“Pretty well?” Kennedy seemed disturbed, agitated. “The Central Intelligence Agency doesn’t know anything about this, for Christ’s sake!” Then he caught himself, and added, “Or, if they do, they haven’t told me about it.”
“We have tried very hard to keep this a secret from all the politicians of every stripe,” Schmidt said.
“I can see not telling Eisenhower,” said the president. “Probably would’ve given old Ike a fatal heart attack.” He grinned. “I wonder what Harry Truman would’ve done with the information.”
“We were tempted to tell President Truman, but—”
“That’s all water over the dam,” I said, trying to get them back onto the subject. “We’re here to get you to call off this Project Apollo business.”
“But why?” asked the president. “We could use Martian spacecraft and plant the American flag on the moon tomorrow morning!”
“No,” whispered Jazzbow. Schmidt and I knew that when a Martian whispers, it’s a sign that he’s scared shitless.
“Why not?” Kennedy snapped.
“Because you’ll destroy the Martians,” said Schmidt, with real iron in his voice.
“I don’t understand.”
Jazzbow turned those big luminous eyes on the president. “May I explain it to you . . . the Martian way?”
I’ll say this for Jack Kennedy. The boy had guts. It was obvious that the basic human xenophobia was strong inside him. When Jazzbow had first touched his hand, Kennedy had almost jumped out of his skin. But he met the Martian’s gaze and, not knowing what would come next, solemnly nodded his acceptance.
Jazzbow reached out his snaky arm toward Kennedy’s face. I saw beads of sweat break out on the president’s brow, but he sat still and let the Martian’s tentacle-like fingers touch his forehead and temple.
It was like jumping a car battery. Thoughts flowed from Jazzbow’s brain into Kennedy’s. I knew what those thoughts were.
It had to do with the Martians’ moral sense. The average Martian has an ethical quotient about equal to St. Francis of Assisi. That’s the average Martian. While they’re only a century or so ahead of us technologically, they’re light-years ahead of us morally, socially, ethically. There hasn’t been a war on Mars in more than a thousand years. There hasn’t even been a case of petty theft in centuries. You can walk the avenues of their beautiful, gleaming cities at any time of the day or night in complete safety. And since their planet is so desperately near absolute depletion, they just about worship the smallest blade of grass.
If our brawling, battling human nations discovered the fragile, gentle Martian culture, there would be a catastrophe. The Martians would be swarmed under, shattered, dissolved by a tide of politicians, industrialists, real-estate developers, evangelists wanting to save their souls, drifters, grifters, conmen, thieves petty and grand. To say nothing of military officers driven by xenophobia. It would make the Spanish Conquest of the Americas look like a Boy Scout jamboree.
I could see from the look in Kennedy’s eyes that he was getting the message. “We would destroy your culture?” he asked.
Jazzbow had learned the human way of nodding. “You would not merely destroy our culture, Mr. President. You would kill us. We would die, all of us, very quickly.”
“But you have the superior technology . . .”
“We could never use it against you,” said Jazzbow. “We would lie down and die rather than deliberately take the life of a paramecium.”
Schmidt spoke up. “So you see, Mr. President, why this moon project has got to be called off. We can’t allow the human race en masse to learn of the Martians’ existence.”
“I understand,” he murmured.
Schmidt breathed out a heavy sigh of relief. Too soon.
“But I can’t stop the Apollo project.”
“Can’t?” Schmidt gasped.
“Why not?” I asked.
Looking utterly miserable, Kennedy told us, “It would mean the end of my administration. For all practical purposes, at least.”
“I don’t see—”
“I haven’t been able to get a thing through Congress except the moon project. They’re stiffing me on everything else: my economics package, my defense buildup, civil rights, everything except the moon program has been stopped dead in Congress. If I give up on the moon, I might as well resign the presidency.”
“You are not happy in your work,” said Jazzbow.
“No, I’m not,” Kennedy admitted, in a low voice. “I never wanted to go into politics. It was my father’s idea. Especially after my older brother got killed in the war.”
A dismal, gloomy silence descended on us.
“It’s all been a sham,” the president muttered. “My marriage is a mess, my presidency is a farce, I’m in love with a woman who’s married to another man—I wish I could just disappear from the face of the earth.”
Which, of course, is exactly what we arranged for him.
It was tricky, believe me. We had to get his blond inamorata to disappear, which wasn’t easy, since she was in the public eye just about as much as the president. Then we had to fake his own assassination, so we could get him safely out of the way. At first, he was pretty reluctant about it all, but then the Berlin Wall went up, and the media blamed him for it and he agreed that he wanted out—permanently. We were all set to pull it off when the Cuban Missile Crisis hit the fan and we had to put everything on hold for more than a month. By the time we had calmed that mess down, he was more than ready to leave this earth. So we arranged the thing for Dallas.
We didn’t dare tell Lyndon Johnson about the Martians, of course. He would’ve wanted to go to Mars and annex the whole damned planet. To Texas, most likely. And we didn’t have to tell Nixon; he was happy to kill the Apollo program—after taking as much credit for the first lunar landing as the media would give him.
The toughest part was hoodwinking the astronomers and planetary scientists and the engineers who built spacecraft probes of the planets. It took all of Schmidt’s ingenuity and the Martians’ technical skills to get the various Mariner and
