He was trying to organize everything when Mary called. “He wants to attend services Sunday morning at the First Presbyterian Church in Titusville. Do you by any chance know the pastor?”

“No,” said Jerry.

“Okay. Contact him. Let him know what’s going to happen. Find out what time the services are, okay? We want something around nine o’clock. Whatever’s close to that, we’ll go with. Tell him there’ll be some people who will want to talk to him about security details. They’ll be in touch.”

Cunningham was routinely accused by his political enemies of showboating. He was, they charged, always visiting schools and shelters for battered women and A.A. meetings. They said it was okay up to a point, but they charged he did it for purely political reasons and therefore debased the very institutions he claimed to be helping.

It was all politics. Jerry knew the president well enough to entertain no doubts about his judgment and his intentions. He believed he had a responsibility to help where he could, and he enjoyed doing so. “If I can remind people,” he’d told Mary in Jerry’s presence one evening, “that these organizations need their assistance, I’m going to do it. Any way I can.”

The remark had stayed with him. Now, while he returned to assembling the guest list, he found his thoughts wandering back into history. To the Beach House and those long-ago Apollo flights. What had Myshko and Walker and their crews been thinking when they gathered out there with their families?

—

It probably wouldn’t have occurred to him to broach the Cassandra business with the president had Mary not cautioned him about bringing it up. “I know you, Jerry. I know how your mind works. And I’m warning you: Don’t even think about it.”

If something had happened here a half century ago, the president would be aware of it if anybody was. And he immediately began imagining himself confronting Cunningham. “Mr. President, what really happened on the Moon back in 1969?” Sure. “And while we’re at it, what about that Roswell business?”

You couldn’t get past the absurdity of it all.

The president came in on a Marine helicopter, designated Marine One. It descended onto the shuttle landing pad, where it was met by a small delegation of NASA executives. Ordinarily, Jerry should have been among them, but Mary found something else for him to do. She wanted him to set up a teleconference with people at NBC to arrange a tour of the facility by a group of TV celebrities. It could have been taken care of at any time over the last few days, but Mary had sat on it, set the timing to coincide with the arrival of the White House delegation, and pulled it out of her pocket at the last minute. “Forgot about meeting them,” she’d said. It was a lame explanation, as she knew it was, as she intended it to be. She was sending a message: Keep your distance while he’s here. Do nothing to remind him of the Moon-landing story. And especially, if you get close to him, don’t bring it up. In fact, don’t get close at all.

The entertainers were the cast of the popular science-fiction series The High Country, which was set in the distant future and pictured a well-funded NASA running flights all over the solar system. It had debuted as a three-part special, in which the world was threatened by an inbound asteroid. The asteroid, when last tracked, had been in a harmless orbit. Someone had apparently deliberately diverted it onto its lethal trajectory. (It didn’t seem to occur to the scientists in the series that it could have bumped into something, that the diversion could have been accidental.) They found the bad guys, who, despite various false leads, turned out to be not aliens, but deranged humans traveling back from the future. Their motivation for trying to destroy the planet was never made clear.

The lead characters, a scientist who’d developed a high-powered laser to be used to take out the asteroid, and a team of astronauts under the command of a Russian captain, Ivan Kolchevsky, played by the immensely popular Boris Vassily, got the job done in classic fashion. The special effects were spectacular. Everybody loved it, and the show morphed into a weekly series. It was not bad theater. The astronauts operated out of Moonbase. The world’s premier orbiting telescope was saved in a hair-raising episode in which one of Captain Kolchevsky’s team very nearly took the long plunge into the atmosphere. In another episode, scientists discovered life at the lunar north pole. Then a mission to a space station being assembled near Ganymede turned into a rescue effort for a ship that got into trouble when a jealous boyfriend seriously injured the pilot.

If the series was less than brilliant, it did avoid the usual chases after space aliens that the general public had come to expect from TV science-fiction shows. In the case of the lunar microbes, for example, it examined the social consequences of the discovery and set off a real-life debate about the literal truth of the Bible. Another episode demonstrated how a united effort to expand the human role in space advanced the cause of peace. (Arab and Israeli occupants living at the Ganymede station had to cooperate in order to survive after a massive power failure.) One show got involved, hilariously, with a virtual exercise intended to determine what the gender makeup of a crew should be on a flight to Uranus. The conclusion seemed to be that no type of crew, encased for a year or two with only each other, could possibly avoid major disharmony. To put it gently.

Jerry recorded it every Tuesday and usually watched it the same night. So, apparently, did everybody else at the Space Center. Engineers, computer specialists, astronauts, personnel managers, even the guys who swept the floors and manned the cafeteria inevitably discussed each episode the next day. For Jerry, for all of them, it was both exhilarating and painful. The High Country was an alternate world, where they were reminded once each week what NASA, given the chance, might have been.

By the time Jerry had finished talking with NBC, the president was tucked away in the director’s conference room. Secret Service guys stood guard at the door. When Jerry approached, they eyed him suspiciously and signaled that he was not authorized to enter. He wouldn’t have made the attempt in any case, of course. He’d never really considered looking for an opportunity to open up to the president about his concerns. That would be career suicide. Jerry knew President Cunningham to be a hardheaded realist. There was no way he’d be taking any of it seriously. Unless, of course, he had inside information.

That was a possibility.

But Jerry was inclined to believe that the president, like most people, bought the official story. And the reality was that no compelling evidence had surfaced to demonstrate that view wasn’t accurate. All he had were hints. Missing voices on old recordings, a curious journal entry, barely recalled memories of something called the Cassandra Project. If there were any truth to the early landings, what could they have been about? In an era when the U.S. was desperate to demonstrate its technological superiority over the Soviets, what could possibly have accounted for pulling off a landing but then keeping it quiet?

Nevertheless, Jerry decided he’d watch for an opportunity. And with luck, he’d get a break. Maybe when the president saw him, he’d be the one to bring up the issue. Jerry wouldn’t have to. And that would keep him out of trouble with Mary. After all, it had dominated the news for several days. Well, maybe not dominated, but it had certainly maintained visibility. And Cunningham knew he could trust his old campaign worker. It would probably only be necessary for Jerry to get close.

—

A small retinue of reporters accompanied the president to the Golden Apple Orphanage just outside Titusville. “No need for you to go, Jerry,” Mary told him. “It’s probably best that we maintain a degree of separation. I’d just as soon not remind him about the secret flights.” She smiled, suggesting it was a joke, but she got her point across. So Jerry went back to his office and spent the rest of the morning staring out the window.