“Now look here, Mr. Blackstone—”

“Bucky.”

“Now look here, Bucky, I’m giving you a private meeting on something like three hours’ notice. There are senators who have been waiting four and five months for one. So let’s get to the point. You made it to the Moon and you proved someone was there ahead of you. I congratulate you for your remarkable achievement, and I hasten to point out that I was as unaware of what you discovered as the rest of the world. Now, what is the purpose of this meeting?”

Bucky smiled. “Very well said. It really tempts me to vote for you next time.” He indicated a chair opposite Cunningham’s desk. “May I sit down?”

The president nodded.

“There’s just one little problem,” continued Bucky.

“Oh?”

“Jerry Culpepper got a mysterious phone call, directing him—and me—to the NASA Archives, where, thanks to his ability to decipher a really vague clue, we found a truly remarkable plate that Sidney Myshko reportedly brought back from the Moon in January of 1969.” He pulled a folded paper out of the lapel pocket of his suit and placed it on the desk. “Here’s a photo of it.”

“Amazing!” said Cunningham, picking the photo up and studying it.

“You know what’s the most amazing thing of all, Mr. President?” said Bucky.

“No. What?”

“It’s a phony.” The smile vanished. “And that means that the White House planted it for us to find.”

“Damn it, Mr. Blackstone! I didn’t know Myshko had landed until you came back with the proof. I had no idea that there had been any deception, I didn’t even believe in it until yesterday, and I had no previous knowledge of this so-called plate.”

“Maybe some of that is true,” said Bucky. Before Cunningham could protest, he continued: “Maybe all of it is. And do you know what, Mr. President? It doesn’t matter. Who’s the public going to believe? A government that’s been lying to them for half a century, or a man who went to the Moon and proved they were lying? So let’s talk turkey.”

“Calm down, Mr. Blackstone.”

“Bucky, damn it.”

“Bucky,” corrected Cunningham. “Suppose you tell me what you’re talking about and why you think the plate is a fake.”

“Ah, yes—the plate that no one spotted for fifty years but that took Jerry Culpepper and me less than twenty minutes to find and photograph.”

“You’re a bright man,” said Cunningham. “The men and women who work at Marshall are minimum-wage civil servants.”

“Rubbish,” scoffed Bucky. “The men and women who work there are retired officers for the most part. Anyway, we brought the photos back to the office and had the inscription translated.”

“And what did it say?”

“It was a gentle warning from a benevolent starfaring race, cautioning us against the dangers of technology, pointing out that advanced civilizations have a limited life expectancy. It was a very considerate, caring message. Almost pastoral, in a sense.” He paused, and the smile returned. “And I almost bought it. I even reserved television time. And then it occurred to me: Why would anyone hide this message? Why would they lie about it for fifty years? Hell, why wouldn’t any president drag it along to nuclear disarmament talks? You want to balance the budget? Show this to the public, and they’ll beg you to gut the Pentagon. This isn’t the kind of thing you hide, Mr. President. It’s the kind of thing you display, and make political capital of. No president in his right mind would keep this secret.” The smile became less amused and more self-satisfied. “And that means it was planted for me to find. Two thousand years old, my ass!” he snorted. “More likely it’s two months old.”

“Fifty years, to be exact,” answered Cunningham.

“Fifty?” said Bucky, surprised not at the answer but that Cunningham was willing to give it to him. “What’s really being covered up?”

Cunningham stared at him, as if trying to make up his mind.

“You can tell me now,” added Bucky, “or you can tell the world after I go public with what I know.”

Finally, Cunningham, his mind made up, nodded and pulled a very old VHS tape out of his desk drawer. “Go put this in the machine,” he said, handing it to Bucky and indicating the tape deck.

Bucky inserted the tape, turned on the monitor, hit PLAY, and watched transfixed as Richard Nixon’s image appeared and said, “Mr. President, I hope I haven’t caused any undue difficulty for you, but I was forced to take action . . .”

—

When it was over, Bucky sat silently frowning.

“Do you understand now?” said Cunningham. “I was only made aware of this yesterday, but I have to think he made the right decision.”

“You know the odds against this ambassador being the person you think it was must be a couple of thousand to one,” said Bucky. “They killed a lot of people back then.”

“If you were Nixon, or me, would you take the chance?” asked Cunningham.

“I’m glad I’m not you,” said Bucky earnestly.

“What are you going to do now?”

“I don’t know,” admitted Bucky. “I’ll have to give it some thought—a lot of thought.” He got to his feet and extended his hand to the man on the other side of the desk. “But believe it or not, I’m a patriot.”

“I hope you are,” said Cunningham.

EPILOGUE

Three days had passed, and Bucky stood in the studio of Blackstone Enterprises, facing more than two hundred members of the national and international media. Since meeting with Cunningham, he’d made a trip to Huntsville accompanied by Jerry Culpepper and Ray Chambers, called the Moon flight crew back from their vacations, and arranged, through Cunningham’s influence, to get airtime on all the public and cable networks.

“Thirty seconds, Mr. Blackstone . . . twenty . . . ten . . .”

Bucky gathered Ben Gaines, Marcia Neimark, and Phil Bassinger behind him, and faced the cameras.

“Three . . . two . . . one . . . you’re on.”

Bucky blinked once as the lights became even brighter, then forced himself to relax.

“Good evening,” he began. Then a smile. “I almost said ‘my fellow Americans,’ but that is far too limiting a term. What I have to say is for the entire world.” He paused for effect. “We found something on the Moon, something I haven’t mentioned until now, because first, I needed to have it authenticated, and second, because I had to discuss our find with President Cunningham before revealing it to you—or sharing it with you, if you prefer.”

He turned, took the plate from Bassinger, and held it up for the cameras.

“While Marcia Neimark and Phil Bassinger were examining the find—the one you know about—in Cassegrain Crater, they came upon this plate in the ruins of the structure that had been there. The inscription—and copies and photos will be made available to all members of the press, as well as posted on the Internet—is in a very early form of Greek, dating from perhaps twenty-four hundred years ago, and yet, given where we found it, it was clearly not written by a human hand.”

He waited a moment for the full meaning of that to sink in.

“Yes, the Earth itself has been visited by an alien race, the same race that created the dome whose remains we found in Cassegrain. And as the translation makes clear, it was—and hopefully still is—a decent and benevolent race, a race that cares about us and our future. As you will see, there is a warning on this plate”—he waited for the audible gasp from the press to subside—“but it is not a threat. It is a warning for our own good, a warning on how to avoid a disaster in the future. I felt my first duty upon returning was to present it to the president and ask for his guidance”—there were only three or four disbelieving chuckles and snickers—“and he agrees that since this is a message to the entire human race, and concerns the entire race, that we make it available to the entire planet, and that is what I am doing. The translation will be posted on the Web within the next five minutes, as well as photographs of the plate.”