“Well, I’ll be damned!” said Bassinger. “The hardheaded businessman is a secret romantic!”
Bucky searched his mind for a caustic reply, but stopped when he realized that Bassinger was right, that he was a romantic at heart. Why else would he declare the trip a success a handful of hours into it when the Moon was still three days away?
After that first nap, Bucky slept intermittently during the next two days. He kept staring out the window, thrilled by the sights, reveling in the sensation of weightlessness. Finally, he fell into a deep sleep and woke up almost eight hours later, feeling totally refreshed and unbothered by the confined space in which he found himself.
As the Sidney Myshko neared the Moon, he still felt like a kid in a candy shop. He homed in on Mars again and spent a few hours studying and admiring it. Then he started spotting the bigger asteroids.
“We’ll move into orbit in about twenty minutes,” announced Gaines. “I’ve calculated it—well, the computer has calculated it—and this should put us right over the Cassegrain Crater when we’re on the dark side.” He paused. “Have you got any idea what we’re looking for?”
“Not since the last time you asked.”
“Could it be metal?” persisted Gaines. “We don’t have to see the exact shape of whatever it is. If we have a hint of what it’s composed of, we can run a spectroscopic analysis of the crater square mile by square mile and see if there’s, I don’t know, some titanium or steel there, something from Myshko’s ship.”
“We’ll know soon enough,” said Bucky.
“Not quite as soon as you think,” said Neimark. “Before we land, we’ll take a number of photos and videos with zoom lenses and transmit them back to Earth. Cassegrain Crater is maybe forty miles across. You could land in it and not see a brontosaur at the other end, let alone something the shape and nature of which you can’t even guess at.”
“I know.” Bucky sighed. “It’s just that I’ve been living with this for months, and I want to know what the hell made Myshko land, and especially what made him keep his mouth shut about it.”
“If he landed.”
“He landed,” replied Bucky with conviction. “And I want to know why damned near every photo of the Cassegrain Crater during the sixties was doctored.”
“Just because some unnamed source told that to Jerry Culpepper doesn’t make it so,” said Neimark.
“I trust him.”
“Oh, I believe he was told that, and that he was honest with you. I just don’t know if the source was honest with him.”
“I’m supposed to be the doubter,” said Bucky.
“Nonsense,” she replied. “Scientists are taught to doubt everything.”
“Rubbish,” said Bucky. “They hang on to disproven and discarded theories like religious zealots.”
“Only some of them,” she said defensively.
“And only some religious people are zealots.” He turned to Gaines. “Are we in orbit yet?”
“About ninety seconds.”
“How long before we’re over Cassegrain?”
Gaines shrugged. “I’d guess an hour and a quarter, but the computer can tell you to the second, always assuming we don’t come face-to-face with too much space garbage.”
“Garbage?”
“Meteor swarms, things like that.”
“What about our garbage?” asked Bucky, remembering his half-eaten lunch.
“We hang on to it till we’re back on Earth,” replied Gaines. “If we jettisoned it, it would just take up orbit, around the Moon if we got rid of it here, around the Sun if we dumped it in transit, and as it picked up speed over the years, it could collide with some ship a century from now and wipe it out.” He checked his instruments. “We’re in orbit now.”
Seventy minutes later, Cassegrain Crater came into view.
“Doesn’t look all that special, does it?” said Bucky, somehow disappointed that he could not see something wrong, something askew, from that distance.
“We’ll know soon enough,” said Bassinger. “Got all the cameras working.”
“And then we send the stills and videos back to Flat Plains?” asked Bucky. Flat Plains was his operational headquarters.
“Yes. The government—hell, a lot of governments, and probably some advanced labs—will try to grab them, too, but we’ve got them pretty well coded. By the time anyone breaks the codes and actually sees the pictures, we should be safely back on Earth.”
“Yeah,” added Gaines. “If there’s really something down there, who knows? They don’t have to be as big as Tars Tarkas to cause a panic. Even little green men will do that.”
“Besides, the boss isn’t into sharing,” said Bassinger with a grin. “Until he makes his millions first.”
“If we find anything but rocks there,” promised Bucky, “you’re going to see just how into sharing your boss is.”
As they were speaking, pictures from the Cassegrain Crater were already showing up on the navigational screen. The regolith was flat and gray, featureless save for occasional smaller craters.
Then—
Bucky stared. “Son of a bitch!”
29
After the Watergate scandal, Eugenio Martinez had established a quiet career selling real estate and had eventually retired to a small town in southern Georgia. “It’s not something I’m especially proud of,” he told Weinstein, referring to his part in the burglary. “I don’t much like to talk about it, but I guess I’ve gotten used to it. What do you want to know that hasn’t already been reported in every newspaper in the country?”
He sounded annoyed. Weinstein sympathized. It would have been difficult to refuse to do something if the president of the United States asked for your help. “Mr. Martinez,” he said, “first let me assure you that whatever you have to say to me will be held in the strictest confidence.”
Martinez frowned. “They’re not opening this thing up again, are they?”
“No, no. Nothing like that. It’s just that we’ve heard a couple of rumors, and we’d like to get a handle on what really happened.”
“Oh.” He smiled. “I’m relieved to hear it. What are the rumors?”
They were sitting in Martinez’s living room, facing each other across a sleek, square cocktail table. The walls were paneled with mahogany, and curtained windows looked out over a lake. A light rain was falling. “Did you know Jack Cohen?”
“Cohen?” He frowned. “I don’t think so.”
“The name doesn’t ring a bell?”
“No.”
Weinstein produced a photo of Cohen, taken during his days at GWU. “You don’t recognize him?”
“Nope. Never saw him before.”
“Well, it’s been a long time.” He placed the photo on a coffee table where Martinez could see it. “Let’s try another question.”
“Go ahead, Mr. Weinstein.”
“Was there a sixth burglar?”
Martinez laughed. “A sixth burglar? Where on Earth did you hear that?”
“Was there?”
“No. Of course not.”
“Mr. Martinez, if you’re hiding anything, I can assure you there’s no need. I can get you a letter from the president himself releasing you from any responsibility for withholding classified information.”
“No need to bother. I’m not hiding anything. There was no sixth burglar.” He paused. Looked out as a bolt of lightning flickered against the window. “You wearing a wire?”
“No.”
“You mind if I have a look?”
“Go ahead.”
Weinstein stood while Martinez did an inspection. “Okay,” he said finally, “I guess you’re clear.”
“So what were you going to tell me that required a search?”
They both sat back down. Martinez studied him for several moments, making up his mind. Then: “Just for the record, I’ve never thought of myself as a burglar. We were the president’s operatives.”