Sex on the Moon (12 page)
Authors: Ben Mezrich
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Criminals & Outlaws, #Science & Technology, #True Crime, #Hoaxes & Deceptions, #Science, #Space Science, #History, #United States, #State & Local, #Southwest (AZ; NM; OK; TX), #General, #Nature, #Sky Observation
Thank you, Orb Robinson
Now this was truly fascinating. Orb Robinson had now become “me and my group.” And even more interesting, Robinson had implied that the rocks had yet to be acquired. He didn’t have the moon rocks in his possession? It was something he was going to get, somehow? The size of the specimen had remained in the kilo area, but this seemed very significant. If this wasn’t just a hoax, if this Orb Robinson really was going to acquire moon rocks—then this was a crime that hadn’t yet happened.
Axel ran a hand over his bald head. He had seen plenty of Hollywood movies, and he had always enjoyed the cat-and-mouse games played out between the cops and the robbers. Still, he did wonder—if he was offering money for these rocks, and that made Robinson go out and do something crazy to get them—was he actually inspiring the crime?
Axel shrugged his meaty shoulders. Robinson had already done something illegal. He had endeavored to sell moon rocks over the Internet. Whether they were real or, more likely, part of a hoax—it wasn’t right. And if Axel hadn’t responded, maybe someone else would have. Axel had done everything right. He had contacted the authorities. This Orb Robinson seemed very eager to make the deal happen. He was the one pushing it along, he was the one sending out the e-mails. He was the one committing the crime.
Axel wondered if Christel would agree. Soon he discovered the FBI certainly did.
In a rather long e-mail, Special Agent Wolfenden told Axel exactly what sort of response he wanted Axel to send back to Orb Robinson. It was a play on the draft that Axel himself had written, which filled Axel with more pride. His creative crime-fighting juices had obviously been accurate. Any ethical questions disappeared as he read through the e-mail. His “brother-in-law” had been changed to a “sister-in-law,” obviously because the FBI had a woman agent they wanted to use in the setup. But all in all, it was as Axel had planned:
Hi Orb,
Your prices are better than I hoped for but the specimens are quite large. You spoke of “multicarat rocks” but a 500 gram rock would cost me 250,000$ and that is no small change. This amount is far out of my league and I would have to find one or more financial partners. Are these really the smallest rocks you have? I would be more interested in smaller specimens. I could always split up a larger rock for resale but it still is a large investment.
Nevertheless, I can free 100,000$ on reasonably short notice. I would be happy to spend it on a single (authenticated) rock of at least 250 grams.
I can’t free myself from work right now, so a meeting in person would have to wait until September. However, my brother and his wife live in Pennsylvania, U.S. I trust them completely and my sister-in-law is somewhat of a hobbyist in mineral collecting. She might be able to verify the rocks’ origin, I think. Would you be willing to deal with me through her?
Sincerely, Axel Emmermann
It wasn’t even a full day later when Robinson responded. Axel immediately forwarded the response to Agent Wolfenden. He felt a little like he was watching a movie in real time, played out over the Internet, these e-mails bouncing back and forth from the United States to Belgium and back to the United States. Who knows, maybe the criminal and the FBI were only a few miles apart, both communicating via a rock hound in Antwerp? It was the most exciting time in Axel’s life since his days in the army, even though he was doing little more than sitting in front of a computer screen in his living room.
Axel,
In attempt to keep things out in the open between us, I will address my concerns. As you well know, it is illegal to sell Apollo lunar rocks in the United States. This obviously has not discouraged me since I live in the United States. However, I must be cautious that this deal is handled with delicacy in that I am not publicly exposed. This same law that makes it illegal to sell Apollo lunar rocks also for our mutual benefit makes them quite rare and valuable. My projected return from this has been just over $250,000 and I would of course prefer to be involved in one business dealing and get it all over at once in order to minimize my personal exposure. Having said that, if I can build some more trust with you, then perhaps I could do a deal with you for $150,000 and then if you find enough buyers you could buy the rest from me. As you can see this decreases my safety and increases my exposure and therefore I would only feel comfortable in doing this if I learned to trust you, which is difficult to do under the circumstances. Maybe you should give me the names of your relatives/contacts in the United States and then have them e-mail me and we shall begin to build a level of trust from that. I could meet them in the United States and then settle our mutual concerns and verify the authenticity of the specimens through them. I can acquire three very unique and valuable specimens and I am waiting to provide you with the details about them until I have built some more trust. One of them does involve dust. Please let me know if it is impossible for you to find some more investors in order to make this in one purchase. I would prefer that over two purchases. Either way I am interested in developing this business relationship with you. And I wish you a hefty profit from our encounter. Please reply with your thoughts and or concerns.
Thank you.
Sincerely, Orb Robinson
Axel contemplated Orb Robinson’s tone as much as the message itself. It seemed the little hoaxer was getting frustrated with Axel’s limited funds—and he also seemed very eager to get this thing done. He also mentioned “three very unique and valuable specimens,” which seemed specific. If this was a hoax, why would he make any specifications at all?
Axel fought the urge to respond on his own, waiting until the FBI sent him a draft of what he was supposed to say:
Mr. Emmermann:
Following is the reply we’d like to send to Robinson:
Hi Orb,
I would prefer to make the first purchase at 100,000$ as we have discussed. If the lunar rocks are proven authentic and all goes well, I will have a much easier time of convincing others to invest and help with a second purchase. I have spoken to my brother and sister-in-law and they would be willing to purchase the lunar rocks for me. As I may have told you earlier, my sister-in-law is a hobbyist in mineral collecting. She has allowed me to provide you her e-mail address, which is [email protected] and said she’d be willing to stand in for me in this initial transaction. Although I trust my sister-in-law, I do not necessarily trust her abilities completely. How will you provide that the lunar rocks you offer are real? Can you provide me some documentation as well? Are they meteorites or samples from one of the Apollo missions? I would not be interested in purchasing meteorites.
Sincerely,
If Robinson likes this, I think the next message will probably be directly to myself and Agent Nance. I’ll let you know.
SA Lawrence A. Wolfenden, Tampa Div’n
Axel understood, reading the new letter as he forwarded it along to Orb Robinson under his own e-mail identification, that from here on out, if things went well, Robinson would be contacting his “sister-in-law” directly, and the FBI would probably be able to take over from there. There was a sense of deflation as he realized that he was giving up his front-row view of the investigation in progress, but really, there wasn’t much more he could do from Antwerp, and he wasn’t about to jump on a plane to meet face-to-face with a master criminal. From the sound of the e-mail, it seemed the FBI was going to put together $100,000 to try to entice this Orb Robinson to make the deal. Agent Wolfenden seemed to be taking this quite seriously.
The next e-mail from Robinson, just one hour and eighteen minutes later—the last one Axel would receive for quite some time—made it clear that no matter how seriously Agent Wolfenden was taking the situation, it wasn’t any sort of overkill. If this was a hoax, Robinson was going to take it right up to the edge of the precipice, right up to the exchange of money for rubble:
Axel,
Since I am confident of the authenticity of these rocks, I will hope that you are able to find many customers quickly after our first transaction, and will for now continue planning on making this transaction. I will e-mail your sister-in-law and begin setting up a meeting time and location. You make sure she is prepared to pay in cash, and I’ll make sure that she has all the relevant documents and publications on the individual specimens. The type of proof I will be providing will be the scientific publications, which can be easily verified and reproduced by you. In these documents/publications, there are quantitative measures describing the samples, photos, and unfakable descriptions of them. I encourage you to have your sister-in-law bring all the scientific equipment she has access to if she wants to double and triple check the samples for the accurate properties. I cannot alert you as to which exact samples will be involved before the trade, because the exposure becomes too high. However, I understand that during a transaction she, and I assume that her husband will be there for her protection, will want to have ample time to check the samples before purchase. So we will discuss the details of the transaction at great detail before it takes place. Please continue to stay in touch with me, and inform me of any changes, concerns, or updates.
Thank you.
Orb
Reading this last e-mail, Axel had to admit that this was no longer sounding like an elaborate hoax. Maybe his wife had been right to be concerned; maybe there really was some level of danger in this can of worms. Axel was glad that he had brought the FBI into this—that the real authorities were going to handle it from here. Because superhero or not, Axel didn’t feel like he was playing a game anymore. This was beginning to feel like something that was deadly serious—and whatever was going to happen, it was going to happen soon.
Axel was now pretty sure of one thing.
Orb Robinson was about to commit a major crime.
The seconds slowly tick away. They roll into their infinite repetitions echoing the never-ending groundhog day. The cold concrete is eternal
.
20
JSC, June 6, 2002
Thad pressed his rubber heels against the curved, brilliant white surface of the International Space Station and pushed off, feeling the sudden rush of adrenaline as his body floated forward. His arms instinctively rose out from his sides, his gloved palms outstretched, and for a moment he was like some sort of wingless angel gliding through a devastatingly blue void. Then his body started to spin, somersaulting forward on its axis, a slow-motion human pinwheel riding out a carefully modulated arc, moving farther and farther away from the vast hull of the station in a symphony of weightless motion. Almost immediately, another shape began to grow at the edges of Thad’s revolving vision. Expertly using his arms to slow the revolutions, in a moment he was once again nearly still, floating upside down in the empty blue. He stared out through his Plexiglas faceplate at the shape that was now a form.
Even from his upside-down vantage point, the space shuttle was a thing of beauty. From his angle, Thad could make out only a portion of the cylindrical cargo bay, but his mind easily filled in the rest. From the curved, sleek nose cone slicing through the blue somewhere up ahead to the jutting shark fin of a tail towering upward—just out of view—the shuttle’s muscular presence was entirely palpable, even as it hung frozen nearly fifty feet away. Thad was so transfixed by the sight of the thing that he didn’t notice the hatch embedded halfway down the fuselage lifting open until it was nearly perpendicular to the ship itself.
He couldn’t make out any details at that distance; the interior of the cargo hold was nothing but a dark yawn. But suddenly a new shape appeared in the darkness, rising up to fill the open hatch like some sort of alien creature. Bulbous, an even brighter shade of white than the International Space Station behind Thad—the creature had legs and arms but was obviously more machine than human. Its legs were thick like tree trunks, ending in enormous, rubber-soled boots. Its arms, almost as thick as the legs, were stretched outward, gloved hands gripping the sides of the open hatch as if readying for a huge leap forward. The white torso of the thing was a pincushion of tubes and hoses, running around both sides to a giant rectangular pack attached to its back.
Still suspended upside down more than fifty feet away, Thad lifted his gaze to the machine creature’s face. Except … it had no face—instead, where its face was supposed to be, he found himself looking at a curved sheet of reflective, gold-hued material, polished so spectacularly smooth that it glowed as if lit by its own internal light source.
“My God,” Thad whispered.
It was not the first time he had laid his eyes on an EMU, but it was the first time he had seen one like
this
: fully operational, worn by a real astronaut as he was about to step out of the cargo bay of the space shuttle. The Extravehicular Mobility Unit was a particularly fancy name for a space suit—but to be fair, it was a
very
fancy space suit. More like a spaceship, actually, a completely self-contained unit designed to protect the astronaut from the harshness of space. Its construction derived from the original design that had been used during the Apollo missions, the EMU was one of the most sophisticated tools in the NASA arsenal. From its hard upper torso made of fiberglass, containing the control module and the primary life-support systems—bleeding the tubes and hoses that controlled oxygen, and cooling and warming liquids that kept the astronaut alive—to the ultrasophisticated helmet, composed of a vent pad that controlled the flow and pressure of oxygen, to the recognizable bubble, which was covered by the extravehicular visor assembly, coated in a thin layer of pure gold to filter out the sun’s dangerous rays.
