Jerry sent the graphics down to the pressroom projector and was getting his index cards together when Barbara came into the office. “Jerry,” she said, “Dr. Edwards is on the line. I told her you were busy, but she says it’s important. “

Jerry glanced at his watch. He had about five minutes. “Put her on, Barbara.”

The line clicked as she made the connection. Then Mandy was on the display. “Hello, Jerry,” she said.

“Hi, beautiful, what do you have?”

“Are you sure your people didn’t screw up the dates?”

“The pictures don’t fit?”

“Jerry, a lot of the pictures could not have been taken at the times indicated.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes. Of course I am.”

So there really had been a cover-up. Did that mean there’d been a landing? “How can you tell?”

“The shadows aren’t right. Which means the Moon, at the time the pictures were taken, was in a different place than it actually would have been on the given dates.”

“These are pictures of the far side of the Moon?”

“Yes.”

“What about the near side?”

“The near side’s okay. I didn’t see any problems there.”

“All right. What are the dates? Of the bogus pictures?”

“They run from the very beginning of the program until approximately May 1969.”

Just after Walker’s mission returned. “After that, they’re okay?”

“That’s correct. By the way, it’s always the same general area.”

“How do you mean?”

“There’s a strip of ground that we never get to see. The photos that have been manipulated always exclude the same area.”

“How big is it? Where?”

“It’s about two hundred miles by eighty or so. Anyhow, I’ve marked it for you. You should have the package now. You can see for yourself.”

Jerry looked at his watch. He was running late. “Okay, Mandy, thanks. I owe you.”

“It’s centered on the Cassegrain Crater.”

“The what?”

“The Cassegrain Crater. It’s a small one. Only about forty miles across. I can’t imagine why anybody would be trying to conceal it. But, anyhow, there it is. And one more thing, Jerry.”

“Yes?”

“I checked some Russian pictures from the same time period. They were cooked, too.”

—

Jerry was running late. Despite that, he walked slowly out of his office and nodded to Barbara. She was looking at him with a strange expression. “You okay, Boss?” she asked.

“Sure,” he said. He left the office, went out into the corridor, and pushed the elevator button.

Somebody passed him. “Hello, Jerry.”

A woman’s voice. It was one of the computer wonks. He needed a moment to come up with her name. “Hello, Shelley,” he said, as she disappeared around a corner.

The elevator doors opened and he went in.

He pressed DOWN. Checked his watch again, but the time didn’t register.

There really had been a cover-up. But what the hell were they hiding? What could they be hiding? And the Russians as well?

The elevator descended past the fourth floor.

The third.

He should have gone with Mary’s idea. Let Vanessa handle the press conference.

The doors opened at the second floor. Wally Bergen got in. Said hello. Jerry didn’t usually care when people stopped the elevator to ride up or down one floor. But this time it annoyed him, and he almost said something.

“Ready for the reporters?” Wally asked with a smile. He was a little guy. Glasses. Smiled too much. He was always trying to be cheerful. Jerry didn’t like nonstop cheerfulness.

“Sure,” he said.

—

There were about forty people crowded into the pressroom. Almost three times the usual number. Jerry walked to the lectern, waited for everyone to quiet down, and welcomed them in a tone that suggested nothing unusual was going on. He knew he should not make any reference to Blackstone, but he couldn’t resist. “It’s been a busy week,” he said with a grin. Everybody knew what he meant, and it got some laughs. But it was a dumb start.

He described some improvements in scanners that would be mounted on the Valkyrie, a robotic mission that was approaching Jupiter. Then he went into his routine with the colliding galaxies, the exoplanets, and the second sun. He put the images up. They were spectacular. When he’d first seen the Kastelone pictures, he’d wondered what it would be like to live on a world in a place where stars were being knocked around in all directions. Were there living worlds, maybe even worlds with people on them, getting torn loose from their suns and dragged into the night?

Ordinarily, he would have mentioned that possibility to spice up the presentation, but now it was the kind of remark that would be used to confirm the notion that he was a kook. “Fortunately,” he said, “we live in the Milky Way, which is a quiet, sedate neighborhood.” He added a smile.

And, having used only about fifteen minutes, he asked if anyone had a question.

Everybody raised a hand. He looked around, hoping for a safe place to land. And pointed at Ellie McIntyre. Ellie represented the local magazine Oceanside. It was usually interested in topics that concerned coastal merchants. Like when would the next launch happen? Of course, launches were off the table, but the Space Center still brought in high-profile guests and ran presentations that drew a decent number of visitors.

“Jerry,” she said, “what did you think about what Morgan Blackstone said last week?”

He laughed. Not anything to be taken seriously. “I’ll have to let Mr. Blackstone speak for himself, Ellie,” he said. “To be honest, I didn’t see the show. I can tell you that, if anybody was on the Moon prior to Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, it would make a great science-fiction movie.”

Diane Brookover, of The New York Times, was next: “Jerry,” she said, “can you categorically deny that there’s some sort of cover-up going on here? That we don’t know the entire story of the Moon landings?”

“Can I categorically deny it? I wasn’t here, Diane. Maybe we sent an early mission looking for oil, and we didn’t want to tell anybody because— Well, I don’t know.” He was on a platform that was elevated about eighteen inches off the floor. He looked out over their heads. Saw one of the interns standing in the doorway. Everybody was interested. “The whole notion is so ridiculous, I don’t know where to begin. Now, if we could, I’d like to move on and not waste any more time on this.”

Someone who identified herself as representing Fox asked whether there was evidence that there might actually be life on the exoplanets as opposed to there being worlds where the conditions were simply favorable?

“My understanding,” said Jerry, “is that there’s simply no way to know for certain but that the chemical mix in the atmospheres of two of the three worlds indicates a high probability of life. The third one–let me check my notes here—the third one is maybe one chance in four or five.”

She kept her hand in the air. “So that makes how many worlds now with oxygen atmospheres?”

“I’m not up on that,” said Jerry. “But I think this puts the count at about fourteen.”

Barry Westcott, of USA Today, was next. “Jerry, the National Astrophysics Association has issued a statement thanking NASA for everything it’s done over the sixty years of its existence. They give the Agency credit for a long list of achievements, the flybys, the telescopes, the analyses of Martian soil. The lunar flights finish pretty far down the list. And they only seem to count because they brought home some Moon rocks. It sounds like a eulogy. Is NASA finished?”

Jerry resisted his inclination to brush the question away as ridiculous. “I suspect we’ll be here for a good many years, Barry. The country’s space program isn’t going away. Yes, we’ve fallen on lean times. But so has everybody else. This country isn’t going to shut down its space program. That’s just not going to happen.”