In Seattle, I appeared at a Chamber of Commerce dinner with Arnold Banner, an astronaut who’d never gotten higher than the space station. But nevertheless he was an astronaut, and he hailed from the Apollo era. During the course of the meal I asked whether he’d ever heard of a Cassegrain Project. He said something about tabloids and gave me a disapproving look.
We brought in astronauts wherever we could. In Los Angeles, at a Marine charities fundraiser, we had both Marcia Beckett and Yuri Petrov, which would have been the highlight of the tour, except for Frank Allen.
Frank was in his nineties. He looked exhausted. His veins bulged and I wasn’t sure he didn’t need oxygen.
He was the fourth of the Apollo-era astronauts I talked with during those two weeks. And when I asked about the Cassegrain Project, his eyes went wide and his mouth tightened. Then he regained control. “Cassandra,” he said, looking past me into a distant place. “It’s classified.”
“Not Cassandra, Frank. Cassegrain.”
“Oh. Yeah. Of course.”
“I have a clearance.”
“How high?”
“Secret.”
“Not enough.”
“Just give me a hint. What do you know?”
“Jerry, I’ve already said too much. Even its existence is classified.”
Cassandra.
When I got back to the Cape I did a search on Cassandra and found that a lot of people with that name had worked for the Agency over the years. Other Cassandras had made contributions in various ways, leading programs to get kids interested in space science, collaborating with NASA physicists in analyzing the data collected by space-born telescopes, editing publications to make NASA more accessible to the lay public. They’d been everywhere. You couldn’t bring in a NASA guest speaker without discovering a Cassandra somewhere among the people who’d made the request. Buried among the names so deeply that I almost missed it was a single entry: The Cassandra Project, storage 27176B Redstone.
So secret its existence was classified?
The reference was to the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama where NASA stores rocket engines, partially-completed satellites, control panels from test stands, and a multitude of other artifacts dating back to Apollo. I called them.
A baritone voice informed me I had reached the NASA Storage Facility. “Sgt. Saber speaking.”
I couldn’t resist smiling at the name, but I knew he’d heard all the jokes. I identified myself. Then: “Sergeant, you have a listing for the Cassandra Project.” I gave him the number. “Can I get access to the contents?”
“One minute, please, Mr. Carter.”
While I waited, I glanced around the office at the photos of Neil Armstrong and Lawrence Bergman and Marcia Beckett. In one, I was standing beside Bergman, who’d been the guy who’d sold the President on returning to the Moon. In another, I was standing by while Marcia spoke with some Alabama school kids during a tour of the Marshall Space Flight Center. Marcia was a charmer of the first order. I’ve always suspected she got the Minerva assignment partially because they knew the public would love her.
“When were you planning to come, Mr. Carter?”
“I’m not sure yet. Within the next week or so.”
“Let us know in advance and there’ll be no problem.”
“It’s not classified, then?”
“No, sir. I’m looking at its history now. It was originally classified, but that was removed by the Restricted Access Depository Act more than twenty years ago.”
I had to get through another round of ceremonies and press conferences before I could get away. Finally, things quieted down. The astronauts went back to their routines, the VIPs went back to whatever it was they normally do, and life on the Cape returned to normal. I put in for leave.
“You deserve it,” Mary said.
Next day, armed with a copy of the Restricted Access Depository Act, I was on my way to Los Angeles to pay another visit to a certain elderly retired astronaut.
“I can’t believe it,” Frank Allen said.
He lived with his granddaughter and her family of about eight, in Pasadena. She shepherded us into her office—she was a tax expert of some sort—brought some lemonade, and left us alone.
“What can’t you believe? That they declassified it?”
“That the story never got out in the first place.” Frank was back at the desk. I’d sunk into a leather settee.
“What’s the story, Frank? Was the dome really there?”
“Yes.”
“NASA doctored its own Cassegrain imagery? To eliminate all traces?”
“I don’t know anything about that.”
“So what do you know?”
“They sent us up to take a look. In late 1968.” He paused. “We landed almost on top of the damned thing.”
“Before Apollo 11.”
“Yes.”
I sat there in shock. And I’ve been around a while, so I don’t shock easily.
“They advertised the flight as a test run, Jerry. It was supposed to be purely an orbital mission. Everything else, the dome, the descent, everything was top secret. Didn’t happen.”
“You actually got to the dome?”
He hesitated. A lifetime of keeping his mouth shut was getting in the way. “Yes,” he said. “We came down about a half mile away. Max was brilliant.”
Max Donnelly. The lunar module pilot. “What happened?”
“I remember thinking the Russians had beaten us. They’d gotten to the Moon and we hadn’t even known about it.
“There weren’t any antennas or anything. Just a big, silvery dome. About the size of a two-story house. No windows. No hammer and sickle markings. Nothing. Except a door.
“We had sunlight. The mission had been planned so we wouldn’t have to approach it in the dark.” He shifted his position in the chair and bit down on a grunt.
“You okay, Frank?” I asked.
“My knees. They don’t work as well as they used to.” He rubbed the right one, then rearranged himself—gently this time. “We didn’t know what to expect. Max said he thought the thing was pretty old because there were no tracks in the ground. We walked up to the front door. It had a knob. I thought the place would be locked, but I tried it and the thing didn’t move at first but then something gave way and I was able to pull the door open.”
“What was inside?”
“A table. There was a cloth on the table. And something flat under the cloth. And that’s all there was.”
“Nothing else?”
“Not a thing.” He shook his head. “Max lifted the cloth. Under it was a rectangular plate. Made from some kind of metal.” He stopped and stared at me. “There was writing on it.”
“Writing? What did it say?”
“I don’t know. Never found out. It looked like Greek. We brought the plate back home with us and turned it over to the bosses. Next thing they called us in and debriefed us. Reminded us it was all top secret. Whatever the thing said, it must have scared the bejesus out of Nixon and his people. Because they never said anything, and I guess the Russians didn’t either.”
“You never heard anything more at all?”
“Well, other than the next Apollo mission, which went back and destroyed the dome. Leveled it.”
“How do you know?”
“I knew the crew. We talked to each other, right? They wouldn’t say it directly. Just shook their heads: Nothing to worry about anymore.”
Outside, kids were shouting, tossing a football around. “Greek?”
“That’s what it looked like.”
“A message from Plato.”
He just shook his head as if to say: Who knew?
“Well, Frank, I guess that explains why they called it the Cassandra Project.”
“She wasn’t a Greek, was she?”
“You have another theory?”
“Maybe Cassegrain was too hard for the people in the Oval Office to pronounce.”
I told Mar
y what I knew. She wasn’t happy. “I really wish you’d left it alone, Jerry.”
“There’s no way I could have done that.”
“Not now, anyhow.” She let me see her frustration. “You know what it’ll mean for the Agency, right? If NASA lied about something like this, and it becomes public knowledge, nobody will ever trust us again.”
“It was a long time ago, Mary. Anyhow, the Agency wasn’t lying. It was the Administration.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Good luck selling that one to the public.”
The NASA storage complex at the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville is home to rockets, a lunar landing vehicle, automated telescopes, satellites, a space station, and a multitude of other devices that had kept the American space program alive, if not particularly robust, over almost seventy years. Some were housed inside sprawling warehouses; others occupied outdoor exhibition sites.
I parked in the shadow of a Saturn V, the rocket that had carried the Apollo missions into space. I’ve always been impressed with the sheer audacity of anybody who’d be willing to sit on top of one of those things while someone lit the fuse. Had it been up to me, we’d probably never have lifted off at Kitty Hawk.
I went inside the Archive Office, got directions and a pass, and fifteen minutes later entered one of the warehouses. An attendant escorted me past cages and storage rooms filled with all kinds of boxes and crates. Somewhere in the center of it all, we stopped at a cubicle while the attendant compared my pass with the number on the door. The interior was visible through a wall of wire mesh. Cartons were piled up, all labeled. Several were open, with electronic equipment visible inside them.
The attendant unlocked the door and we went in. He turned on an overhead light and did a quick survey, settling on a box that was one of several on a shelf. My heart rate started to pick up while he looked at the tag. “This is it, Mr. Carter,” he said. “Cassandra.”
“Is this everything?”
He checked his clipboard. “This is the only listing we have for the Cassandra Project, sir.”
“Okay. Thanks.”
“My pleasure.”
There was no lock. He raised the hasp on the box, lifted the lid, and stood back to make room. He showed no interest in the contents. He probably did this all the time, so I don’t know why that surprised me.
Inside, I could see a rectangular object wrapped in plastic. I couldn’t see what it was, but of course I knew. My heart was pounding by then. The object was about a foot and a half wide and maybe half as high. And it was heavy. I carried it over to a table and set it down. Wouldn’t do to drop it. Then I unwrapped it.
The metal was black, polished, reflective, even in the half-light from the overhead bulb. And sure enough, there were the Greek characters. Eight lines of them.
The idea that Plato was saying hello seemed suddenly less far-fetched. I took a picture. Several pictures. Finally, reluctantly, I rewrapped it and put it back in the box.
“So,” said Frank, “what did it say?”
“I have the translation here.” I fished it out of my pocket but he shook his head.
“My eyes aren’t that good, Jerry. Just tell me who wrote it. And what it says.”
We were back in the office at Frank’s home in Pasadena. It was a chilly, rainswept evening. Across the street, I could see one of his neighbors putting out the trash.
“It wasn’t written by the Greeks.”
“I didn’t think it was.”
“Somebody came through a long time ago. Two thousand years or so. They left the message. Apparently they wrote it in Greek because it must have looked like their best chance to leave something we’d be able to read. Assuming we ever reached the Moon.”
“So what did it say?”
“It’s a warning.”
The creases in Frank’s forehead deepened. “Is the sun going unstable?”
“No.” I looked down at the translation. “It says that no civilization, anywhere, has been known to survive the advance of technology.”
Frank stared at me. “Say that again.”
“They all collapse. They fight wars. Or they abolish individual death, which apparently guarantees stagnation and an exit. I don’t know. They don’t specify.
“Sometimes the civilizations become too vulnerable to criminals. Or the inhabitants become too dependent on the technology and lose whatever virtue they might have had. Anyway, the message says that no technological civilization, anywhere, has been known to get old. Nothing lasts more than a few centuries—our centuries—once technological advancement begins. Which for us maybe starts with the invention of the printing press.
“The oldest known civilization lasted less than a thousand years.”
Frank frowned. He wasn’t buying it. “They survived. Hell, they had an interstellar ship of some kind.”
“They said they were looking for a place to start again. Where they came from is a shambles.”
“You’re kidding.”
“It says that maybe, if we know in advance, we can sidestep the problem. That’s why they left the warning.”
“Great.”
“If they survive, they say they’ll come back to see how we’re doing.”
We were both silent for a long while.
“So what happens now?” Frank said.
“We’ve reclassified everything. It’s top secret again. I shouldn’t be telling you this. But I thought—”
He rearranged himself in the chair. Winced and rotated his right arm. “Maybe that’s why they called it Cassandra,” he said. “Wasn’t she the woman who always brought bad news?”
“I think so.”
“There was something else about her—”
“Yeah—the bad news,” I said. “When she gave it, nobody would listen.”
CATS IN VICTORY
David Barr Kirtley
Lynx awoke before dawn. He got out of bed, brushed his whiskers, and licked his fur clean. He dressed in boots and a tunic, then donned his rucksack and set out into the dusty streets. The sun was just beginning to peek up over the thatched rooftops. Most of the other catmen of the village were still asleep.
Lynx hiked west, out of town, through the foothills and into the wasteland, where he wandered amid the stark beauty of the stony plains, winding arroyos, and towering plateaus.
He loved walking here, and today he’d secretly resolved to explore as far to the west as he could. His parents would disapprove. Like all the adults of the village, they harbored a vague mistrust of the wasteland, maybe due to the strange mechanical artifacts that they said were sometimes discovered beneath the sands. But the more time Lynx spent out here, the more he felt that such misgivings were baseless.
All morning he climbed hills, clambered over fields of boulders, and strode between pillars of stone. Finally, around mid-day, his westward progress was blocked by a narrow canyon that stretched as far as he could see in either direction. The canyon floor was forty feet below, and the walls were too sheer to climb, so Lynx turned north, skirting the cliff edge and searching for a way across.
Finally he came to a place where a giant tree had grown up from the canyon floor beside the near wall. The tree was dead now, but its pale, branchless trunk would provide easy access down into the canyon. Though there was no telling whether—
Wait. What was that?
He thought he saw movement, below.
A few hundred yards away, the canyon wall was broken by a wide, low cavern. A figure detached itself from the darkness and wandered down onto the sand. Lynx ducked, then slowly raised his head again as the figure came to a halt.
As far as Lynx knew, nothing lived out here except lizards and birds. But this figure was the size of a catman, and walked upright.
Then the thought came to him: A dogman.
Here? Impossible. But it had to be. He knew he should flee, get help, but . . .
The dogmen were almost extinct. This might be the only chance he’d ever get to see one. And he should make sur
e it was really a dogman, before he alarmed the whole village.
He dropped his rucksack and kicked off his boots. He paced, flexing his hand and foot claws. Then he dashed to the edge of the cliff and leapt onto the tree. His claws dug into the wood, and he hung there a moment, then scrambled down the trunk and dropped lightly to the canyon floor.
He sneaked toward the cave, ducking behind one boulder, then another, then another. A strong breeze blew into his face, and this was good, for the wind would muffle his footsteps and carry his scent off behind him.
He lay down and crawled on elbows and knees until he was just a dozen yards away from the mysterious figure, then peeked around a rock.
Yes. A dogman. It was burlier than any catman, and Lynx could make out its grotesque floppy ears. It wore a grungy tunic and a heavy broadsword. Then the creature turned its head, and Lynx glimpsed its profile—a flat face with saggy jowls and wrinkled folds of flesh around the eyes. A horrible, misshapen creature. An abomination.
Lynx began to crawl backward, then paused, as he spied a second figure emerging from the cave.
This one was . . . not so terrible. A female, slender, perhaps as young as Lynx. Her snout was white, her large eyes banded with brown, and her long, silky ears hung past her shoulders. She too wore a sword, a rapier.
In Lynx’s imagination, dogmen had always been ugly and fearsome and . . . male. He wondered about the female. What was she to the hulking beast beside her? His ally? His wife? She had a sweet look to her, or was that deceptive? Had she ever killed a catman?
Suddenly the big male straightened and poked his nose in the air, sniffing loudly—once, twice.
Lynx felt a prickle of terror. While he’d been distracted, the breeze had shifted, and he was now upwind of the dogmen.
The male roared, “Catmen!” and whipped out his sword. He turned and stared straight at Lynx, who leapt up from his hiding spot and sprinted away, dodging around boulders and vaulting over ditches. Behind him came heavy footfalls and throaty growls as the male chased him, gained on him. Lynx spotted the tree, his escape.
Lightspeed: Year One Page 3