Later that afternoon, he’d be meeting with his conference representatives. He sighed. They needed a plan. He had nothing. And neither did they.

—

He was still agonizing when Ray showed up, looking rattled. Kim offered to get him a cup of coffee, but he passed on it. She closed the door, leaving them alone. “Bad news, looks like, George,” he said. “The networks are announcing that Blackstone is going to be transmitting pictures from the Moon. He must have found something.”

Cunningham was tired. After the frustrations of the conference, Bucky’s Moon flight just didn’t seem that serious anymore. “What did he find?” he asked.

“They’re not saying. They just made the announcement a few minutes ago. They’re going to start broadcasting in”—he checked his watch—“six minutes.”

“The son of a bitch lives to play to his audience, doesn’t he?”

“I’d say so, yes.”

He picked up the remote and turned on the TV. CBS was running a crawl stating that there was breaking news from the Moon, while three or four of their newspeople chattered about what it could be. NBC had its news anchor going on about the Myshko and speculating on whether there had really been other landings. ABC was interviewing physicist Michael Shara in his office at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Fox had a team on the ground at Flat Plains.

ABC’s Mark Cassidy broke off his conversation with Shara and looked up into the camera. “ABC has breaking news. Taking you now to the Moon—”

Shara’s bright functional office was replaced by Blackstone, seated inside the cramped spacecraft, wearing his customary self-satisfied grin. Except it had an additional dimension this time. He looked like a guy holding four aces. “This is Morgan Blackstone,” he said.

—

When it was over, Cunningham simply stared at the screen, which had reverted to Shara’s office, where the physicist and his interviewer were talking about what they’d seen. But Cunningham turned off the sound. “I don’t believe it,” he said. Laurie Banner had shown up at the office door, and the president turned toward her. “There’s no way this could be a mistake, is there?”

She made no attempt to answer but only stood shaking her head. “Mr. President,” she said finally, “you really don’t know any more about this, right?”

“No, I do not,” Cunningham said. “Of course I don’t.” He was still not certain why he’d allowed himself to get so caught up in this. He’d thought at first that he simply didn’t like Blackstone, didn’t want to see him come off as the guy who knew the truth when nobody else did, not even himself. He felt ridiculous. A president left out of the loop. He could, of course, pretend that he had known and had simply been keeping a closely held government secret all this time. He’d have to work, though, to come up with an explanation for that.

Nobody trusted the government anymore. And no matter how this played out, confidence in him was going to be undercut. Did he want to be an idiot or a schemer?

“You’re assuming the descent modules are really there,” Laurie said.

“What are you talking about, Laurie?”

“I assume all we’re going to have is pictures being sent back by Blackstone.”

Ray chimed in: “Right. It could all be a prank. Designed to elicit a statement from you. Then he yells, ‘April fool.’”

“Sure,” Cunningham said. “What are the odds of that?”

Ray looked over at Laurie. The science advisor kept her eyes straight ahead.

She had made her reputation in quantum mechanics. Cunningham had never been able to grasp precisely what that was about. Something to do with a single particle going through two holes at the same time. He’d brought her into the White House because she had a talent for explaining complicated ideas in simple English. But she’d never been able to explain the two holes. At least not to the president’s satisfaction. She’d also been a Nobel Prize finalist two years before. “What do you think?” he asked her. “Any chance of a hoax?”

She turned those dark brown eyes on him. “Physically, sure. But—” She hesitated. “I believe I’ll leave the politics to you, sir.”

“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.”