It was either a reflection, an illusion of some sort, or it was a fraud. The thing was on the edge of a crater, shaped like the head of a bullet. We just didn’t need this.īut it did look like an artificial construct. It depicted a crater wall, with a large arrow graphic in the middle of a dark splotch pointing at a dome that you couldn’t have missed anyhow.
#LES SCHWAB VIRTUAL WHEELS MOVIE#
The Bedrock carried the image on its front page, where they usually show the latest movie celebrity who’s being accused of cheating, or has gone on a drunken binge. The dome-if that’s really what it was-appeared on every image in the series. I mean, once you’ve seen a few square miles of lunar surface you’ve pretty much seen it all. I hadn’t looked at the images prior to the meeting. Apparently nobody on either side had noticed anything unusual. Moscow had released the satellite images only a few hours before and forwarded them to us without comment. If the image was doctored, the deed had to have been done by the Russians.
I didn’t have to tell him what we all knew: That it was a doctored picture and that it must have been a slow week for scandals. “It looks legitimate, Jerry,” Cole said, but he was still laughing. “Well,” I said, “I guess Buck Rogers beat us there after all.” The reporters in the pool all had a good chuckle, and then they looked up at me. He twisted the iPad, raised it higher, and squinted at it. If you can believe this, there’s a dome back there.” “They’ve got one here from the far side of the Moon. “The Russians released more lunar orbital pictures from the sixties,” He snickered. My first thought had been that we were about to have another astronaut scandal, like the one the month before with Barnaby Salvator and half the strippers on the Beach. Then a wave of laughter rippled through the room. “I don’t usually get to Bedrock this early in the week.” Somebody snorted.
“No, I haven’t,” I said, hoping he was making it up. That started a few people checking their own devices. “Have you seen the story that the Bedrock’s running?” He held up his iPad. “Jerry….” He looked up, making no effort to suppress a grin. He was frowning, his left hand in the air, staring down at something on his lap that I couldn’t see. Cole was the AP journalist, seated in his customary spot up front. I’d just made the point to the pool of reporters that it was Richard Nixon who’d turned off the lights-not the astronaut Eugene Cernan-when Warren Cole began waving his hand. Sid and his five crewmates denied the story, of course. Either of them could have landed and waved back at us, and the rumor was that Sid Myshko had almost taken the game into his own hands, and that the crew had put it to a vote whether they’d ignore the protocol and go down to the surface regardless of the mission parameters.
We all knew the dangers inherent in overconfidence, but two orbital missions had gone up without a hitch. Or that was the plan, anyway, until Warren Cole mentioned the dome. President Gorman and his Russian counterpart, Dmitri Alexandrov, were scheduled to talk to the press from the White house an hour later, so I was strictly a set-up guy. I was in the middle of conducting a NASA press conference several days before the Minerva lift-off-the Return to the Moon-and I was fielding softball questions like: “Is it true that if everything goes well, the Mars mission will be moved up?” and “What is Marcia Beckett going to say when she becomes the first person to set foot on lunar soil since Eugene Cernan turned off the lights fifty-four years ago?” It’s an odd fact that the biggest science story of the twenty-first century-probably the biggest ever-broke in that tabloid of tabloids, The National Bedrock.
Series: From the Lost Travelers’ Tour Guide.People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction!.
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