Simpler, indeed. I was sixty-eight. You were gone.
It was time to move on.
The world had changed since I left. The human lifespan was up to 150 years. I hadn’t imagined this possibility. I had decades left for music, art, whatever I dreamed of. My health was good—they killed a malignant breast tumor and grew me a new liver, twice—but otherwise, my body kept working for years.
But my nervous system paralysis—that was incurable. I opted for cryogenesis, hoping they’d find a cure. If they did, years from now, they’d revive me and heal me.
It was exciting. I wondered if it’d be hard to fall asleep, like Christmas Eve—not knowing what Christmas Day would bring. But of course the freezing was instant. As I lay down in the cryochamber I thought to myself: Reno. That’s where I should have gone, when disaster struck. I was thinking of you.
And then I was frozen, like Charon and Pluto.
If I’m a train leaving Philadelphia at 3:00, going 50 miles an hour, and you’re a train on the same track leaving San Francisco at 4:00, going 55 miles an hour, at what time will we collide and run each other off the tracks?
More importantly, if we move at the speed of light, and I shine a light in your direction, will you blink and tell me to stop blinding you, or will you not see me coming until it’s too late?
If Einstein is flying next to our train, looking into a mirror and wondering where his reflection has gone—will you ask him whether anything stands still, or if everything is always in motion? Relative to everything else, of course.
And ask about Reno. If our trains crash there, should we consider that they’ve stopped moving? Or are they still in motion on Earth, relative to everything else in the universe?
Everyone’s joined in the same future, except you. Time moves so quickly—accelerating to the point where we can hardly imagine what’s next. I went to sleep expecting to be cured. Instead, the AI woke me and said I no longer needed my body. It downloaded my mind, and now I see. You and I are eccentric, but part of a solar system, and I know now where we belong. It’s easy for me to travel along circuits, to expand my mind everywhere in the network—and then condense myself so small as to be negligible in the universe, here in one corner of a virtual city.
I see they’ve sent a ship after you, moving at 99.99% the speed of light. It’ll reach you eventually. They’ll download you and you’ll fly back to me. Here, where we belong. I think I never left your orbit.
I wrote you a long message to explain all this, but I think I’ll erase it and just leave ten words. I’ll tell you the rest when you arrive—when our perpetual motion comes to a relative stop.
THE CASSANDRA PROJECT
Jack McDevitt
It’s an odd fact that the biggest science story of the twenty-first century—probably the biggest ever—broke in that tabloid of tabloids, The National Bedrock.
I was in the middle of conducting a NASA press conference several days before the Minerva lift-off—the Return to the Moon—and I was fielding softball questions like: “Is it true that if everything goes well, the Mars mission will be moved up?” and “What is Marcia Beckett going to say when she becomes the first person to set foot on lunar soil since Eugene Cernan turned off the lights fifty-four years ago?”
President Gorman and his Russian counterpart, Dmitri Alexandrov, were scheduled to talk to the press from the White house an hour later, so I was strictly a set-up guy. Or that was the plan, anyway, until Warren Cole mentioned the dome.
It was a good time for NASA. We all knew the dangers inherent in overconfidence, but two orbital missions had gone up without a hitch. Either of them could have landed and waved back at us, and the rumor was that Sid Myshko had almost taken the game into his own hands, and that the crew had put it to a vote whether they’d ignore the protocol and go down to the surface regardless of the mission parameters. Sid and his five crewmates denied the story, of course.
I’d just made the point to the pool of reporters that it was Richard Nixon who’d turned off the lights—not the astronaut Eugene Cernan—when Warren Cole began waving his hand. Cole was the AP journalist, seated in his customary spot up front. He was frowning, his left hand in the air, staring down at something on his lap that I couldn’t see.
“Warren?” I said. “What’ve you got?”
“Jerry . . . ” He looked up, making no effort to suppress a grin. “Have you seen the story that the Bedrock’s running?” He held up his iPad.
That started a few people checking their own devices.
“No, I haven’t,” I said, hoping he was making it up. “I don’t usually get to Bedrock this early in the week.” Somebody snorted. Then a wave of laughter rippled through the room. “What?” I said. My first thought had been that we were about to have another astronaut scandal, like the one the month before with Barnaby Salvator and half the strippers on the Beach. “What are they saying?”
“The Russians released more lunar orbital pictures from the sixties,” He snickered. “They’ve got one here from the far side of the Moon. If you can believe this, there’s a dome back there.”
“A dome?”
“Yeah.” He flipped open his notebook. “Does NASA have a comment?”
“You’re kidding, right?” I said.
He twisted the iPad, raised it higher, and squinted at it. “Yep. It’s a dome all right.”
The reporters in the pool all had a good chuckle, and then they looked up at me. “Well,” I said, “I guess Buck Rogers beat us there after all.”
“It looks legitimate, Jerry,” Cole said, but he was still laughing.
I didn’t have to tell him what we all knew: That it was a doctored picture and that it must have been a slow week for scandals.
If the image was doctored, the deed had to have been done by the Russians. Moscow had released the satellite images only a few hours before and forwarded them to us without comment. Apparently nobody on either side had noticed anything unusual. Except the Bedrock staff.
I hadn’t looked at the images prior to the meeting. I mean, once you’ve seen a few square miles of lunar surface you’ve pretty much seen it all. The dome—if that’s really what it was—appeared on every image in the series. They were dated April, 1967.
The Bedrock carried the image on its front page, where they usually show the latest movie celebrity who’s being accused of cheating, or has gone on a drunken binge. It depicted a crater wall, with a large arrow graphic in the middle of a dark splotch pointing at a dome that you couldn’t have missed anyhow. The headline read:
ALIENS ON THE MOON
Russian Pictures Reveal Base on Far Side
Images Taken Before Apollo
I sighed and pushed back from my desk. We just didn’t need this.
But it did look like an artificial construct. The thing was on the edge of a crater, shaped like the head of a bullet. It was either a reflection, an illusion of some sort, or it was a fraud. But the Russians had no reason to set themselves up as a laughing stock. And it sure as hell looked real.
I was still staring at it when the phone rang. It was Mary, NASA’s administrator. My boss. “Jerry,” she said, “I heard what happened at the press conference this morning.”
“What’s going on, Mary?”
“Damned if I know. Push some buttons. See what you can find out. It’s going to come up again when the President’s out there. We need to have an answer for him.”
Vasili Koslov was my public relations counterpart at Russia’s space agency. He was in Washington with the presidential delegation. And he was in full panic mode when I got him on the phone. “I saw it, Jerry,” he said. “I have no idea what this is about. I just heard about it a few minutes ago. I’m looking at it now. It does look like a dome, doesn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said. “Did your people tamper with the satellite imagery?”
“They must have. I have a call in. I’ll let you know as soon as I hear something.”
I called Jeanie Escovar in the
Archives. “Jeanie, have you seen the National Bedrock story yet?”
“No,” she said. “My God, what is it this time?”
“Not what you think. I’m sending it to you now. Could you have somebody check to see where this place is—?”
“What place? Oh, wait—I got it.”
“Find out where it is and see if you can get me some imagery of the same area. From our satellites.”
I heard her gasp. Then she started laughing.
“Jeanie, this is serious.”
“Why? You don’t actually believe there’s a building up there, do you?”
“Somebody’s going to ask the President about it. They have a press conference going on in about twenty minutes. We want him to be able to say: ‘It’s ridiculous, here’s a picture of the area, and you’ll notice there’s nothing there.’ We want him to be able to say ‘The Bedrock’s running an optical illusion.’ But he’ll have to do it diplomatically. And without embarrassing Alexandrov.”
“Good luck on that.”
The Bedrock story was already getting attention on the talk shows. Angela Hart, who at that time anchored The Morning Report for the World Journal, was interviewing a physicist from MIT. The physicist stated that the picture could not be accurate. “Probably a practical joke,” he said. “Or a trick of the light.”
But Angela wondered why the Russians would release the picture at all. “They had to know it would get a lot of attention,” she said. And, of course, though she didn’t mention it, it would become a source of discomfort for the Russian president and the two cosmonauts who were among the Minerva crew.
Vasili was in a state of shock when he called back. “They didn’t know about the dome,” he said. “Nobody noticed. But it is on the original satellite imagery. Our people were just putting out a lot of the stuff from the Luna missions. Imagery that hadn’t been released before. I can’t find anybody who knows anything about it. But I’m still trying.”
“Vasili,” I said, “somebody must have seen it at the time. In 1967.”
“I guess.”
“You guess? You think it’s possible something like this came in and nobody picked up on it?”
“No, I’m not suggesting that at all, Jerry. I just—I don’t know what I’m suggesting. I’ll get back to you when I have something more.”
Minutes later, Jeanie called: “It’s the east wall of the Cassegrain Crater.”
“And—?”
“I’ve forwarded NASA imagery of the same area.”
I switched on the monitor and ran the images. There was the same crater wall, the same pock-marked moonscape. But no dome. Nothing at all unusual.
Dated July, 1968. More than a year after the Soviet imagery.
I called Mary and told her: The Russians just screwed up.
“The President can’t say that.”
“All he has to say is that NASA has no evidence of any dome or anything else on the far side of the Moon. Probably he should just turn it into a joke. Make some remark about setting up a Martian liaison unit.”
She didn’t think it was funny.
When the subject came up at the presidential press conference, Gorman and Alexandrov both simply had a good laugh. Alexandrov blamed it on Khrushchev, and the laughter got louder. Then they moved on to how the Minerva mission—the long-awaited Return to the Moon—marked the beginning of a new era for the world.
The story kicked around in the tabloids for two or three more days. The Washington Post ran an op-ed using the dome to demonstrate how gullible we all are when the media says anything. Then Cory Abbott, who’d just won a Golden Globe for his portrayal of Einstein in Albert and Me, crashed his car into a street light and blacked out the entire town of Dekker, California. And just like that the dome story was gone.
On the morning of the launch, Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, issued a statement that the image was a result of defective technology. The Minerva lifted off on schedule and, while the world watched, it crossed to the Moon and completed a few orbits. Its lander touched down gently on the Mare Maskelyne. Marcia Beckett surprised everyone when she demurred leading the way out through the airlock, sending instead Cosmonaut Yuri Petrov, who descended and then signaled his crewmates to join him.
When all were assembled on the regolith, Petrov made the statement that, in the light of later events, has become immortal: “We are here on the Moon because, during the last century, we avoided the war that would have destroyed us all. And we have come together. Now we stand as never before, united for all mankind.”
I wasn’t especially impressed at the time. It sounded like the usual generalized nonsense. Which shows you what my judgment is worth.
I watched on my office monitor. And as the ceremony proceeded, I looked past the space travelers, across the barren wasteland of the Mare Maskelyne, wondering which was the shortest path to the Cassegrain crater.
I knew I should have just let it go, but I couldn’t. I could imagine no explanation for the Russians doctoring their satellite imagery. Vasili told me that everyone with whom he’d spoken was shocked. That the images had been dug out of the archives and distributed without inspection. And, as far as could be determined, without anyone distorting them. “I just don’t understand it, Jerry,” he said.
Mary told me not to worry about it. “We have more important things to do,” she said.
There was no one left at NASA from the 1960s. In fact, I knew of only one person living at Cape Kennedy who had been part of the Agency when Apollo 11 went to the Moon: Amos Kelly, who’d been one of my grandfather’s buddies. He was still in the area, where he served with the Friends of NASA, a group of volunteers who lent occasional support but mostly threw parties. I looked him up. He’d come to the Agency in 1965 as a technician. Eventually, he’d become one of the operational managers.
He was in his mid-eighties, but he sounded good. “Sure, Jerry, I remember you. It’s been a long time,” he said, when I got him on the phone. I’d been a little kid when he used to stop by to pick up my grandfather for an evening of poker. “What can I do for you?”
“This is going to sound silly, Amos.”
“Nothing sounds silly to me. I used to work for the government.”
“Did you see the story in the tabloids about the dome?”
“How could I miss it?”
“You ever hear anything like that before?”
“You mean did we think there were Martians on the Moon?” He laughed, turned away to tell someone that the call was for him, and then laughed again. “Is that a serious question, Jerry?”
“I guess not.”
“Good. By the way, you’ve done pretty well for yourself at the Agency. Your granddad would have been proud.”
“Thanks.”
He told me how much he missed the old days, missed my grandfather, how they’d had a good crew. “Best years of my life. I could never believe they’d just scuttle the program the way they did.”
Finally he asked what the Russians had said about the images. I told him what Vasili told me. “Well,” he said, “maybe they haven’t changed that much after all.”
Twenty minutes later he called back. “I was reading the story in the Bedrock. It says that the object was in the Cassegrain Crater.”
“Yes. That’s correct.”
“There was talk of a Cassegrain Project at one time. Back in the sixties. I don’t know what it was supposed to be. Whether it was anything more than a rumor. Nobody seemed to know anything definitive about it. I recall at the time thinking it was one of those things so highly classified that even its existence was off the table.”
“The Cassegrain Project.”
“Yes.”
“But you have no idea what it was about?”
“None. I’m sorry. Wish I could help.”
“Would you tell me if you knew?”
“It’s a long time ago, Jerry. I can’t believe security would still be an issue.”
“Amos, you were pretty high
in the Agency—”
“Not that high.”
“Do you remember anything else?”
“Nothing. Nada. As far as I know, nothing ever came of any of it, so the whole thing eventually went away.”
Searching NASA’s archives on “Cassegrain” yielded only data about the crater. So I took to wandering around the facility, talking offhandedly with senior employees. It must feel good to see us back on the Moon, huh, Ralph? Makes all the frustration worthwhile. By the way, did you ever hear of a Cassegrain Project?
They all laughed. Crazy Russians.
On the day the Minerva slipped out of lunar orbit and started home, Mary called me into her office. “We’ll want to get the crew onstage for the press when they get back, Jerry. You might give the staging some thought.”
“Okay. Will it be at Edwards?”
“Negative. We’re going to do it here at the Cape.” We talked over some of the details, the scheduling, guest speakers, points we’d want to make with the media. Then as I was getting ready to leave, she stopped me. “One more thing. The Cassegrain business—” I straightened and came to attention. Mary Gridley was a no-nonsense hard-charger. She was in her fifties, and years of dealing with bureaucratic nonsense had left her with little patience. She was physically diminutive, but she could probably have intimidated the Pope. “—I want you to leave it alone.”
She picked up a pen, put it back down, and stared at me. “Jerry, I know you’ve been asking around about that idiot dome. Listen, you’re good at what you do. You’ll probably enjoy a long, happy career with us. But that won’t happen if people stop taking you seriously. You understand what I mean?”
After the shuttle landing and subsequent celebration, I went on the road. “We need to take advantage of the moment,” Mary said. “There’ll never be a better time to get some good press.”
So I did a PR tour, giving interviews, addressing prayer breakfasts and Rotary meetings, doing what I could to raise the consciousness of the public. NASA wanted Moonbase. It was the next logical step. Should have had it decades ago and would have if the politicians hadn’t squandered the nation’s resources on pointless wars and interventions. But it would be expensive, and we hadn’t succeeded yet in getting the voters on board. That somehow had become my responsibility.
Lightspeed: Year One Page 2