He nodded to a young man on his right. Another stranger. “Mark Lyman,” he said. “From The Nation. Jerry, where do you think we’re going to be, as far as space exploration is concerned, in twenty years? Is there any chance we’ll go back to the Moon?” Lyman looked as if he’d just graduated from college. A thin, reedy kid with unruly hair and a tone that sounded vaguely accusatory.

“Twenty years is a long time,” said Jerry. “And none of us is very good at making predictions. I can tell you this much: If President Cunningham wants to see a return to the Moon, we can do it. All that’s necessary is a willingness to pay for it.”

“We could probably do that,” said Lyman, “just by staying out of the next war.”

A middle-aged battle-scarred woman on his left: “Tonya Brant,” she said. The columnist best known for unrelenting attacks on the administration and on right-wing politicians. “Jerry, the president was here a few days ago. When you asked him about the Myshko flight, how did he react?”

“Tonya,” he said, “I never brought the subject up with him.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s crazy. Deranged.”

“He didn’t mention it either?”

“He doesn’t usually confer with me on matters of policy.”

“But when wild stories are going around that reflect adversely on whether the government is telling the truth about something, I’d think he would be interested. I mean, he must have asked whether anybody here had any idea where this story had come from. If I’d been president—not that anybody would ever vote for me—I’d want to get a better feel for what’s going on.”

“Tonya, I just wouldn’t have been able to help him in any event. The whole story is a baseless rumor. I suspect he has no interest in wasting his time on it.”

“Okay,” she said. He wanted to break away, to go to someone else, but she wasn’t quite ready to let go. “Let me just ask you, Jerry. Point-blank. As far as you know, there’s absolutely no basis to this story, none whatever, and no reason to believe the government is hiding something. Is that correct?”

“Yes,” he said. “Absolutely.”

—

He rarely skipped lunch. But his appetite had gone away, so he went back to his office.

Barbara smiled at him as he walked in. “Nice job, Jerry,” she said. “I’m always amazed how you can push back at those people. The guy we had here before you always caved.”

“I think you’re being generous, Barb. But thanks.”

“You had a couple of calls.” She handed him two note cards. He glanced at them. They were requests from local TV stations for interviews. He did a lot of those. “You want me to schedule them?” she asked.

“Sure,” he said. “Give it a few days, though.”

A warm breeze was coming in through the windows. He had a corner office, with views of the Vehicle Assembly Building and Launchpad 39A. Hard to believe he’d ever thought he would want to be an astronaut. To ride an Atlas through the clouds. Now the prospect of simply sitting on one while it rested on the pad made him uneasy. He closed the windows and turned on the air-conditioning.

He sat down in front of the monitor and brought up the package of lunar pictures from Mandy. There were two sets. One consisted of the photos he’d sent her. The second showed him what the surface should have looked like on the designated dates. There were about seventy photos in each of the two sets.

To Jerry, every part of the Moon looked like every other part. Craters. Craters within craters. Dark areas referred to as seas. And jagged-looking mountains.

The first pair of pictures were dated October 7, 1959, ten years before the Saturn flights. They were the product of the Soviet vehicle Luna 3, the third spacecraft to make it successfully to the Moon and the first to get pictures of the far side. Both photos were purportedly of the same area, one as it had looked on the official record, the second as it should have looked. At first glance, he saw no difference between them.

Craters, rocks, ridges, everything seemed identical.

But Miranda had said the shadows were wrong. He studied them. Increased the magnification. And yes, the shadows were angled differently. In the photo she’d indicated as accurate, the shadows were slanted more to the left of the picture. It wasn’t easy to see, but it was there. Other pictures showed similar discrepancies.

So it was true: The images had been falsified. And the Russians were part of it.

The area that had been doctored was centered on the crater she’d mentioned. Cassegrain.

She’d enclosed a few pictures taken in August 1969, which, she said, were valid. Those were by Zond 7. Another Soviet vehicle.

An attached comment read: The Zond images, as far as I can tell, have not been doctored. Nor can I find anything afterward that does not seem authentic.

What in hell had been going on?

—

Barbara’s voice interrupted him: “Jerry, Mary wants to see you.”

“Okay,” he said. “Tell her I’ll be right there.”

He did a search on the Cassegrain Crater. There wasn’t much. It was, of course, on the back side of the Moon, never visible from Earth. It was located in the south, close to the Mare Australe. And the Lebedev Crater. Jerry had never heard of either.

Cassegrain was named after a Catholic priest who, in the seventeenth century, designed and built a new type of telescope. And that pretty much summed up everything. Except that the name rang a bell somewhere.

Cassegrain.

Where had he heard it before?

He shrugged, got up, glanced out again at the launchpad, copied a couple of the pictures in Miranda’s package, put them in a folder, and headed upstairs to Mary’s office.

—

“Come in, Jerry.” She was seated behind her desk, turning over sheets of paper. Without looking up, she pointed toward one of the chairs. Jerry sat. She stared down at the paper and shook her head. “They want to change over the computers. Bring in OpenBook’s quantums. You believe that?”

“They’re expensive.”

She looked up at him and rolled her eyes. “It’s ridiculous. The ones we have are fine. I think we’re getting pressure from Beaverbrook again.” She was referring to Adam Barnett, a Maryland senator with a strong British accent. Barnett was on NASA’s funding committee, and OpenBook was located in Baltimore. “Anyway, I wanted to tell you I watched the press conference. I thought you did a good job. Held off the wolves. Maybe by next week this will have gone away.”

He showed her the folder. “I’ve got something here that you’ll want to see.”

“What’s that?”

He got up, took out the pictures from October 7, 1959, and laid them on her desk. He had to stop a moment, check them again to make sure he knew which was which. “This one,” the one on her left, “is the official picture.”

“Of what?”

“The area around the Cassegrain Crater.”

She shrugged. But she already had a sense of what was coming. “Okay. It looks like the Moon all right.”

“The official picture is Russian.”

“So what does it have to do with us?”

“The other one is what a picture taken on that date should have looked like.”

She bent over and studied the photos. Looked back at him. “Are they supposed to be different?”

“Look at the shadows.”

She sighed. “Jerry, what are we doing here?”

“Photos of this area taken through late 1969, from the very beginning until after the Walker mission returned, were switched out. By us and by the Russians. Whatever it’s about, they’re in on it, too.”

She lowered her head into her hands. “Oh, God,” she said. “Jerry, do you hear yourself?”

“Yes, I do. Mary, there are no photos of this area during that entire time period that weren’t tampered with.”

She took a deep breath. “What’s different about them? Are you talking about the shadows?”