The Cassandra Project (15 page)

“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 to 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.”

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 enthusiasm 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.

The NFL needed a spokesman. They’d gone through a series of scandals, and they wanted someone, they said, with a reputation for integrity. He wondered whether they weren’t just looking for somebody to distract the reporters.

Most of the positions would have brought in considerably more money than he’d been making with NASA. But he just couldn’t get excited about moving cars or soft drinks. Or covering for the NFL’s wayward millionaires. The State Department, he suspected, would find a way to send him to Outer Mongolia. Amnesty International sounded good, but the money was minimal.

Josephine Bracken called him as he was getting ready to go out to breakfast. She was with CUES, the Committee to Upgrade Energy Systems. It was another nonprofit. “We need you, Jerry,” she said. Josephine had been an activist for twenty years. “We can’t offer you the kind of money NASA was paying you, but look at the cause you’d be supporting. If we don’t succeed in getting our message out, in getting rid of fossil fuels, the climate will deteriorate to the point there will be massive disasters. It’s just a matter of time. There’s no way we can continue to pour poison into the atmosphere before we get a major reaction.”

“I’d like to help, Jo,” he said, “but if you want the truth, I think people are tired of listening to warnings about the climate. Yes, it’s going downhill. But it’s been a slow process, and the deniers won’t give up until the catastrophe hits. The fact is, nobody cares anymore. Most people don’t even think about it. The problem’s gone invisible.”

“That’s why we need you, Jerry. We need someone to help stir things up.”

“Jo, I’m going to have to pass. I hate to say this, but working with your organization would just be a shortcut to a heart attack. I’ve had enough of lost causes.”

She sighed. “Okay, Jerry. I hope you’ll change your mind. If you do, give me a call, okay?”

—

He felt guilty about that. But he was convinced there’d be no serious effort to deal with the problem until the Atlantic rolled in over downtown Manhattan. He just didn’t need any more frustration in his life. Better to go back into politics. Real politics, that is, the kind where you just find a way to beat the other side and put your guy in office. It was the sort of work he could live with. And, to tell the truth, that he enjoyed.

Jim Tilghman was up for reelection this year. He was running for his second term in the Senate. And he was a decent guy. Someone he could support with a clear conscience. The word was that he was unhappy with the way his campaign was being run. That meant a reorganization would be coming.

Jim was an old friend. If the stories about disarray among the troops were correct, Jerry would probably be hearing from him.

He went to Darby’s for breakfast. It was a nice break. Darby’s was down at Cocoa Beach, overlooking the ocean. He couldn’t eat there on a workday; it was too far out of the way. But it was perfect for a Saturday. Or for somebody no longer gainfully employed. He pulled into a half-empty parking lot. It was already hot, and no breeze came in off the ocean. They were predicting a high over a hundred.

He went inside, decided he wasn’t going to worry about his diet, ordered bacon and eggs and a side of pancakes. Then he sat there, waiting for his breakfast to arrive, looking out over the Atlantic and listening to the rumble of the surf. If Tilghman called, he would accept. Jim was from Pennsylvania, and even though Jerry didn’t know much about the politics in the Keystone State, he was a quick learner.

Maybe this was going to turn out to be a break for him. He’d enjoyed working at NASA, but the reality was that, whatever might happen there, his career had stalled. There’d been nowhere for him to go. If he’d remained at the Space Center for the next two decades, he’d have still been doing the same job.

Jerry wasn’t sure what he wanted to do with his life. He’d been a history major in college and had expected to launch a teaching career. That had seemed natural enough for him. He was one of maybe three kids in the speech class who weren’t terrified of getting up in front of everyone and delivering a few comments on how they’d have responded, say, to the Cuban Missile Crisis. The instructor, Professor Clement, had cited a study tabulating the things that people feared most. Death had come in second. Public speaking led the way.

Jerry, though, was a natural. He loved performing.

Maybe eventually he’d run for office himself. Representative Culpepper from the great state of Ohio. He liked the sound of it.

—

There were more job offers waiting when he got home. He’d received invitations from two talk shows to sign on as a regular panel member. One was the politically oriented
Slippery Slopes
, but the other was
Dark Energy
, on the Science Channel. He wished he had the background to do the Science Channel, but he’d get lost as soon as they started talking about quantum mechanics or string theory.

There were a couple of feelers from politicians, both in Ohio, both in local races.

But if he was going to get back into politics, he might as well go for the top. Rather than wait for Tilghman, he decided to take the first step. He called the senator’s office. The woman who answered identified herself as Sally. She obviously didn’t know him. Neither his name nor his face. “How may I help you, Mr. Culpepper?” she asked.

“I’m a friend of the senator’s,” he said. “Is he available?”

“I’m sorry, sir,” she said. “He’s not here at the moment.”

“Would you tell him I called?”

“Yes. May I ask what this is about?”

“I suspect he’ll know, Sally.”

“Very good, Mr. Culpepper. Thank you for calling.” And the screen went blank.

Jerry looked at the time. It was slightly after ten. Ordinarily, at that hour, he’d have been getting ready for his appearance on the NASA Channel. Going over the topics, constructing some spontaneous remarks, coming up with optimistic assessments on current projects.

It was painful. The organization he’d served so well had forced him to leave when he was coming to its defense. Because he wouldn’t allow it to get further sucked into this web of lies and doctored photos and whatever else.

—

He called Ralph D’Angelo.

“I was about to call
you
,” Ralph said. “What happened?”

“I was asking too many questions.”

Ralph was in his office. He pushed back in his chair and rubbed his hands across his few remaining strands of gray hair. “Are you telling me there’s actually something to that Moon story?”

“Yeah. Something happened.”

“What, precisely?”

“I don’t know, Ralph. But the photos of the Moon, the back side near the Cassegrain Crater, were doctored. All the pictures between 1959, which were the first ones, until after the Walker mission, were not what they were supposed to be.” He explained in detail. “I can send them to you, if you like.”

“So whatever was going on, the Russians were in on it, too?”

“Apparently.”

“Jerry, that’s crazy. That was the height of the Cold War. They wouldn’t have cooperated with us on anything.”

“I know. It makes no sense.”

“You have any kind of theory at all?”

“I got nothing, Ralph. I can’t imagine what the hell was going on.”

“We could publish the pictures, and all that would happen is that NASA would say there must have been a mistake, it’s a long time ago, who cares?”

“I know.”

“All right. I appreciate your getting to me on this. But we’re going to need something a little more substantial, Jerry. You know what I mean?”

—

Jim Tilghman didn’t return the call. Jerry knew he should take the hint, but Tilghman had told him any number of times how much he would enjoy having him around to work on his campaign.
You’re just the kind of guy we need.
And, of course, there was always the possibility that his message had gotten lost in the stack, that Tilghman had never seen it.

He waited until Monday before calling again. He got someone else this time. Wanda. “This is Jerry Culpepper,” he said. “I’m a friend of the senator’s. Is he available?”

“I’m afraid not at the moment, Mr. Culpepper. May I have your number, please?”

Jerry sat through most of the morning, thinking maybe he should break down and take the NFL job. Then, shortly before lunch, the call came in. “Mr. Culpepper?” Wanda again. “Please hold for the senator.”

Jim Tilghman had grown up in the Appalachians. He looked like a mountain man. He’d been an offensive guard at the University of Pennsylvania, spent two seasons with the Eagles before concluding that his Maker hadn’t really intended him for pro football. (Jim was an intensely religious man, a quality that didn’t hurt him with the voters.) He’d gone to law school, become a prosecutor in Harrisburg, and later a judge. “I want to apologize for not getting right back to you, Jerry. We’ve been buried around here and, to be honest, it just got away from me.” His black hair was neatly combed, but his goatee was missing. He was somewhat ahead of schedule. Goatees, Jerry knew, were never beneficial during election years. “What can I do for you?”

“Jim, I guess you’ve heard I left NASA.”

“Yes, Jerry. That’s a pity. You were the perfect guy to have out front.” He hesitated, as if he was about to say something more. But he simply repeated himself: “It’s a pity.”

“Well, it was getting uncomfortable for me.”

“The Myshko thing.”

“Yes.”

“I can see how that could have happened. It was all a long time ago, Jerry, whatever it’s about. Something like that makes everyone uncomfortable. Do you know anything that hasn’t been made public?”

“Not really.”

Another pause. Then: “So what can I do for you, Jerry?”

That should have told him. In the past, Tilghman had always been forthright about his interest in securing him for his staff. “I’m thinking about getting back into politics, Jim.”

“Really? You planning on running for office?”

“No. I don’t think I have the qualities to win an election for myself.”

“I understand.”

“Actually, I’d like to sign on to your campaign. If you think you could use me.”

“Jerry, to tell you the truth, I don’t really have a staff position open.”

“Oh.”

The senator’s face reflected regret. “Wish I could.”

“It’s okay. I’m sorry to hear it.”

“Jerry.” Tilghman looked around, apparently checking to see whether anyone could overhear him. “I’d love to have you. But right now’s not a good time.”

“Why do you say that?”

Tilghman put his elbows on the desk and rolled his shoulders forward in what looked like a blocking position. “Jerry, you’re connected with the stories about the Myshko flight. And with Blackstone. That puts you right in the middle of the Moon conspiracy.”

“I never said there was a conspiracy.”

“It’s hard not to read it that way. And being on the same side as Blackstone doesn’t help. Jerry, you’re radioactive right now. I’d take you in a minute if that weren’t the situation. But, listen, a lot of people owe me favors. I can get you something somewhere, if you like. The Scoville people are looking for someone like you.”

“Scoville? What do they do?”