July 1969
We were pulling troops out of Vietnam; everything was about airpower now. Five months into my first term as president and we seemed to be building momentum.
The day of the Apollo 11 launch was drawing near and I waited for a portent or a warning or any information to explain the sense of foreboding hanging over this, arguably humanity’s greatest and most daring exploit. Earlier, I had toured the launch facilities, making a show of marveling at the manned missile looming and puffing smoke.
A week after that, I hosted one of the chief scientists at the White House. He was an older man but trim and polite. He wore a brown coat and kept a small, neat mustache. He peered around the Oval Office with its seal and flags. I couldn’t help but think he must have been in rooms like it in Berlin before the fall, so perhaps he was not all that impressed.
“Thank you for seeing me, Mr. President. It is an honor.”
His English was excellent.
“Thank you for your efforts in these historic times,” I said. I tried not to think about the last world leader who’d handed him that line. “You had a concern about the Apollo mission?”
“I do not know to whom I can speak and who not, you understand?”
“It’s just me and Haldeman here.”
“As you say, Herr Nixon. When we were—in the other place—we spoke often of this work, to go to moon. Von Braun, he always wished to do this, and with the success he brought us, he was not argued with. Of course, it never came to be.”
“Not until now.”
“That is right, and even here for a long time I do not think it likely. I do the work, of course; in my position I have little choice. But now the time is perhaps here and I wish to say perhaps we should not go. Perhaps it is best not.”
“We’re not canceling the Apollo project.” That morning my approval rating was 58 percent; disapproval was 22 percent, and those with no opinion, 20 percent. Eisenhower had done better even after having a heart attack and a stroke.
“I know. Such a coup for our people, for any nation, to be first on that strange far shore. And it is my life’s work, yes. Please do not repeat what I tell you now. In the other place—”
“The Third Reich, you mean,” snapped Haldeman.
“Yes. In the Reich, the Nazis cultivated all sorts of people. Scientists like myself, but also mystics and so-called philosophers, men without degrees, confidence men and frauds, to say it plainly. Anyone could enrapture the party officials with tales of dwarfs and Rheingold and a fabled age to come. They were given offices and budgets equal to our own.
“There was one, though. A professor of anthropology who’d been disgraced and then joined the party. He showed great interest in our work. He had, he told me, translated a great many writings of a mystic sect from the fourteenth century. He spoke of lunar travel as if it were a settled thing. He showed me maps of the dark area. He laughed at us.
“Of course I do not pay him any mind. But I spoke with the men of Apollo Eight when they returned. We have seen the Earth rise above it. We have seen it now, this dark side.” It was true. That same month, Julie had married David Eisenhower, and there was already talk from Henry of a dynasty such as had not been seen since the pharaohs.
“Then surely—” I said.
“His maps, I still have them. Kept for a joke. But they are too good. Much too good. The strange appearance, the land formations, all too similar. It is as if they had—”
“Coincidence,” I told him.
“But I wonder what we find there. What we send these men to.”
“It’s just rock. Surely you know that much better than I do. A dead world.”
“Yes, we know things. Gray rocks and fine dust. Perhaps deep down we discover ice; that is all. I know. But this moon—it becomes more curious as we look at it. We see it there, so large in proportion to our planet, as in no other pairing we know. Its own world. Not a mere asteroid, as the ones circling Mars.
“We do not know its age. It stood in the sky over America’s dawn, over the streets of Nero’s Rome, over Babylon, Carcosa, the Black Forest of my ancestors, over cities whose names are lost. Over tribesmen who scarcely spoke, over the glaciers, over the great lizards before them. Before that, over the blank seas that teemed with forms of life we do not dream of. It has lain so close to us for so long, yet it is a stranger to us. It hides its face!”
“Have you spoken to this professor lately?”
“When the Allies came he was one of those who cut their own throats rather than continue. It seems as if he was sincere after all.”
I was tired of searching the Oval Office but I had no other ideas. Kissinger warned of a major supernatural insurgency on its way, a power play of unprecedented proportions intended for mid-August.
So I took pictures down and gazed at the blank spaces, tapped on walls and floors. Stared into space; wrote in my journal. One day, a lazy warm afternoon, I’d felt absolutely certain I had gotten somewhere, located the final piece of the puzzle. I found myself in an unfamiliar suite on the third floor, opening door after door where there shouldn’t have been any. I covered dozens of yards, so much distance that surely I should have been walking across the North Lawn and straight through the fountain to Pennsylvania Avenue. And then, impossibly, I heard Eisenhower’s voice from the next room. Eisenhower, who’d died in March not knowing me, barked his military laugh and recited his familiar warning: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the Military. Industrial. Complex.” His voice went on, growing louder and louder, until I came awake at an executive staff meeting. It was unclear whether anyone had noticed.
In May, the tenth Apollo mission had flown only nine miles from the lunar surface. I had had the astronauts sworn to secrecy and debriefed exhaustively. Nothing stirred there. A dead world, surely. We’d prepared for so long. And on July 16, 1969, we would go to the moon.
“We are going to the moon,” I’d told everyone. “Kennedy said so, Johnson said so. I said it myself about a hundred times. America is going to the moon, and that’s that.”
Now we stared at the television, at an image of the Apollo 11 steaming and puffing on the pad.
“It is most likely a mistake. A trick of some kind,” Kissinger said. “But I admit I do not understand its nature.”
“How can the moon possibly be a trick?” I asked. “And why is this coming up only now? Is that going to be my opening move? Canceling the moon shot?”
“I think they plan this. I feel certain of it. Goad him from the start,” Kissinger said. And I began suddenly to feel ill. Had Arkady said something about this? I was drinking a lot in those days.
“Why would they want us to go to the moon? The entire world is watching us. It’s our moment of triumph. We do this, it’s almost like we’re going to another planet. We are the interplanetary world power.”
“The moon…” Kissinger said, staring into space. “What is it? What’s on it?”
“It’s—well, it’s a big dusty rock, basically. Isn’t it? Doesn’t have an atmosphere. Doesn’t have water. So, dust. Craters.”
“Craters, yes. I think I begin to see. Things flying through space. They hit the Earth, they burn up. But the moon, not so much. Things hit the moon, they stay there.”
“They’d hit it pretty hard,” I said.
“There are very tough things out there. Spores, they survive the vacuum of space. Every crater on the moon, something landed. What if something did survive? What if any number of things did?”
“But we’re still protected…aren’t we?”
“A great deal about this war depends on legal ambiguities, yes? Treaties, thrones, and dominions. Every place on Earth there is some kind of legal agreement. Even Antarctica, where no country is. But who rules the moon?”
I pressed the intercom.
“Rose? John Mitchell, please.”
“I’ll get him.”
In a few moments, Mitchell answered his phone.
“Mitchell, who’s got the moon? I mean, legally, what is it? Is it a country? Is it like international waters? Is there a legal category of unclaimed planetoid?”
“Sir. There is at present no legal treaty covering the moon.”
“Thank you.”
Kissinger looked a bit distant. “Sir, I believe this represents a serious problem.”
“We’re at eight thousand feet above lunar surface. Seven thousand. Six thousand. We are descending as per projections, velocity as expected.”
“Roger that,” came the voice from Houston’s Mission Control. Kissinger and I sat listening.
“Open the private channel,” I said.
“Mr. President?” I heard Buzz Aldrin say.
“I need your report, Buzz.”
“Everything looks clear from this altitude. We are descending normally.”
And then: “I see—but this is impossible—it appears to be a sort of a…well, a rock formation of regular outline.”
“Mr. Aldrin, is it possible to halt your descent?”
“I am relaying. I’m not sure. It’s becoming clearer. A ziggurat, I believe. Monolithic white stone. There are figures carved. Now coming into view—”
“Apollo,” Mission Control broke in, “I believe your descent has slowed?”
“Executive order, sir. I’m seeing a city now. A vast city. Carvings visible from above. This is not possible. It is enormous. Castles carved into the crater wall, eternally in shadow. Armstrong, are you all right? He’s having a fit of some kind.”
“Go on, Aldrin.”
“Five-sided symmetries, geometry—I can only call it obscene. Armstrong is speaking now…a language I don’t recognize.”
Kissinger took the phone’s receiver from my nerveless hand.
“Mission Control? We will move to the Maya contingency, yes? Confirm, please.”
“…Confirmed, Dr. Kissinger.”
The crew manning the soundstage was extraordinarily skillful, and the production was extremely convincing, and if in moments the wires were visible, this was almost never spoken of. The astronauts, on their return, performed a very creditable show of triumph and euphoria. Dr. Kissinger spoke to them privately and the matter was not touched upon again.