Lee reached up and patted Alice’s hand as she rubbed his shoulders. “I assume it’s because the Germans believed, and I think rightly so, that the remains of the spaceman they found was a visitor, an explorer if you will, to this planet.”
“How long ago?” Niles asked, finally finding his voice.
“I don’t know,” Lee said, lowering his head. “If only the OSS had had a chance to examine the crates more closely.”
“And we don’t know where the crates are now?” Sarah asked as she stood and started pacing.
“No. No trace of them has ever been found,” Alice said with resignation. “The last known sighting was Ecuador. So, either Germany or Washington is where you should look.” Alice removed her hands and then sat in the empty chair next to Lee’s. “I think you need to start there.”
“Start what?” Niles asked.
“Your investigation, of course. I assume it would be within the parameters of what the president has given you authorization to do,” Lee said, smiling at Niles.
“Why not start at the excavation you spoke of?” Jack asked.
“Because it has been buried and the ground salted. The Ecuadorians allow no one near the site. I know. I was shot at years later trying to get in,” Lee said.
“May I suggest, since we have a geologist on hand, that we use her to find out what she can about the excavation? And while Sarah is doing that, Niles and Jack can start the search for the crates. Because whatever is in those wooden boxes holds the answer to what they just found on the Moon.”
As they watched Alice answer for a very tired-looking Lee, she stood and helped the senator to his feet. She placed her arm around him and started walking toward the hallway.
“That’s enough for you for one day,” she said. “Say good-bye and good night.”
“Damn woman won’t let me play no more.”
“Get some rest,” Niles said as Sarah walked over and kissed Lee on the cheek once more. Then she regretted the gesture; the senator had to bend low to accept it.
Jack turned toward Niles and shook his head. “I don’t see the point of this. NASA will soon have the answers we need, and if the skeletons are indeed from one and the same civilization, why bother to find the crates? And we have to consider the big question here.”
“What’s that?” Sarah asked.
Jack stood and replaced his chair. Alice walked back into the room to show them out. Jack thought a moment and then came to the conclusion that Alice also needed to hear his question.
“Someone thought the find in 1945 was important enough to get rid of, and important enough not to announce. Now here we are trying to find out where those crates are. Whoever has them may want them protected at all cost, for reasons of their own.”
Niles bit his lower lip and then his eyes settled on Jack.
“Good point.”
2
Evans looked up from his clipboard to the monitor.
Atlantis was on its way.
Hugh Evans had worked his way up the chain of command from engineering to flight director. His normal duties called for his expertise on the space shuttle program, but eighteen months earlier he’d had a mild heart attack. Shuttle missions were well beyond his health situation at the moment, so when his superiors asked for a liaison and flight manager to work with JPL on the Peregrine mission, he jumped at the chance to get on the boards once again. He was working closely with Stan Nathan out at Jet Propulsion Lab, not interfering with his mission leadership but helping with some of the more NASA-based situations that sprang up. It had been his suggestion to Stan that morning to use John, George, and Paul as a linkup from Ringo and then up to REMCOM at JPL, completing the relay of the communications signal back to earth.
Mission control was running shorthanded. The Peregrine mission was squeezed in between STS 129, one of the last space shuttle missions to be launched before that particular program came to a close, and a Mars orbiter currently on course for the red planet.
Now, in the large monitor to the right-center of the main screen, Hugh Evans saw the shuttle Atlantis as it started making its journey from the barn to the launch pad. The large-tracked vehicle carrying the giant shuttle moved slowly and surely toward one of the final missions of the shuttle program. Hugh was looking at it longingly, as he knew he would never be a flight director again for one of the last few missions to the International Space Station.
Hugh turned his gaze back to the main screen in the center of mission control. He watched as Ringo started another grid pattern search of the center of Shackleton Crater. He glanced over at the large telemetry readout next to the image and saw that Ringo was beginning to show a power loss of over 65 percent.
He frowned.
If he had been in charge he would have cut the grid search down. He would have concentrated Ringo closer to the center of the crater for expediency. He had started to suggest just that four hours before, but he knew that Stan Nathan in Pasadena was having a far more harrowing day than he. So Evans had decided to keep quiet, even though as a second recommendation he would have used Paul, the second rover into the crater, as a search partner to Ringo instead of digging out the mysterious skeleton. After all, they knew what the damn thing was. So his priority would have been on finding other remains or something that could identify what it was they were dealing with.
Finally, Hugh switched his view from the interior of the crater to the rim, where George was watching with its long-range lens. He saw the zoomed image of Paul as it used its drill arm to scoop out deposits of lunar dust from around the left side of the half-buried skeleton. All of a sudden the robot stopped. He saw the image being streamed from George switch to the close-up view from Paul ’s camera.
“What’s that?” he asked aloud as several of the overnight telemetry technicians looked on just as confused.
On the large monitor was the left arm of the space suit. On it was a patch. It was not unlike the flag that United States astronauts wore on their left shoulder. This one, however, was a multicolored series of rings, eclipsed by each before it, the first being the only whole circle of the four.
“If that’s a flag, it sure as hell rules out the remains being anyone from this side of the border,” he said. He stood and tilted his head. There was something just underneath the shoulder blade of the now exposed left arm of the skeleton. He hit the small transmit button on his belt, and then adjusted the headset to his mouth.
“Stan, this is Houston, can you ask REMCOM to order Paul to zoom in on the object just beneath the arm. Yeah, do you see the black thing there? It’s partly exposed.”
As he waited for the time delay in communications, Hugh became a little anxious. Soon the image changed as the camera angle from Paul adjusted and focused on a long tubular object jutting from the dust. As it became clearer, Stan Nathan’s voice came over the loud speaker.
“What in the hell is that?”
Stan walked a few steps down the steep steps leading to the control room floor and stopped. His mouth became a little drier. He knew exactly what the strange object was.
“Uh, Stan, we aren’t going out live this time are we?” He looked around at the small staff of technicians inside his own facility as they in turn watched him.
“No, most of the press is dozing inside the press facility. Why, what is that thing?”
“The object at the very top of that tube is a sight, maybe a scope.”
“I’m not following,” Stan said from Pasadena.
“Sometimes having a history as an Air Force officer has its advantages,” Hugh said, “because what we’re looking at is a back sight and scope for a weapon.”
