The Cassandra Project

by Jack McDevitt

  “Yes. That’s correct.”

  “Kirby, I understand, has a long history of taking care of battered women and kids in trouble. A genuinely good guy.”

  “Yes. He is. We were pleased to have the opportunity to recognize all he’s done.”

  “Let’s play a clip. This took place shortly after the award ceremony.” Koestler glanced up at a screen set back among the books. Jerry watched himself again talking with Kirby, watched the conversation morph into a confrontation, himself matched against a kindly man in a wheelchair.

  Then Kirby shoved the plaque at him. “Here, Jerry, you can have it. And if we weren’t in polite company, I’d tell you what you could do with it.”

  They froze the picture. “Jerry,” said Koestler, “why would anybody care who was on the capsule radio?”

  “It just seemed odd, Al. It was no big deal, and I was surprised he got annoyed.”

  “Is there a suggestion that Myshko and his partner, um, Crash Able—I love that name, don’t you?—weren’t in the capsule during that period?”

  “I asked him about it simply because the AP reporter had asked. That was all. I thought maybe it was an interesting question. I didn’t even know if it was true. Didn’t realize that Frank was upset, or I wouldn’t have said anything.”

  “Well, okay. But what was that about the rocks?”

  “The rocks?”

  “The Navy guy who said he saw one of the astronauts bringing back some rocks?”

  “I think he said with rocks. Rocks is a code word. It’s a Navy expression for being nervous. As in ‘he was rocked by the experience.’” That was a stretch, but Jerry hoped it would get him past the question.

  “Why was Kirby so upset, do you think?”

  “I just don’t know. I’m certainly sorry I brought it up.”

  “But he was angry at you. You say you don’t know why?”

  “No, I don’t. I guess there was a misunderstanding of some sort.”

  “In what way?”

  “I’m not sure, Al. I’m really not. The only thing I can say is that I have a great deal of respect for Frank Kirby, and I want to take advantage of this opportunity to apologize if I gave offense. And obviously I did.” Jerry looked directly into the camera. “I’m sorry it happened, Frank. And I’d like to make it right.”

  —

  Mary called him minutes after the show. “You did good, Jerry. I thought you came away from it about as well as you could. Let me know if you hear from Frank.”

  —

  Kirby called the following morning. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have blown my stack like that.” He looked down at Jerry from the TV screen, which was mounted beside a picture of Jerry and Myra Hasting, editor of The Florida Times-Union.

  “It’s okay. It was my fault, Frank.”

  “Let’s just forget it, okay?”

  “Yes. That’s a good idea. You’ll be wanting your award back, I hope.” Jerry grinned.

  “That would be nice, yes.”

  “I’ll ship it this afternoon.”

  “Thanks, Jerry. And one other thing?”

  “Sure.”

  “That business with Sidney Myshko. Forget it, okay? It’s just confusion over a bad joke.”

  —

  Jerry was grateful to put it aside and get back to his normal routine. Fortunately, the media have a short memory. The disappearance of Sidney Myshko from the Apollo transmissions all those years ago needed precisely two days to drop out of the news. Then, as he was getting ready to quit for the day, he got a call from Ralph D’Angelo. Ralph was a friend from Jerry’s days at Wesleyan University. He was a columnist for The Baltimore Sun.

  “Long time,” Jerry said. “How you been, Ralph?”

  “Still working, Jerry.” He hadn’t aged well. Ralph looked twenty years older than he actually was. His hair was gone, his forehead was wrinkled, his eyes were glazed. Jerry suspected he had health problems. Or worse.

  “I hear you. These aren’t exactly the best of times.”

  “I’ve noticed. Listen, I have a question for you.”

  “Sure.”

  “You know Aaron Walker retired here? The astronaut?”

  Aaron Walker. Jerry needed a moment. He was one of the early Apollo guys. Had been on a test flight, the one immediately after Myshko. “I didn’t know he’d gone to Baltimore,” Jerry said.

  “A few years ago, he walked into a liquor store right into the middle of a holdup. Got killed.”

  Jerry recalled the story, of course, though not where it had happened. “Yes,” he said. “I remember. Sad end for a guy like that.”

  “He left a journal. You ready for this? In the journal, he says he landed on the Moon.”

  “He wasn’t on any of the flights that landed, was he?”

  “Not according to the record.”

  “Well, okay. Then there’s a mistake somewhere.”

  “It’s his writing, Jerry. We’ve checked it. Anyhow, what with this other stuff about Myshko, we’re going to use it. I can send you a copy if you like.”

  “Ralph, it’s a false alarm.”

  “Well, I wanted to give you a chance to comment. Why don’t you take a look at what he said? You should have it now. I can wait.”

  The journal entry was dated April 21, 2009:

  Hard to believe it’s been forty years since my stroll on the lunar surface. Oops, forgot I’m not supposed to say that. Wonder what that thing was, anyhow?

  “What do you think?” said Ralph.

  “Is that it?”

  “The context is interesting.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “He was describing a day at the ballpark. He’d gone to the Orioles-Yankees game. He gave up when Robinson Cano homered in the seventh. It gave the Yankees, I think, a 9–2 lead. He got up and left.

  “That night he commented on it in his journal: ‘That was it. I’d had enough. Sitting up there when I should have been out somewhere celebrating the biggest event of my life. Of anybody’s life.’ Then he tosses in the line ‘Hard to believe . . .’”

  “Where’s it been all these years?” Jerry tried to sound skeptical.

  “Jane said she’d forgotten he kept a journal. She found it after he died. She’d never really looked at it, beyond reading about when he’d first met her mother. The mother’s been dead a long time. Then when this stuff started about Myshko, she got curious and went back to it.”

  “Who’s Jane?”

  “Jane Alcott. His daughter. His only child, in fact.”

  “Who has the journal now?”

  “I do.”

  Jerry looked out at the launch towers. “How does the entry read for April 21, 1969?”

  “There isn’t one. We have an entry for April 3, describing his feelings, his anticipation, for the flight. Then there’s nothing until May 2. Three days after he got back.”

  “On April 21, they were orbiting the Moon?”

  “Yes.”

  Jerry was getting a cold feeling in his stomach. “So what’s the May 3 entry say?”

  “Just how glad he was to see his family again. To be back on solid ground. That sort of thing”

  “What does his daughter think?”

  “She says she never noticed the ballpark line. She says she was not a baseball fan.”

  “I think Amos Bartlett’s still alive,” said Jerry. Bartlett had been one of Walker’s crew.

  “We called him,” Ralph said. “Bartlett was the command module pilot. He told us it must be a mistake. Or a joke.”

  Jerry nodded. Of course. What else could it be? “That should settle it,” he said.

  “Do you have a comment, Jerry?”

  “Sounds to me as if Walker was dreaming. Thinking about what might have been. Maybe he’d lost touch with reality. Started making up stuff for his journal.”

  “Is that the formal NASA response?”

  “No. I’d guess, Ralph, at this point, that we’re strictly no comment.”

/>   —

  Jerry went immediately to the archives. For more than seventy hours, while the capsule orbited the Moon, Bartlett’s voice had been the only one heard from the capsule. On the way out, and during the return flight, Walker had dominated the conversation. And occasionally, Lenny Mullen, the LEM pilot, could be heard.

  But for almost three days, Walker and Mullen had been silent.

  It was a rerun of the Myshko recordings.

  5

  Bucky Blackstone was in New York when the news broke. He made three quick calls, one to Ralph D’Angelo, two more to D’Angelo’s editor and his publisher—both longtime acquaintances if not exactly friends—and when he was done, he had no doubt that the diary mentioned a landing.

  But that was ridiculous. The most important event in human history, and they covered it up for half a century? It made no sense. Even if the government had some reason for a cover-up, how the hell could they get the consent of the crew? There wasn’t a schoolkid anywhere in the Western world who didn’t know the names of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. How could you convince any landers who predated them to forgo that glory? And even if they agreed at the time, why would Myshko and the others keep quiet for twenty or thirty years—or fifty, if any of them were still alive?

  He rubbed his chin absently, staring at nothing in particular, and frowned. No one had landed on the Moon before Armstrong. If they had, it would be a triumph, not a secret. We were in a race with the Russians, and Sputnik had predated everything we’d done. We couldn’t have been sure that Khrushchev and the Russians weren’t secretly working on their own Moon landing. If we could have touched down, we would have.

  Don’t forget those Kennedy memos that came to light back in 2012, he reminded himself. JFK didn’t give a damn about science. All he was concerned with was the prestige of beating the Russians to the Moon. And if Harvard John didn’t care about the scientific breakthroughs, you could be sure that Landslide Lyndon and Tricky Dick didn’t give a damn either. To all three, the only important thing was getting there first, so of course they wouldn’t hide the accomplishment.

  So why did Aaron Walker write that in his diary?

  Think, Bucky! he told himself. You’ve already bought half an hour on CNN and Fox News to offer your version of what happened and what’s being covered up, and to challenge the government to prove you wrong. You’d better be damned sure you’re right, or no one will ever listen to you again.

  One thing is certain: Walker didn’t write it as a joke. A lot of social mores have changed over the years, but diaries are still private things. He never expected anyone to read what he wrote—so why did he say that?

  He checked his Rolex. Thirty-three hours before he had to speak on television. That didn’t give him a lot of time.

  He had come with a skeleton staff—Ed Camden; his longtime secretary, Gloria Marcos; and his bodyguard, Jason Brent. (Bucky thought of himself as a pretty fit specimen, more than capable of taking care of himself—but when you’re a billionaire, you’re a target for kidnappers and all the disgruntled rivals you beat, which is to say bankrupted, on the way to your fortune. He hated the thought of traveling with an entourage of bodyguards the way so many others of his economic stature did, so he’d chosen Brent, a one-man wrecking crew who was a crack shot, a karate champion, and had the fastest reaction time he’d ever seen.) Bucky summoned all three of them to his suite. Well, to the huge living room of the presidential suite. Jason would never agree to stay down the corridor with a locked door between them, and slept in the adjoining bedroom.

  “What’s up?” asked Camden.

  “You heard the news?” said Bucky.

  “Yeah,” replied Camden. “I wonder what the guy was smoking.”

  Bucky turned to Gloria. “You think anyone’ll believe it?”

  “Why not?” she answered. “Hell, a third of the public doesn’t believe we ever landed. Why shouldn’t another third believe we landed more often than we said?” “I’m going in front of fifty million people tomorrow night,” said Bucky. “I’d like to think I’m not about to make a total fool of myself.” Jason Brent looked puzzled. “I don’t see a problem, Boss. I assume you’re going to give your version about why Kirby wouldn’t accept that award.” “He accepted it the next day,” noted Camden.

  “Even so, something’s going on, and the Boss is going to give his version. Thing is, whatever it is, they’ve kept it a secret for fifty years, and that’s if anything happened at all. So what if he’s wrong? Who will know? Or put it this way: If something did happen, and he’s wrong about what it is, the only guys who can contradict him and prove he’s wrong are the same guys who have been lying about it for fifty years. He’s not NASA’s enemy, so why would they reverse course just to embarrass him?” Camden considered what Brent had said and finally turned to Bucky. “He’s got a point, you know.” “Look,” said Bucky. “We’re going to the Moon. If I wind up looking like a buffoon over this, every single thing we find, everything we learn, everything we announce to the public when we return, will be suspect because I’ll have proven how easily I can be bamboozled.” “Then why not just ignore it, cancel your airtime, and pretend it never happened?” said Camden.

  “Because something happened,” said Bucky decisively. “I don’t know what, though I’ve got a pretty good idea. And if I’m right about what it was, it’s essential that NASA come clean before we actually launch our Moon mission.” He paused, looking from one to another. “Doesn’t it bother any of you that they’ve been lying to the public for half a century? And that it’s got to be about something major, something important. If it’s minor, there’s no need to still be keeping it secret. If it was just some stupid glitch that could embarrass or humiliate them, hell, 80 percent of the public wasn’t even alive then, and just about anyone who could be embarrassed is dead by now.” “That’s an assumption, Bucky,” said Gloria. “A logical one, but still an assumption. You know the government: It lies about something, usually something trivial, every five minutes. “ “I just explained why it’s not trivial,” said Bucky.

  She shook her head. “You just explained why you think it’s not trivial, and it was a logical answer—but what has logic got to do with the government? You say everyone’s dead, so why not reveal whatever it was if it was trivial? I say there have been so many lies and cover-ups, why go to the trouble of exposing this one if everyone involved is dead and most of the public can’t even remember the Apollo missions?” “Okay,” said Bucky, “I’ve listened patiently. I haven’t heard anything to make me change my mind. Now we’re going to spend the next day and a half trying to find out what the hell happened. Clearly, Ralph D’Angelo has either gotten possession of the diary, or he’s made a photocopy of it.” “Why?” asked Brent.

  “Because he’s an hour from Washington, and he had to be under a lot of pressure to keep quiet about this,” explained Bucky patiently. “So he had to protect his ass, and that means either the diary or a photocopy, with some expert already authenticating Aaron Walker’s handwriting.” He paused. “We need a copy of whatever he’s got.” “Don’t look at me, Boss,” said Brent. “I don’t leave your side, not for anything.” Bucky turned to Camden. “Okay, Ed. Get on the next flight down there, and don’t come back without it.” “And if he doesn’t want to part with it?” asked Camden. “I can’t bust down doors the way Jason can.” Bucky sighed deeply. “We’re not criminals, Ed. I don’t want you to beat it out of him.” “Then what?”

  Bucky stared at him. “You’re working for a billionaire. What do you think I’m going to suggest?” “How high can I go?”

  “Gloria, D’Angelo’s not syndicated, right? He just works for The Baltimore Sun?” “That’s right.”

  “What’s the most he could be making?”

  “Week, month, or year?”

  “Per year.”

  “Without being syndicated? No more than $130,000, probably a little less.” Bucky turned back to Camden. “A quarter million ought to do it.�
�� “And if he wants more?”

  “Tell him you have to see it to decide if it’s worth more.”

  “And then?”

  “Then decide.”

  Camden walked to the door. “I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.” Then he was gone. Bucky lit a Havana, took a couple of puffs, and walked back and forth in front of his desk, thinking. Finally, he sat down.

  “I need to talk to Jerry Culpepper,” he announced.

  “Culpepper?” repeated Gloria. “Even if he knows what happened, which I, for one, doubt, he’ll never tell you.” “We’re on the same side,” replied Bucky. “He just doesn’t know it yet.” “What makes you think so?” asked Brent.

  “His job is disseminating information.” Gloria and Brent just stared at him, puzzled. “Don’t you see?” he continued. “Everything he’s built in his career depends upon his credibility. If they’re lying to him or feeding him false information, they’re destroying the one thing he trades on: his veracity. If he knew he was lying, that would be different, it’d be his choice—but my reading of him is that he’s an honorable man. Hell, you saw what precipitated that brouhaha with Kirby: He wanted to know what happened.” Another pause. “He’s on our side. One of these days, he’ll figure it out. In the meantime, I need to talk to him.” “If he’s lying or ignorant, why?” asked Brent.

  “So he’ll know he’s got a home here if they ever kick him out,” answered Bucky. “Sooner or later, the truth will come out, and they’re going to need a fall guy—and as Humphrey Bogart would say, he’s made to order for the part.” Brent shrugged. “You’re the boss.”

  “If we’re all agreed on that, set up a face-to-face for me.”

  Gloria went to her much smaller desk, and a moment later Jerry Culpepper’s image appeared on Bucky’s computer screen.

  “Hi, Jerry. Did I catch you at a busy time?”

  “These days, those are the only times I’ve got.” Jerry smiled. “What can I do for you, Mr. Bucky?” “Bucky,” Bucky corrected him.