The Cassandra Project

by Jack McDevitt

  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.”

  “Tonya, I just wouldn’t have been able to help him in any event. The whole story is a baseless rumor. I suspect he has no interest in wasting his time on it.”

  “Okay,” she said. He wanted to break away, to go to someone else, but she wasn’t quite ready to let go. “Let me just ask you, Jerry. Point-blank. As far as you know, there’s absolutely no basis to this story, none whatever, and no reason to believe the government is hiding something. Is that correct?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Absolutely.”

  —

  He rarely skipped lunch. But his appetite had gone away, so he went back to his office.

  Barbara smiled at him as he walked in. “Nice job, Jerry,” she said. “I’m always amazed how you can push back at those people. The guy we had here before you always caved.”

  “I think you’re being generous, Barb. But thanks.”

  “You had a couple of calls.” She handed him two note cards. He glanced at them. They were requests from local TV stations for interviews. He did a lot of those. “You want me t
o schedule them?” she asked.

  “Sure,” he said. “Give it a few days, though.”

  A warm breeze was coming in through the windows. He had a corner office, with views of the Vehicle Assembly Building and Launchpad 39A. Hard to believe he’d ever thought he would want to be an astronaut. To ride an Atlas through the clouds. Now the prospect of simply sitting on one while it rested on the pad made him uneasy. He closed the windows and turned on the air-conditioning.

  He sat down in front of the monitor and brought up the package of lunar pictures from Mandy. There were two sets. One consisted of the photos he’d sent her. The second showed him what the surface should have looked like on the designated dates. There were about seventy photos in each of the two sets.

  To Jerry, every part of the Moon looked like every other part. Craters. Craters within craters. Dark areas referred to as seas. And jagged-looking mountains.

  The first pair of pictures were dated October 7, 1959, ten years before the Saturn flights. They were the product of the Soviet vehicle Luna 3, the third spacecraft to make it successfully to the Moon and the first to get pictures of the far side. Both photos were purportedly of the same area, one as it had looked on the official record, the second as it should have looked. At first glance, he saw no difference between them.

  Craters, rocks, ridges, everything seemed identical.

  But Miranda had said the shadows were wrong. He studied them. Increased the magnification. And yes, the shadows were angled differently. In the photo she’d indicated as accurate, the shadows were slanted more to the left of the picture. It wasn’t easy to see, but it was there. Other pictures showed similar discrepancies.

  So it was true: The images had been falsified. And the Russians were part of it.

  The area that had been doctored was centered on the crater she’d mentioned. Cassegrain.

  She’d enclosed a few pictures taken in August 1969, which, she said, were valid. Those were by Zond 7. Another Soviet vehicle.

  An attached comment read: The Zond images, as far as I can tell, have not been doctored. Nor can I find anything afterward that does not seem authentic.

  What in hell had been going on?

  —

  Barbara’s voice interrupted him: “Jerry, Mary wants to see you.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Tell her I’ll be right there.”

  He did a search on the Cassegrain Crater. There wasn’t much. It was, of course, on the back side of the Moon, never visible from Earth. It was located in the south, close to the Mare Australe. And the Lebedev Crater. Jerry had never heard of either.

  Cassegrain was named after a Catholic priest who, in the seventeenth century, designed and built a new type of telescope. And that pretty much summed up everything. Except that the name rang a bell somewhere.

  Cassegrain.

  Where had he heard it before?

  He shrugged, got up, glanced out again at the launchpad, copied a couple of the pictures in Miranda’s package, put them in a folder, and headed upstairs to Mary’s office.

  —

  “Come in, Jerry.” She was seated behind her desk, turning over sheets of paper. Without looking up, she pointed toward one of the chairs. Jerry sat. She stared down at the paper and shook her head. “They want to change over the computers. Bring in OpenBook’s quantums. You believe that?”

  “They’re expensive.”

  She looked up at him and rolled her eyes. “It’s ridiculous. The ones we have are fine. I think we’re getting pressure from Beaverbrook again.” She was referring to Adam Barnett, a Maryland senator with a strong British accent. Barnett was on NASA’s funding committee, and OpenBook was located in Baltimore. “Anyway, I wanted to tell you I watched the press conference. I thought you did a good job. Held off the wolves. Maybe by next week this will have gone away.”

  He showed her the folder. “I’ve got something here that you’ll want to see.”

  “What’s that?”

  He got up, took out the pictures from October 7, 1959, and laid them on her desk. He had to stop a moment, check them again to make sure he knew which was which. “This one,” the one on her left, “is the official picture.”

  “Of what?”

  “The area around the Cassegrain Crater.”

  She shrugged. But she already had a sense of what was coming. “Okay. It looks like the Moon all right.”

  “The official picture is Russian.”

  “So what does it have to do with us?”

  “The other one is what a picture taken on that date should have looked like.”

  She bent over and studied the photos. Looked back at him. “Are they supposed to be different?”

  “Look at the shadows.”

  She sighed. “Jerry, what are we doing here?”

  “Photos of this area taken through late 1969, from the very beginning until after the Walker mission returned, were switched out. By us and by the Russians. Whatever it’s about, they’re in on it, too.”

  She lowered her head into her hands. “Oh, God,” she said. “Jerry, do you hear yourself?”

  “Yes, I do. Mary, there are no photos of this area during that entire time period that weren’t tampered with.”

  She took a deep breath. “What’s different about them? Are you talking about the shadows?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s hard to see a difference.”

  “I’ve forwarded the entire package to you. Look at them on your computer.”

  She brought them up on the display. Studied a pair. Moved to the next ones. “Has anybody else seen these? An expert of some sort?”

  “Mandy Edwards.”

  She was nodding. “And she thinks the official pictures—”

  “—are doctored. Yes.”

  She looked at more pictures. Wiped the back of her hand against her lips. “Okay,” she said finally. “Maybe you’re onto something. I don’t know. If you’re right, it’s been kept quiet for a half century, and I can’t see that anyone’s been harmed by it. Can we just let it go?”

  Jerry suddenly felt tired. “You know, I lied out there today.”

  “In what way?”

  “Tonya Brant asked me point-blank whether I had any reason to believe the government was hiding something. I told her no. Nada. No way.”

  “Jerry—”

  “I don’t like lying. Especially to television cameras.”

  “Jerry, for God’s sake, you’ve been in politics. You helped George make it to the state house. Helped him get to the Oval Office.”

  “That’s politics, Mary. People expect you to shade the truth. It’s part of the game. This isn’t the same thing at all.”

  “Jerry, I wish we could just walk away from this.”

  “When I went in there this morning, I already knew about these.” He picked up the folder. “But I wanted to save my job, so I just flat out lied.”

  “Jerry, this is all a misunderstanding of some sort. It’s just a crater. For God’s sake, what do you think they were trying to hide? What do you think they could possibly have been trying to hide?”

  “I told you I don’t know, Mary.”

  “All right, when you find out, let me know. Then we’ll see whether we want to go further.”

  “No,” he said.

  “Jerry, I’m not asking you.”

  “I’m part of the cover-up now, Mary.” She sat staring at him. “You’ll have my resignation by the end of the day.”

  13

  Barbara teared up and told him she wanted him to stay. Vanessa, who might have been looking at an opportunity to step in and take over, nevertheless seemed genuinely unhappy. The fifth floor was filled with friends, people he routinely ate lunch with, partied with, played bridge with. He’d enjoyed working with them because they were true believers. Most of his career had been spent in places where it was just a job and everybody understood that. Even when he was working on George’s Ohio campaign, surrounded almost exclusively by volunteers, the level of enthusias
m had been different. Not that it had been at a lower level, but it had been aimed, not at putting a man everyone admired into the state house, but rather at winning a game, at being smarter than the other side.

  He took time to stroll through the area, saying good-bye to everybody. They all wished him luck. Some said he was making a mistake and should reconsider; others thought he was making a smart move, getting off a sinking ship. When he’d finished, he returned to his office and began getting his personal gear together. His sweater. Some notes. His pens. He was taking the photos down off the walls when Mary came by and made a second appeal. “You don’t really want to do this,” she said. “Take twenty-four hours and think about it. Call me tomorrow and let me know. I’m sure we can work something out.”

  God knew he wanted to stay. To be here when NASA became what everybody had thought it would become. But he no longer believed it.

  “Mary,” he said, “this isn’t politics. We’re supposed to be a science-first organization. That’s what brought me here, and it’s the position I’ve taken since my first day. I don’t cover up, I don’t mislead, and it would be doing the organization a serious disservice to start now.

  “Something strange happened fifty years ago. I don’t know what it was, or even what it might have been. But whatever it’s about, unless someone can give me a good reason to back off, something better than keeping my job, then I won’t be part of what we’re doing now. Of lying about it.”

  He handed her the resignation. Fifteen minutes later, he drove past the security gate onto the Kennedy Parkway, thinking how he’d never go back.

  —

  In an age of instant communications, a guy with the right kind of reputation didn’t have to wait long for job offers to come in. In fact, they were stacked up at his website when he got up next morning. Half the corporations on the planet seemed to need someone to become the face of their operations. He received invitations from Bolingbroke Furniture, “Relax with the Elite”; from Kia and Ford; from Coca-Cola; and from Amnesty International. Harvard offered him a teaching position. The United Nations wanted him to join the Committee for the Elimination of Hunger (CEH). MSNBC invited him to join the band of commentators on The Morning Show. The State Department offered him a post as an assistant secretary. He had no experience whatever in foreign policy. So that might have meant somebody was hoping to keep him quiet.