1

Summer, 1969

When thinking back Paul Kawaski, PHD, considered the whole thing his fault. He had been an analyst in the Soviet Section of the CIA's Intelligence Directorate back in the late '60s. His job was to piece together information gleamed from field agents, satellite recon, and other sources and write reports on various aspects of the Soviet Union. Mostly those reports concerned mundane subjects like projections of Ukrainian wheat yields, the production of a tractor factory in Minsk, or the effects of the latest five year health care plan in Tashkent or Volgagrad.

But the subject of the report he completed on July 25th, 1969, changed the course of history. More than thirty years later the subject of the report, and indeed its very existence, was still classified.

The title of the report was "The Effects on Soviet Economic and Military Strength of Soviet Aerospace Expenditures." He supposed that the excitement of the Moon landing caused him to write it. At the time he considered it an interesting intellectual exercise, but nothing of Earth shattering importance.

Kawaski knew that his work was usually circulated among other analysts at the Firm and in various nooks and crannies in the federal government, a congressional staffer here, and a bureaucrat at State there. Occasionally an Undersecretary of State would read his work. So he was very surprised to learn that he was going to attend a meeting at the White House on August 9th.

Kawaski paid an unusual attention to his grooming and dress the day he was to go to the meeting. He wore his darkest blue, conservative suit and made certain that his hair and beard were neatly trimmed. He drove from Langley all the way to the White House. He presented his CIA ID to the guard at the White House gate. "I'm expected," he said, unnecessarily.

The guard looked him up on his list. "Park over there," he said, jabbing his finger vaguely in the direction of some visitor's slots. "Entrance is over there." He jabbed his finger in another direction. "They'll take care of you and make sure you get where you need to be."

"Thanks."

A uniformed Secret Service man at the entrance checked his ID against his list. Then he picked up the receiver of his telephone and dialed a number. "Dr. Kawaski is here...Yes, I'll tell him." He hung up the phone. "Mr. Harlington will be here to meet you."

Harlington, Kawaski thought. The name didn't ring any bells.

Presently a short, stocky man with a military style buzz cut and a gray suit appeared. "I'm Chris Harlington," he said. "I'm on the NSC staff. You're Kawaski."

"I have that dubious honor," Kawaski replied as they shook hands. "Are you the one I'm meeting with? You see; I haven't been given any details."

"Among others," Harlington said. "Come with me."

They vanished together in the bowls of the White House.

"I read that paper of yours," Harlington told him. "I must say your insights are very impressive. My boss thought so too."

"Your-boss?"

"His boss too."

Kawaski was puzzled. "Are we meeting them too?"

"Oh, yes."

They walked through some corridors, passing by serious looking people in dark blue or gray suits going to and fro on the nation's business. By the time they got to a receptionist's station, Kawaski thought he recognized where they were.

"You don't mean..?" he started.

"Oh yes," Harlington replied. Then to the receptionist, "Are they all inside?"

"You gentlemen can go right on in, Mr. Harlington," she replied.

Following Harlington, Kawaski stepped inside the Oval Office. He had to struggle to keep the lump out of his throat. Nevertheless he managed to cross the room and shake hands with Richard Nixon, President of the United States.

"So your the genius Harlington's been raving about," President Nixon said.

"Mr. President, I-"

"This is Dr. Kissinger, my National Security Advisor, Bob Haldeman, my Chief of Staff."

Kawaski shook hands in turn with a curly haired man in thick glasses and a tall, lean man with close-cropped hair. Unlike the President neither one of them were smiling. "A pleasure, to be sure, gentlemen," Kawaski said. "Dr. Kissinger, I read your last book."

"Indeed," he replied with a Germanic accent. He still didn't smile.

"Well, shall we get started?" the President suggested.

Kawaski gave a presentation on his findings. Essentially the effort spent by the Soviets to win the race to the Moon had caused a small but measurable effect on its economic and military strength. "We have intelligence of both money and personnel being diverted from their strategic rocket program to the development of the N-1. That's the big, four staged rocket that's their equivalent of the Saturn V. They haven't been able to get it to work, but they are still trying."

"Even now that we've beat them?" President Nixon asked.

"That's right. Currently the Russians believe that Soviet honor demands that even having lost, they should put a man up there just so they can claim they have kept pace with us."

"Has this effort degraded Soviet military readiness?" said Kissinger.

"Not yet. But I've some projections that indicate that it might very soon."

"Yes, the projections," Nixon replied with a certain anxiousness. "Let's hear them."

"If we continue our current space effort at the same pace as present, the Soviets will feel compelled to try to catch up and maybe surpass us. There're been discussions in the Politburo about how the Soviet Union should proceed should we build a lunar base or even start another race to-say-Mars. Right now-according to our intelligence-the consensus in the Politburo is that such a development would constitute a direct threat to the security of the Soviet Union."

"Do they really think that?" Kissinger asked skeptically.

"Yes, I think so. Remember when Lyndon Johnson declared that he didn't want to go to sleep by the light of a communist Moon? Breznev doesn't want to go to sleep by the light of a capitalist Moon."

"How far are they prepared to go?" Nixon asked.

"That's hard to tell. But I've an analysis based on the scenario that the Space Task Group is in the process of putting together. That's on page 143." Nixon and Kissinger flipped their copies of the report to that page. "That's an estimate of the amount of money and personnel which would be necessary to attempt to match the Space Task Group plan. We'll see a serious degradation of Soviet military readiness by no later than 1975. They will be forced to divert resources from the maintenance and upgrade of their strategic rocket forces to try to maintain pace with us."

"But then they would be in danger of falling behind us in nuclear forces," suggested Kissinger. "They would never risk that."

"Unless-" Nixon started, and then catching himself he forced a smile. He continued, "If the Soviets perceived themselves in danger of falling behind in nuclear arms, it might provide us other opportunities."

:"Hmm," said Kissinger, seeming to get an insight from Nixon's cryptic remark.

"Ah, Dr. Kawaski, thank you for your time," Nixon said. "Your presentation was most-enlightening."

"Thank you, Mr. President."

"Mr. Harlington will show you out." As Harlington clapped Kawaski on the back and steered him toward the door, Kawaski heard Nixon say, "Bob, we need to set up a meeting with some of our political people. Make it next week some time. And Henry, I want you people to-"

But then the door closed shut behind them.

"Well, how did I do?" asked Kawaski.

"My personal opinion is that you knocked them dead."

"Really?"

"You noticed what Haldeman said?"

"He didn't say anything."

"Exactly."

Kawaski was to puzzle over that last exchange for several months.

* * *

One of the first things Wendy Pendleton did when she moved to Houston back in 1967 was to buy an ice blue corvette. She liked the way that it hummed around her as she roared down Highway 3 from her house north of the Manned Space flight Center. She also liked the way heads turned as she passed through the front gate of the center and hence to her parking space near the Lunar Receiving Lab. Most people seeing the corvette for the first time thought an astronaut was driving it. Astronauts tended to like vehicles that were sleek and went fast, whether they traveled in the air, in space, or on the highway. Only when the door popped open and two, well turned, boot and stocking clad legs stepped out followed by a trim, athletic body in a green dress, and medium, blond bangs were people disabused of that notion. In the late sixties, as America raced to the Moon, the word "woman" was never connected to the word "astronaut."

But that, she thought not for the first time, is going to change. One way or the other.

Eight years ago, Wendy had been a college freshman and was wondering what she really wanted to do with her education and the rest of her life. Then a young President named John F. Kennedy announced that he thought that America should send a man to the Moon by the end of the decade. Wendy, after she had seen the announcement on the news in the student commons, had walked outside and looked up at the crescent Moon in the evening sky for a long time. The next day she informed her student advisor that she wanted to go into geology.

Inside the Lunar Receiving Lab, dressed in a clean suit, her gloved hands gingerly handling a rock just brought back last month by the Apollo 11 crew, Wendy lectured to a group of astronauts. "This rock, which Neil found on the Sea of Tranquility, is what we in the business call 'basalt.' Can anyone tell me what that means?"

"That means the Sea of Tranquility used to be a hot old place," said one of the astronauts.

When the good-natured laughter died down, Wendy said, "Yes, Pete's right. This rock was once subjected to intense heat. That means the Sea of Tranquility used to be a sea of molten lava. And that means that the Moon used to be very geologically active."

Wendy noticed that several of the astronauts were eying her with as much appreciation as they were the treasure Armstrong had brought back from the Moon. When she had first taken the job as a researcher and instructor to the astronauts who would fly to the Moon, she had to fend off quite a number of advances, subtle and not so subtle. Some of those passes had come from men who for all appearances were happily married. Finally Deke Slayton, head of the astronaut office, had put his foot down and had laid down the law about "fraternization." The advances had taper off, but not entirely.

One of the astronauts who had made a pass at her once was Ray MacPherson, a tall, lean Naval aviator with close cropped, sandy blond hair, a broken nose, and a permanent smile on his face. His smile was as if he found everything he saw fascinating. MacPherson had accepted her rejection with good humor and had actually become a friend, one of her only ones in the astronaut corps. Rumor had it that he was on the fast track to be command module pilot for Apollo 19.

She was barely surprised to see MacPherson waiting for her in her office, leaning back in her guest chair, bounding a rubber ball off the wall. Her office (which was as tiny as a closet, but since it had a door it qualified) had walls filled with lunar orbiter photos, as well as a few of herself in the deserts of Arizona, the mountains of Colorado, and other places she had rock hunted as a post grad. "Stop that!" she growled. He caught the ball neatly and she edged her way behind her desk.

"I read that memo you sent out to the Boys' Town," he said.

Boys' Town referred to the area where NASA had stuck some of the scientist-astronauts, a jumble of desks and cabinets out in the open. "It went further than there," Wendy replied.

"Oh, I know. You've got your fellow geologists all stirred up. Shoemaker and Silver are frankly intrigued." Gene Shoemaker and Leon Silver were two other field geologists NASA had hired to train the astronauts and map out the scientific missions for the later Apollo flights. "Of course they're easy to convince. If you rock hounds had your way, we'd be up to Apollo 30 before you'd be satisfied."

"And your point is?"

"There's no way in hell they're gonna approve a mission to the South Pole."

"By Apollo 21 we ought to know a lot about getting to the Moon. For Gods sake, Ray. We could prove that there's ice in those shadowed craters."

"You don't have to convince me. I'd command that flight in a heartbeat. But the Project office is not gonna approve a flight that's so far away from the lunar equater. You remember how they shat bricks when Tycho came up."

"And frankly I still think Tycho would be a good idea."

"That's not the point. The trajectory to get the Tycho is so far out of the free return that the flight directors have hives thinking about it. As for the pole-"

"I've talked to some of the folks at North America. The F1s on the Saturn can be tweaked to bump up their thrust. We can compensate."

MacPherson nodded. "Yeah, I've seen that proposal too. They've got it up to 1.8 million on the test stand. But this may be all academic. Rumor has it there might not even be an Apollo 19, not to mention anything past 20."

"Oh, that's nonsense! You really think we'd stop after what we've just done?"

"They're folks in Congress who want to cut us the bone. Put all the money into poverty programs, the environment-"

"They've always been folks in Congress who've wanted to do that. They're idiots."

"Yeah. But sometimes I think it's a different country than the one I left back in '65 to fly missions over Vietnam. Maybe we've lost the guts to do things like go to the Moon."

Wendy fell silent, pursing her lips.

"Hey, sorry I depressed you. Hell, what do I know about politics? I'm just a fly boy."

"I'm not depressed. I'm a little bit angry."

There was more than that. Unknown to any of her coworkers at NASA, Wendy had been driving up highway I 45 to Hobby airport and had been taking flying lessons. She would probably get her pilot's license sometime in the Fall. The reason for her wanting to be a pilot would have been obvious to MacPherson and to anyone in the astronaut corps.

One had to be a pilot in order to be an astronaut.

True Wendy would not be qualified to fly high performance jets, which was a minimal requirement, but she would be part way there. The scientist astronauts like Jack Schmidt-currently slated to fly on Apollo 18-had been given flying lessons and were qualified to pilot the T-38 jet trainer.

Her vision for Apollo 21 not only included it landing somewhere near the lunar South Pole, but also featured the first American, female astronaut, indeed the first woman ever to walk on the Moon. The woman's name would be, if she had anything to do with it, Dr. Wendy Pendleton, PHD.

It was a dream she had dared tell no one. She thought that even MacPherson would laugh if he knew. Women didn't fly into space, no more than did women test fly aircraft or fly missions over Hanoi. Maybe one day, but not now. Not soon.

Sooner than they think, maybe, she thought.

Of course for that to happen, there would have to be an Apollo 21. And that was by no means certain.

* * *

Cal Lauren was a happy man. He was happy not because he was rich or powerful. He never cared about the former and the latter he knew would come. He was happy that he was working in Washington D.C., was in the right place at the right time, and that everything he had dreamed of coming to pass was unfolding like a story already told.

He had lucked out in getting a job as counsel to Congressman Benjamin Arnold last year right out of Berkley. Most Hill jobs still went to Ivy League grads, but Arnold had been impressed by what he called his "fresh perspective." He had hired him on the spot and had put him to work right away drawing up legislation for the new Committee of the Environment, which Arnold headed. Arnold had decided that dirty air and water would be the issue of the '70s. Lauren agreed and in fact had written his Master's thesis on environmental regulation.

Congressman Arnold had been in Congress since 1933, having been swept into office along with Franklin Roosevelt. Arnold was now in his seventies and many of Lauren's fellow Hill Rats thought him a little senile. That's a mistake I've never made, Lauren thought to himself. The Old Man may be a little slower than his heighday passing New Deal legislation and maybe too given to telling old stories about FDR or Mr. Sam or "that young fella" Kennedy. But he had a sharp mind and a quick temper.

"I told Lyndon he was making a big mistake," Arnold had informed him one time shortly after he had been hired. "He's gotten us involved in that damn quagmire and now there's nothing else going on. Think of all the progressive legislation we could have passed. I'll bet you we loose the White House in November. Hubert's a good man, but he doesn't have the killer state of mind to be President."

And wasn't he right? Still having Nixon in charge suited Lauren just fine. The Vietnam thing, for instance, was now his problem, not ours, he thought with satisfaction.

Some of his old friends back at Berkley would have been shocked at such cynicism, though truth to tell Lauren was genuinely against the war. The people of Vietnam have a right to fight for their own society without us butting in. But it was also true that the main reason for his dabbling in the peace movement back at college was that it was an easy way to get laid.

The subject currently most on his mind was not Vietnam or the environment. He was taking a long walk down the Washington Mall, among the picnickers and tourists. He had more discretion in August on where he spent his office hours, since Congressman Arnold was spending the recess back in his Wisconsin district. In front of him, the Washington Monument soared into the clear blue sky like a rocket moments from take off. And that's a rather apt simile, I must say, Lauren thought.

He came upon a certain tree, whose shade would shield him some from the summer sun. He sat down with his back against the tree, took out his thermos from his brief case and took a swig of iced tea. Then he fished for the paper bag that contained his roast beef sandwich. He brought the sandwich to his mouth to take a bite when a voice just beside him addressed him.

"Good afternoon, Calvin."

Lauren lowered his sandwich and turned his face to his right. A beefy faced, dark haired man, sweating in his dark blue suit, was seated beside him. His named, Lauren surmised, was Yuri Popov. Officially he was the Washington Bureau Chief for the Communist Party newspaper Pravda. Lauren supposed that he was also a KGB intelligence agent, not that it mattered to him. As if I would have any secrets to sell, he thought. Big as the Russian was, it unnerved Lauren how silently he moved.

"Good afternoon, Yuri. When did you get back from Moscow?"

"Two nights ago."

"Did you get it?"

Popov slid an envelope over to him. "A letter to your member of Congress from our government. It states that in no way has the Soviet Union seriously pursued this 'race to the Moon' that until last month your nation has been embarked upon."

Lauren opened the envelope. "Proof that we've just wasted twenty four billion dollars."

"If you'll excuse me, what use will your Congressman make of this? He is not chairman of either your Congress's space committee or the appropriations committee."

"He is a member of the VA,HUD,IA appropriations subcommittee."

"So he will use this letter to cut funding for your nation's space program."

"Oh certainly will." Though he doesn't know it yet, he added to himself.

Lauren had a complicated plan to benefit Congressman Arnold. With Kennedy's goal of landing a man on the Moon by the end of the decade accomplished, there was an increasing sentiment in Congress to cut back on space and fund more social programs. There were several members on the committee who were very anxious to do just that. The deal that Lauren was brokering, which Congressman Arnold did not know about yet, would transfer money from NASA to low-income housing programs. In return those other members would support Arnold on pushing for the establishment of an environmental regulatory agency and for an increase in the dairy price support program. The latter would make Arnold more popular than ever back in his rural Wisconsin district.

Of course it would establish Lauren on the Hill as a guy who got things done. People would come to him for favors in the expectation that they could be granted. The flip side was that Lauren would demand favors in return. And so his power and influence would increase.

"Thank you, Yuri. This will be very helpful."

"And so perhaps both of our countries will not waste countless dollars and rubles on adventures in space?"

Lauren smiled. And I'll be you'll just use those savings on economic development, Yuri. A food program for collective farm workers, perhaps? Right. More likely spend it on tanks and missiles. Not my problem, though. "Perhaps we have both done some good here, Yuri."

"Perhaps, my friend."

Lauren went back to his office on Capital Hill a far happier man than when he left. And Yuri Popov was happier still, though for a different reason.