahead. Try to keep talking about that other sun. Keep the questions to a minimum.”

—

The press conference was routinely scheduled for ten o’clock. But on this day, Mary moved it back to eleven. The official reason given was that it was necessitated by an upgrade being done on the electrical system. The reality, Jerry suspected, was that Mary would not have been comfortable regardless of who was at the lectern, and she wanted it pushed as close as she could manage to lunch hour.

Jerry sent the graphics down to the pressroom projector and was getting his index cards together when Barbara came into the office. “Jerry,” she said, “Dr. Edwards is on the line. I told her you were busy, but she says it’s important. “

Jerry glanced at his watch. He had about five minutes. “Put her on, Barbara.”

The line clicked as she made the connection. Then Mandy was on the display. “Hello, Jerry,” she said.

“Hi, beautiful, what do you have?”

“Are you sure your people didn’t screw up the dates?”

“The pictures don’t fit?”

“Jerry, a
lot
of the pictures could not have been taken at the times indicated.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes. Of course I am.”

So there really had been a cover-up. Did that mean there’d been a
landing
? “How can you tell?”

“The shadows aren’t right. Which means the Moon, at the time the pictures were taken, was in a different place than it actually would have been on the given dates.”

“These are pictures of the far side of the Moon?”

“Yes.”

“What about the near side?”

“The near side’s okay. I didn’t see any problems there.”

“All right. What are the dates? Of the bogus pictures?”

“They run from the very beginning of the program until approximately May 1969.”

Just after Walker’s mission returned. “After that, they’re okay?”

“That’s correct. By the way, it’s always the same general area.”

“How do you mean?”

“There’s a strip of ground that we never get to see. The photos that have been manipulated always exclude the same area.”

“How big is it? Where?”

“It’s about two hundred miles by eighty or so. Anyhow, I’ve marked it for you. You should have the package now. You can see for yourself.”

Jerry looked at his watch. He was running late. “Okay, Mandy, thanks. I owe you.”

“It’s centered on the Cassegrain Crater.”

“The
what
?”

“The Cassegrain Crater. It’s a small one. Only about forty miles across. I can’t imagine why anybody would be trying to conceal it. But, anyhow, there it is. And one more thing, Jerry.”

“Yes?”

“I checked some Russian pictures from the same time period. They were cooked, too.”

—

Jerry was running late. Despite that, he walked slowly out of his office and nodded to Barbara. She was looking at him with a strange expression. “You okay, Boss?” she asked.

“Sure,” he said. He left the office, went out into the corridor, and pushed the elevator button.

Somebody passed him. “Hello, Jerry.”

A woman’s voice. It was one of the computer wonks. He needed a moment to come up with her name. “Hello, Shelley,” he said, as she disappeared around a corner.

The elevator doors opened and he went in.

He pressed
DOWN
. Checked his watch again, but the time didn’t register.

There really
had
been a cover-up. But what the hell were they hiding? What
could
they be hiding? And the Russians as well?

The elevator descended past the fourth floor.

The third.

He should have gone with Mary’s idea. Let Vanessa handle the press conference.

The doors opened at the second floor. Wally Bergen got in. Said hello. Jerry didn’t usually care when people stopped the elevator to ride up or down one floor. But this time it annoyed him, and he almost said something.

“Ready for the reporters?” Wally asked with a smile. He was a little guy. Glasses. Smiled too much. He was always trying to be cheerful. Jerry didn’t like nonstop cheerfulness.

“Sure,” he said.

—

There were about forty people crowded into the pressroom. Almost three times the usual number. Jerry walked to the lectern, waited for everyone to quiet down, and welcomed them in a tone that suggested nothing unusual was going on. He knew he should not make any reference to Blackstone, but he couldn’t resist. “It’s been a busy week,” he said with a grin. Everybody knew what he meant, and it got some laughs. But it was a dumb start.

He described some improvements in scanners that would be mounted on the Valkyrie, a robotic mission that was approaching Jupiter. Then he went into his routine with the colliding galaxies, the exoplanets, and the second sun. He put the images up. They were spectacular. When he’d first seen the Kastelone pictures, he’d wondered what it would be like to live on a world in a place where stars were being knocked around in all directions. Were there living worlds, maybe even worlds with people on them, getting torn loose from their suns and dragged into the night?

Ordinarily, he would have mentioned that possibility to spice up the presentation, but now it was the kind of remark that would be used to confirm the notion that he was a kook. “Fortunately,” he said, “we live in the Milky Way, which is a quiet, sedate neighborhood.” He added a smile.

And, having used only about fifteen minutes, he asked if anyone had a question.

Everybody raised a hand. He looked around, hoping for a safe place to land. And pointed at Ellie McIntyre. Ellie represented the local magazine
Oceanside
. It was usually interested in topics that concerned coastal merchants. Like when would the next launch happen? Of course, launches were off the table, but the Space Center still brought in high-profile guests and ran presentations that drew a decent number of visitors.

“Jerry,” she said, “what did you think about what Morgan Blackstone said last week?”

He laughed. Not anything to be taken seriously. “I’ll have to let Mr. Blackstone speak for himself, Ellie,” he said. “To be honest, I didn’t see the show. I can tell you that, if anybody was on the Moon prior to Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, it would make a great science-fiction movie.”

Diane Brookover, of
The
New York Times
, was next: “Jerry,” she said, “can you categorically deny that there’s some sort of cover-up going on here? That we don’t know the entire story of the Moon landings?”

“Can I categorically deny it? I wasn’t here, Diane. Maybe we sent an early mission looking for oil, and we didn’t want to tell anybody because— Well, I don’t know.” He was on a platform that was elevated about eighteen inches off the floor. He looked out over their heads. Saw one of the interns standing in the doorway.
Everybody
was interested. “The whole notion is so ridiculous, I don’t know where to begin. Now, if we could, I’d like to move on and not waste any more time on this.”

Someone who identified herself as representing Fox asked whether there was evidence that there might actually
be
life on the exoplanets as opposed to there being worlds where the conditions were simply favorable?

“My understanding,” said Jerry, “is that there’s simply no way to know for certain but that the chemical mix in the atmospheres of two of the three worlds indicates a high probability of life. The third one–let me check my notes here—the third one is maybe one chance in four or five.”

She kept her hand in the air. “So that makes how many worlds now with oxygen atmospheres?”

“I’m not up on that,” said Jerry. “But I think this puts the count at about fourteen.”

Barry Westcott, of
USA Today
, was next. “Jerry, the National Astrophysics Association has issued a statement thanking NASA for everything it’s done over the sixty years of its existence. They give the Agency credit for a long list of achievements, the flybys, the telescopes, the analyses of Martian soil. The lunar flights finish pretty far down the list. And they only seem to count because they brought home some Moon rocks. It sounds like a eulogy. Is NASA finished?”

Jerry resisted his inclination to brush the question away as ridiculous. “I suspect we’ll be here for a good many years, Barry. The country’s space program isn’t going away. Yes, we’ve fallen on lean times. But so has everybody else. This country isn’t going to shut down its space program. That’s just not going to happen.”

He nodded to a young man on his right. Another stranger. “Mark Lyman,” he said. “From
The
Nation
. Jerry, where do you think we’re going to be, as far as space exploration is concerned, in twenty years? Is there any chance we’ll go back to the Moon?” Lyman looked as if he’d just graduated from college. A thin, reedy kid with unruly hair and a tone that sounded vaguely accusatory.

“Twenty years is a long time,” said Jerry. “And none of us is very good at making predictions. I can tell you this much: If President Cunningham wants to see a return to the Moon, we can do it. All that’s necessary is a willingness to pay for it.”

“We could probably do that,” said Lyman, “just by staying out of the next war.”

A middle-aged battle-scarred woman on his left: “Tonya Brant,” she said. The columnist best known for unrelenting attacks on the administration and on right-wing politicians. “Jerry, the president was here a few days ago. When you asked him about the Myshko flight, how did he react?”

“Tonya,” he said, “I never brought the subject up with him.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s crazy. Deranged.”

“He didn’t mention it either?”

“He doesn’t usually confer with me on matters of policy.”

“But when wild stories are going around that reflect adversely on whether the government is telling the truth about something, I’d think he would be interested. I mean, he must have asked whether anybody here had any idea where this story had come from. If I’d been president—not that anybody would ever vote for me—I’d want to get a better feel for what’s going on.”