John Adams - Lightspeed - Year One

I called Jeanie Escovar in the Archives. “Jeanie, have you seen the National Bedrock story yet?”

“ No, ” she said. “ My God, what is it this time? ”

“Not what you think. I’m sending it to you now. Could you have somebody check to see where this place is—?”

“ What place? Oh, wait—I got it. ”

“Find out where it is and see if you can get me some imagery of the same area. From our satellites.”

I heard her gasp. Then she started laughing.

“Jeanie, this is serious.”

“ Why? You don’t actually believe there’s a building up there, do you? ”

“Somebody’s going to ask the President about it. They have a press conference going on in about twenty minutes. We want him to be able to say: ‘It’s ridiculous, here’s a picture of the area, and you’ll notice there’s nothing there.’ We want him to be able to say ‘ The Bedrock’s running an optical illusion.’ But he’ll have to do it diplomatically. And without embarrassing Alexandrov.”

“ Good luck on that. ”

The Bedrock story was already getting attention on the talk shows. Angela Hart, who at that time anchored The Morning Report for the World Journal , was interviewing a physicist from MIT. The physicist stated that the picture could not be accurate. “ Probably a practical joke, ” he said. “ Or a trick of the light. ”

But Angela wondered why the Russians would release the picture at all. “ They had to know it would get a lot of attention, ” she said. And, of course, though she didn’t mention it, it would become a source of discomfort for the Russian president and the two cosmonauts who were among the Minerva crew.

Vasili was in a state of shock when he called back. “ They didn’t know about the dome, ” he said. “ Nobody noticed. But it is on the original satellite imagery. Our people were just putting out a lot of the stuff from the Luna missions. Imagery that hadn’t been released before. I can’t find anybody who knows anything about it. But I’m still trying. ”

“Vasili,” I said, “somebody must have seen it at the time. In 1967.”

“ I guess. ”

“You guess ? You think it’s possible something like this came in and nobody picked up on it?”

“ No, I’m not suggesting that at all, Jerry. I just—I don’t know what I’m suggesting. I’ll get back to you when I have something more. ”

Minutes later, Jeanie called: “ It’s the east wall of the Cassegrain Crater. ”

“And—?”

“ I’ve forwarded NASA imagery of the same area. ”

I switched on the monitor and ran the images. There was the same crater wall, the same pock-marked moonscape. But no dome. Nothing at all unusual.

Dated July, 1968. More than a year after the Soviet imagery.

I called Mary and told her: The Russians just screwed up.

“ The President can’t say that. ”

“All he has to say is that NASA has no evidence of any dome or anything else on the far side of the Moon. Probably he should just turn it into a joke. Make some remark about setting up a Martian liaison unit.”

She didn’t think it was funny.

When the subject came up at the presidential press conference, Gorman and Alexandrov both simply had a good laugh. Alexandrov blamed it on Khrushchev, and the laughter got louder. Then they moved on to how the Minerva mission—the long-awaited Return to the Moon—marked the beginning of a new era for the world.

The story kicked around in the tabloids for two or three more days. The Washington Post ran an op-ed using the dome to demonstrate how gullible we all are when the media says anything . Then Cory Abbott, who’d just won a Golden Globe for his portrayal of Einstein in Albert and Me , crashed his car into a street light and blacked out the entire town of Dekker, California. And just like that the dome story was gone.

On the morning of the launch, Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, issued a statement that the image was a result of defective technology. The Minerva lifted off on schedule and, while the world watched, it crossed to the Moon and completed a few orbits. Its lander touched down gently on the Mare Maskelyne. Marcia Beckett surprised everyone when she demurred leading the way out through the airlock, sending instead Cosmonaut Yuri Petrov, who descended and then signaled his crewmates to join him.

When all were assembled on the regolith, Petrov made the statement that, in the light of later events, has become immortal: “ We are here on the Moon because, during the last century, we avoided the war that would have destroyed us all. And we have come together. Now we stand as never before, united for all mankind. ”

I wasn’t especially impressed at the time. It sounded like the usual generalized nonsense. Which shows you what my judgment is worth.

I watched on my office monitor. And as the ceremony proceeded, I looked past the space travelers, across the barren wasteland of the Mare Maskelyne, wondering which was the shortest path to the Cassegrain crater.

I knew I should have just let it go, but I couldn’t. I could imagine no explanation for the Russians doctoring their satellite imagery. Vasili told me that everyone with whom he’d spoken was shocked. That the images had been dug out of the archives and distributed without inspection. And, as far as could be determined, without anyone distorting them. “ I just don’t understand it, Jerry, ” he said.

Mary told me not to worry about it. “We have more important things to do,” she said.

There was no one left at NASA from the 1960s. In fact, I knew of only one person living at Cape Kennedy who had been part of the Agency when Apollo 11 went to the Moon: Amos Kelly, who’d been one of my grandfather’s buddies. He was still in the area, where he served with the Friends of NASA, a group of volunteers who lent occasional support but mostly threw parties. I looked him up. He’d come to the Agency in 1965 as a technician. Eventually, he’d become one of the operational managers.

He was in his mid-eighties, but he sounded good. “ Sure, Jerry, I remember you. It’s been a long time, ” he said, when I got him on the phone. I’d been a little kid when he used to stop by to pick up my grandfather for an evening of poker. “ What can I do for you? ”

“This is going to sound silly, Amos.”

“ Nothing sounds silly to me. I used to work for the government. ”

“Did you see the story in the tabloids about the dome?”

“ How could I miss it? ”

“You ever hear anything like that before?”

“ You mean did we think there were Martians on the Moon? ” He laughed, turned away to tell someone that the call was for him, and then laughed again. “ Is that a serious question, Jerry? ”

“I guess not.”

“ Good. By the way, you’ve done pretty well for yourself at the Agency. Your granddad would have been proud. ”

“Thanks.”

He told me how much he missed the old days, missed my grandfather, how they’d had a good crew. “ Best years of my life. I could never believe they’d just scuttle the program the way they did. ”

Finally he asked what the Russians had said about the images. I told him what Vasili told me. “ Well, ” he said, “ maybe they haven’t changed that much after all. ”

Twenty minutes later he called back. “ I was reading the story in the Bedrock . It says that the object was in the Cassegrain Crater. ”