Wapakoneta, Ohio | The Armstrong Air and Space Museum
Virgil Augustine’s cell phone rang just as he was reaching for his coat to go home. It was Bud Roldan, the facilities director for the museum. “You still in the building, Virgil?” Bud asked.
“Just barely,” Virgil said. Tonight was the weekly date night for Virgil and Emily Augustine; they would pay their teenage daughter, Libby, to watch her twin brothers, which Virgil knew meant she would be in the living room texting her friends while Andy and Hunter played video games in the basement, and Emily and he would have either Mexican or Chinese food and then watch whatever was showing at the Wapa Cinema. This week it was some animated movie involving waterfowl. This is what passed for romance when you were middle-aged and living in small-town Ohio, and Virgil was not one to miss it. “What is it, Bud?”
“Well, it’s…” Bud trailed off, and Virgil waited, eyeing the door of his office, yearning for escape. “You should probably just come see this for yourself,” Bud finally said. “It’s easier than trying to explain it. We’re in the Moon Room. Come on up.” Bud hung up.
Virgil furrowed his brow and then stepped out of his office, and wound his way through the exhibit floor of the small local museum devoted to the life and career of Neil Armstrong, Wapakoneta native and first man on the moon, and down the long, darkened and dramatic hallway that led to the “Moon Room,” featuring the exhibit room highlighting the Apollo 11 moon landing. He glanced, as he always did, at Armstrong’s backup moon suit in its display, helmet and gloves on the floor, which unfailingly gave Virgil a slight start: Here was a decapitated moon man.
Then as always Virgil got over it. He turned the tight right into the small exhibit room, where Bud and Willa King, Armstrong’s curator and communications director, were standing by the room’s central exhibit: a moon rock Neil Armstrong had brought back with him from his trip.
“What is it?” Virgil asked.
“Virgil, look at the rock,” Bud said.
Virgil looked at the rock. It was small, irregularly shaped, looking either triangular or squarish depending which angle you looked at it, a pebbled gray with glossier darker bits that reflected the light. Virgil knew without looking that the informational plaques on the display would tell him this bit of rock was formed by a meteorite impact fusing the moon’s powdered basalt surface back into something more solid, an event that happened some four billion years previously. The rock was mostly pyroxene and plagioclase, and if you found it out in the world you would probably think it was a chunk of concrete, if you thought about it at all. Virgil was so used to looking at the rock that it took several seconds to realize that the rock now looked nothing like it was supposed to look.
“That’s not the rock,” Virgil said, to Bud and Willa.
“We know,” Bud said.
Virgil leaned in to look at the not-the-rock, his nose coming within millimeters of the Lucite encasement the rock was displayed in. The not-a-rock was precisely the same dimensions as the rock, but slightly larger. The original rock had been securely but lightly held between two plastic stoppers on a vise. This large object was also secured by the stoppers and vise, but now it was solidly wedged. It was uniformly off-white, with faint yellow overtones.
Virgil strained his eyes to look more closely. The surface of the not-a-rock had a slightly oily sheen to it.
“What the hell?” Virgil looked up to Bud and Willa.
“We know,” Willa said.
“Is that…”
Bud held up his hand. “We’re not guessing, Virgil. You’re the executive director. That’s your job."
