Armstrong responded: “Thank you, sir. It’s a great honor and privilege for us to be here, representing not only the United States but men of peace of all nations — and with interest and curiosity, and men with a vision for the future.”

And thank you very much. Now I want to pass you on briefly to a special guest I have here with me in the Oval Office today.

Muldoon thought, A guest? My God. Has he any idea of how much this call is costing?

And then familiar tones — that oddly clipped Bostonian accent — sounded in his headset, and Muldoon felt a response rising within him, a thrill deep and atavistic.

Hello, gentlemen. How are you today? I won’t take up your precious time on the Moon. I just want to quote to you what I said to Congress, on May 25, 1961 — just eight short years ago…

’Now is the time to take longer strides — time for a great new American enterprise — time for this nation to take on a clearly leading role in space achievement, which in many ways may hold the key to our future on Earth.

’I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish…’

My God, Muldoon thought. Nixon hates Kennedy; everyone knows that. Muldoon wondered what calculations — PR, political, even geopolitical — lay behind Nixon letting old JFK back into the limelight, today of all days.

It was hard to concentrate on Kennedy’s words.

Fifty feet from him the LM looked like a gaunt spider, twenty feet tall, resting there in the glaring sunlight. The Eagle was complex and delicate, a filmy construct of gold leaf and aluminum, the symmetry of the ascent stage spoiled by the bulbous fuel tank to the right. The craft bristled with antennae, docking targets, and reaction control thruster assemblies. He saw how dust had splashed up over the skirt of the descent stage’s engine, and the gold leaf which coated it. In the sunlight the LM looked fragile. And so it was, he knew, just a taut bubble of aluminum, shaved to the minimum weight by Grumman engineers. But here, on this small, static, delicate world, the LM didn’t seem at all out of place.