“That son of a bitch Nixon,” he said. “Why in hell would he do something like this? It makes no sense.” He turned back to the screen. The first pictures were showing up. An astronaut stood out on the lunar surface, posing beside something that looked very much like a descent module. It was the same color as the dark gray moonscape.
“They did what they could to hide them,” said Laurie. “They’d have been hard to spot from orbit.”
The camera swung away, and the vehicle passed out of the picture. They were looking across open ground. Then the second descent module appeared. There was no commentary by Blackstone, or by the astronauts. The pictures were sufficient.
The president grumbled something. Then: “All right, Ray. I don’t think we have to worry about keeping a lid on this any longer. Somebody out there must know something. Find him. Or her. Check with anyone you can locate from the Carter administration. I don’t care what it takes. Find out what this is about.”
The voters were going to demand some answers, and he’d better damned well come up with some.
ABC was running his comment from the Beverly Hills fund-raiser: “While you’re at it, you might check with Mr. Blackstone to see if he knows what’s going on in the Bermuda Triangle.”
His press secretary called. “Mr. President,” she said, “they’re all over us. I think it would be a good idea if you talked to the reporters.”
They’d already run the daily press conference that morning. “I know, Helen.”
“Do we have any answers, sir?”
“We’re a little short there.”
Helen had started as a journalist herself. She’d had a remarkable career with CBS over a six-year period and had come on board at Cunningham’s request when he took office. He was aware that Jerry Culpepper had hoped to land the appointment, but he was too laid-back. Helen was dynamite. “They’re already piling in here,” she said. “I won’t be able to stall them long. What do you want me to tell them, sir?”
Ray was shaking his head. Stay out of the pressroom until we know what’s going on. But he couldn’t send Helen in there to make it up as she went along. He couldn’t imagine anything that would scream gutless more loudly at the reporters. “I’ll be down in fifteen minutes,” he said.
—
The descent modules were, of course, the only story in town. Where was a good congressional scandal when you needed one? Everybody was speculating about the hidden missions. Chris Matthews wondered about aliens. Mike Huckabee suggested there’d been some sort of freelancing by astronauts anxious to be first on the Moon, and that afterward their silence had been bought. Chevy Johnson, on SyFy, claimed that if you looked closely at the pictures collected by Blackstone, you could see footprints in the regolith that were definitely not human. One of the televangelists proposed that the astronauts had gone down to the surface because they’d felt the presence of God. But they’d kept it quiet because they hadn’t wanted to be laughed at in this society which, he said with sad emphasis, had abandoned the Lord.
Everybody was asking where Cunningham had been through all this. Diane Brookover of The New York Times, interviewed on NBC Special Report, shook her head. “How could we possibly have done something like this and the president didn’t know about it?” The fact that it had happened fifty years ago seemed to go unnoticed.
Ray had people calling everyone who might have an answer. Responses never varied. Two CIA chiefs knew nothing. Two former heads of NASA denied it was even possible. One former NSA director pointed out that “we don’t spy on ourselves.”
People were still calling back when Cunningham got up and headed for the pressroom. “Don’t do it, George,” said Ray. “Best right now is simply to issue a statement. Tell them we’re investigating and will have more as the situation develops.”
Cunningham nodded, signaling he’d heard. “Let me know,” he said quietly, “if we get anything.”
—
This wasn’t the first time, of course, he’d faced the media under trying circumstances. A strike against Somali pirates during his second week in office had gone wrong and eleven hostages, including five kids, had died. That one still kept him awake at night. Always would. And there’d been the FEMA lack of response when the quake hit South Carolina. Cunningham had put one of his staunchest supporters in charge, a guy he’d always thought competent but who, he realized belatedly, thought public relations was the solution to everything. And then there’d been the Ethiopian massacre.
The pressroom wasn’t big enough to accommodate everyone. Reporters were standing in back, and the crowd had spilled out into the passageway. The place was buzzing when he came through the side door, but it immediately fell silent. He took his place at the lectern. “Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “I guess we all recognize that this story keeps getting stranger.
“At the moment, I don’t have any kind of definitive statement to make, other than to admit that the images Morgan Blackstone sent back from the far side of the Moon are as puzzling to me as they are to everyone else. I don’t know what this is about, or how those vehicles could have gotten there, or why the United States might have landed twice on the Moon in 1969 and kept it secret. We’re conducting a thorough investigation in an effort to get some answers. And we will, I promise you, find out precisely what happened. In the meantime, we’ll have to wait to see what Mr. Blackstone has.” He looked into the TV camera at the back of the room, then down at Stan Huffman from the A.P., and smiled. “Keep in mind that I don’t have any answers. Having said that, the floor is open to questions.” Huffman’s hand went up. “Stan?”
“We understand you have no answers, Mr. President, but you must have a theory. Assuming these flights actually happened, and it looks now as if Blackstone was right, and they really did, do you have any conceivable explanation, any idea at all, why NASA might have done this?”
“None whatever, Stan. I haven’t heard one from anybody else, either. It’s why I’m still not entirely sure I’m buying in.”
“Follow-up please, Mr. President. You’re suggesting Blackstone faked the pictures.”
“I’m not suggesting anything, Stan. I just don’t know. I feel as if I’m living in an episode of The Twilight Zone.”
Bill Kelly of The Washington Post was next. “Are there any plans to have NASA send something to the Moon to confirm that the pictures we’re getting are valid? That those descent modules are really there?”
“Not at the moment, Bill. I think we can be confident that Bucky Blackstone would not perpetrate a fraud on the American people. No, I’m pretty sure that he found precisely what he says he did.” Rick Hagerty, of Fox News, caught his eye. “Rick?”
“Is there any kind of hidden vault that presidents have to keep secret information, and make it available to one another? Stuff that nobody else can see?”
“Is that a serious question?”
“Until these last few days, Mr. President, it wouldn’t have been. But yes, is there anything like that? And if there were, would you be willing to tell us that it exists?”
“The answers to your questions are no and yes.” He looked around the room with the boyish grin that had been so effective with voters. “There’s no hidden vault. Look, everybody, I’m sorry to admit this, but I doubt many residents of the White House have been that good at looking beyond their own terms in office.” He hadn’t yet finished the sentence before he knew it was the wrong thing to say. But there was no breaking off, or calling it back. At least, they’d have to concede his honesty, and for a politician, that was a major benefit. Maybe worth the headline he’d just created.
Meredith Aaronson, from NBC, got the next question. “Mr. President, why has NASA sat back while a private company went to the Moon? Is our space program dead?”
“No, Merry,” Cunningham said. “Maybe we don’t need a government-funded system anymore. We built this country on individual initiative, and I think we owe Mr. Blackstone a debt of gratitude for the action he’s taken.” And a good kick in the rear as a bonus.